J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Perhaps the least likely of the plots against Hoover was made public when the FBI director announced that the Communists had instructed two of their writers “to portray me as a Broadway glamour boy and particularly to inquire into my affairs with women in New York.”

  This was, the Hoover biographer Ralph de Toledano later commented—with, one suspects, tongue in cheek—“a monumental exercise in futility since Hoover had never been a womanizer.”3

  Paranoia aside, there were real plots against the FBI director, and not all of them were Communist inspired.

  Among those most anxious to replace J. Edgar Hoover was the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Congressman Martin Dies of Texas.

  Dies was suffering from “great delusions of personal grandeur,” Hoover informed Attorney General Jackson.4 He wanted nothing less than to be named head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  What Dies actually wanted, according to the historian Michael Wreszin, was “to transform the committee from a congressional investigative unit into a law enforcement body coequal with the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”5

  Hoover, not about to share the spotlight as the nation’s foremost hunter of subversives—he’d worked too hard to maneuver the president into giving him that authority to lose it to an upstart politician from Texas—launched an intensive behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Dies. FBI agents were sent to spy on the committee; its findings were ridiculed, sometimes even before they saw print. Lists were made of Dies’s anti-administration remarks; rumors (such as the one that Dies would bolt the Democratic party and run as the Republican vice-presidential candidate) were reported as fact. Derogatory information on Dies was leaked to the president, the attorney general, other congressmen, and favored press contacts.

  On November 22, 1940, Attorney General Jackson brought the battle out into the open by charging that Dies and his committee were interfering with the work of the FBI.

  A week later Dies met with the president and voiced his complaints against the Justice Department and, in particular, FBI Director Hoover. Dies subsequently claimed that Roosevelt had refused to take his charges seriously, that he’d praised Stalin and even jocularly remarked that some of his best friends were Communists. However, knowing Dies, Roosevelt had prepared for just such an eventuality, by secretly having a stenographer listen in on and transcribe their conversation. There were no such statements. What the transcript did show, however, was the basic philosophical difference between the two men, when it came to labeling people Communists or Fascists, and FDR’s willingness to compromise.

  In recent years perhaps a half million Americans had voted for Communist candidates, Roosevelt noted, adding, “Now, I would not bar from patriotic defense efforts every one of those people who have voted for a Communist in 1936 or 1937-8-9 or 40; neither would you.”

  Mr. Dies: “I would be suspicious of them.”

  The president: “Oh, I would check them out—absolutely; but the mere fact that they voted for a Communist when voting for a Communist was legal doesn’t automatically entitle us to say to the public ‘Those people are disloyal.’ They may be loyal.”

  Mr. Dies: “But there is one thing, Mr. President, exposure does get the innocent ones out. It separates the wheat from the chaff. When they are apprised of the practical purposes of the organization, they get out, without any harm being done.”

  The president: “If the defense catches up with the charge…I think education is very necessary, Martin, just so long as you don’t hurt human lives, because it is awfully hard, as I say, for the word of acquittal to catch up with the charge which is not proved.”

  Mr. Dies: “In other words, the greatest care should be taken to safeguard innocent people, provided they are willing to cooperate with you.”

  Not until near the end of the conversation was Dies able to get in his complaints against Hoover: “I have carried on under great pressure. I have been ridiculed. I have been denounced. I have had to pay a pretty high price for what I have done. I want to work with you. I don’t want to be at cross purposes with the Executive Department. The only thing I ask is that the Department of Justice show some degree of cooperation in return. Here is a case. Mr. Hoover is a very excellent man, but he syndicated an article that was widely printed in nearly every newspaper in the country, that was construed everywhere against us. He said he didn’t mean it as against us, but the public understood it as an attack on us. And then we say something and he construes it as an attack on him.”6

  Roosevelt suggested Dies meet with Bob Jackson to see if something could be done to eliminate such misunderstandings. Dies did meet with Jackson, and a deal was struck. The committee agreed not to publicize any information it might obtain until after it had been cleared by the Department of Justice, so as not to interfere with any secret FBI investigations. In return, the Department of Justice agreed to furnish the committee with information on cases which it felt could not be successfully prosecuted.

  Thus FDR, and his liberal attorney general Robert Jackson, set up the machinery which would be used, in the coming years, to smear thousands upon thousands of Americans.

  Hoover, however, was unwilling to leave it at that.

  For Martin Dies, Pearl Harbor came four days early. On December 3, 1941, Ed Tamm met privately with the congressman and informed him that he had evidence that Dies had accepted a $2,000 bribe to sponsor legislation permitting a Jewish refugee to obtain entry to the United States from Cuba. Dies had no choice but to admit the charge and throw himself on J. Edgar Hoover’s mercy. No charges were brought, and Tamm’s one-page memorandum of the conversation was buried in the director’s Official/Confidential file.

  Although Dies continued to issue press releases attacking Roosevelt (and, even more rabidly, his wife, Eleanor) until his term as committee chairman expired in 1944, he never attended another public hearing of the committee. Nor, perhaps needless to say, did he ever again attack the Federal Bureau of Investigation or its director.

  Martin Dies had been “neutralized.” As for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it became, under Dies’s successors, almost an adjunct of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover dominated it, and used it, for his own purposes, throughout the three decades it remained in existence.

  On July 1, 1941, Charles Evans Hughes retired. As his replacement, Roosevelt named Harlan Fiske Stone, Hoover’s old mentor, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. To fill the resulting vacancy, FDR appointed Robert Jackson an associate justice.

  Asked who he’d like to succeed him as attorney general, Jackson recommended his friend Francis Biddle, then solicitor general. There is no better indication of how well established the FBI director’s position now was than Roosevelt’s immediate query: “How does Francis get along with Hoover?”7

  By all rights they shouldn’t have gotten along. Paris-born, Harvard-educated, an aristocratic Philadelphian of liberal bent, Biddle was exactly the sort of person Hoover usually despised. Yet get along they did, and very well, perhaps because Biddle was the first attorney general who seriously attempted to “analyze” J. Edgar Hoover.

  Biddle was also, as he later admitted, somewhat naive when it came to the politics of the capital: “Washington was then, as it always is, full of intrigue, and I suppose I was rather innocent. I found it difficult to be suspicious, and did not recognize disloyalty until it slapped me in the face.”8

  While Biddle was still under consideration for the job, a New York Herald Tribune reporter asked him if he intended to fire J. Edgar Hoover. It was a familiar trick, and Biddle fell for it, quickly denying he had any such intention. That one of Hoover’s aides might have planted the question apparently never occurred to him.

  Biddle not only didn’t have any intention of firing Hoover but didn’t even believe it possible. Realizing that the FBI director’s “appointment was by the Attorney General, not for a term of years but during good behavior; and no Attorney General would have th
ought of discharging him,” Biddle made a serious effort to understand Hoover’s “complex character.” Among those he consulted was Chief Justice Stone, who provided an important key: “if Hoover trusted you he would be absolutely loyal; if he did not, you had better look out.” Stone also cautioned Biddle that Hoover “had to get used to his new chief every time.”9

  “Temperamentally,” Biddle found, “Hoover was a conservative, although such an easy classification hardly describes a temperament which is clearly not reflective or philosophic. Edgar Hoover was primarily a man of immediate action.” And “like all men of action,” Biddle decided, “he cares for power and more power; but unlike many men it is power bent to the purpose of his life’s work—the success of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”10

  Hoover had certain weaknesses, Biddle quickly realized, among them “his passion for the limelight, his obsession with Communists that tends to include in his net fish that are hardly worth catching, his hypersensitivity to any criticism of his beloved Bureau.” However, “weighed against his concrete achievements,” Biddle finally decided, “they do not tip the scales.”11

  Biddle also sensed a side which the FBI director, in most of their dealings, carefully suppressed. Behind Hoover’s “absolute self control” was, Biddle suspected, “a temper which might show great violence if he did not hold it on a leash.”12

  It seemed to the new attorney general that the FBI director’s abilities were not being fully utilized. For the record, Hoover eschewed policy decisions, taking the position that he was an investigator, that his job was establishing facts and preparing cases for trial, not drawing conclusions from the evidence. As Biddle put it, “This constituted a broad and safe defense against criticism.” However, feeling “he was too valuable a man not to use in discussing and determining departmental policy,” the attorney general set up weekly policy conferences with a small group of Justice’s top men and insisted that Hoover attend.13 The meetings were, Biddle admitted, often acrimonious, but at least they forced Hoover to take a stand and perhaps decreased some of the behind-the-scenes plotting.

  He also tried to reach Hoover on a more personal level, with very interesting results. “I sought to invite his confidence; and before long, lunching alone with me in a room adjoining my office, he began to reciprocate by sharing some of his extraordinarily broad knowledge of the intimate details of what my associates in the Cabinet did and said, of their likes and dislikes, their weaknesses and their associations…

  “Edgar was not above relishing a story derogatory to an occupant of one of the seats of the mighty, particularly if the little great man was pompous or stuffy. And I must confess that, within limits, I enjoyed hearing it. His reading of human nature was shrewd, if perhaps colored by the eye of an observer to whom the less admirable aspects of behavior were being constantly revealed.”

  Hoover, for his part, “knew how to flatter his superior, and had the means of making him comfortable,” Biddle realized. When traveling, the attorney general could count on an agent’s meeting him at the train station and providing him with an armload of newspapers to read on his trip, while another agent would meet him at his destination and take him in an FBI car wherever he wished to go.

  Such niceties, Biddle believed, showed a “human side of Edgar Hoover with which he was not always credited.”14 It did not occur to Biddle that such niceties also constituted a form of surveillance.

  Homer Cummings had insisted on a strict chain of command but helped create a publicity empire that gave the FBI, rather than the Justice Department, most of the credit in the war against crime, in the process diminishing the attorney general’s importance while elevating the FBI director to near-legendary status. Frank Murphy let Hoover have his own way, so long as he could share the spotlight. Robert Jackson opposed Hoover on such issues as wiretapping, then was forced to reverse himself when the president sided with the FBI director. By contrast, although he often criticized Biddle privately—his prosecutive policy was too soft, he complained to his aides—Hoover was “truly comfortable” with this attorney general, who remained in office until Roosevelt’s death in 1945.15

  Biddle opposed wiretapping in principle—but not in practice. “I thought, and still think,” Biddle wrote in his autobiography, “that wiretapping is a ‘dirty business,’ but no dirtier than the use of stool pigeons, or undercover men, or informers. Of course it violates privacy; but it is an extraordinarily effective tool in running down crime.” Unlike Jackson, who had washed his hands of the whole matter, Biddle studied each wiretap application carefully, “sometimes requesting more information, occasionally turning them down when [he] thought they were not warranted.”*16 This hampered Hoover not at all. If refused a tap, he could substitute a bug, since, by his interpretation, microphone surveillance did not require the attorney general’s permission.

  In 1943 Attorney General Biddle discovered, and reviewed, the Custodial Detention list, finding it “impractical, unwise, dangerous, illegal and inherently unreliable,” and ordered Hoover to abolish it.18 He did, semantically, by changing its name to the Security Index and instructing his aides to keep its existence secret from the Justice Department. But it was Biddle who, as the nation’s chief lawyer, approved the forced internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans—70,000 of them U.S. citizens by birth—in barbed-wire-enclosed “relocation” camps.

  (Hoover opposed the internment not on First Amendment grounds, as has often been maintained, but because he believed the most likely spies had already been arrested, by the FBI, in the first twenty-four hours after Pearl Harbor. Thus the relocation was, in Hoover’s view, an implied criticism of the Bureau’s efforts. After the war Hoover’s opposition was much publicized. Nothing was said, however, about the FBI director’s 1938-40 memorandums warning FDR that both the Nazis and the Soviets had planted secret agents among the Jewish refugees, nor was any publicity given to Hoover’s opposition to relaxing immigration quotas for European Jews, many of whom, he was convinced, were Communists.)

  Biddle opposed the Alien Registration Act (or Smith Act), passed in June 1940, with Hoover’s strong backing.* But he did so only in retrospect, for he prosecuted the first twenty-nine defendants.

  When Jackson left the AG’s office, Biddle inherited the Harry Bridges deportation case. While admitting that the evidence of the labor leader’s Communist party membership “was not overwhelming,” Biddle nevertheless, with Hoover’s prodding, pursued the matter all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.19 Moreover, he found himself defending the FBI director when Bridges caught two of his agents in a most compromising situation.

  “Just the mention of the name Harry Bridges was enough to turn the director’s face livid,” a former supervising agent in the San Francisco field office recalled. “Lots of careers began and ended with that case. It was one of Hoover’s biggest failures, and he blamed everyone except himself.”20

  Australian-born, Harry Renton Bridges had arrived in the United States in 1920 as an immigrant seaman. Finding work on the San Francisco docks as a longshoreman, he became a militant labor organizer, led the West Coast maritime strike of 1934, was elected president of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), and, after the CIO broke off from the AFL, became its West Coast director. Unlike its East Coast counterpart, the ILWU was free of corruption. It also refused to enter into “sweetheart” agreements with the shipping companies, which, together with other large businesses, raised a huge fund whose sole purpose was to destroy Bridges and the ILWU. In this, Hoover was an enthusiastic accomplice. A special Bridges squad, operating out of the San Francisco field office, spent thousands of manhours attempting to prove that Bridges was a secret Communist and thus subject to deportation. But after compiling a 2,500-page report, and after more than a dozen inquiries, hearings, and appeals, Bridges remained in the United States, still head of the ILWU and a strong power in the CIO.†

  As if this weren’t bad enough, Bridges had also committed the one unpardon
able sin: he’d publicly ridiculed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Having been under investigation for so many years, Bridges found it easy to spot an FBI surveillance. When you check into a hotel, he told the New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway, FBI agents usually try to rent an adjoining room. “So you look under the connecting door, and you listen. If you see two pairs of men’s feet moving around the room and hear no talking, except in whispers, you can be fairly certain the room is occupied by FBI men…Of course, you can often see the wiretapping apparatus—the wires and earphones and so forth—all spread on the floor of this other room, and then you don’t have any doubts at all.”

  Once he spotted them, Bridges enjoyed playing little tricks on the agents. One of these involved inviting friends up: “We’d talk all sorts of silly stuff—about how we were planning, for instance, to take over the Gimbel strike so we could use the pretty Gimbel shopgirls to help me take over the New York longshoremen.” The sound of typing indicated, to Bridges, that this sensational information would soon be in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover. Or Bridges simply remained silent, until the agents decided he’d left the room; then he would follow them down the hall to the elevator and, without a word being spoken, accompany them to the lobby.

  Spotting the agents in the lobby was even easier, Bridges claimed: “If I don’t happen to see any FBI men I know, I watch out for men holding newspapers in front of them in a peculiar sort of manner. They hold the paper so that it just comes to the bottom of their eyes, and their eyes are always peeping over the top of the paper.”

  Nor was losing his “tails” any problem. Doubling back, he’d follow them, often to the local field office.

  In July and August of 1941 Bridges made two trips to New York. Both times he stayed at the Edison Hotel, and on both occasions he was assigned the same room, even though on his second visit he requested less expensive accommodations. Confirming his suspicions, a peek under the connecting door revealed two pairs of feet and a bunch of wires.