J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Well aware that the president did not particularly like his vice-president—Nixon had, at one point, almost cost him the election, when one of his “slush funds” was revealed—the FBI director cultivated the favor of both and didn’t completely trust either. There were more FBI spies in the Eisenhower White House than during any previous administration. Ike’s presidential style helped make this possible: still a general at heart, he delegated nearly everything to his staff, and this being a Republican rather than a Democratic administration, Hoover found it easier to infiltrate it with sympathetic ears. Although he was not able to persuade Eisenhower to give the FBI the Secret Service’s protective functions (Ike did let one special agent he liked, Orrin Bartlett, travel with him on many of his trips), Hoover had so many informants in place that there was little need for more.

  As for the new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower’s former campaign manager, Hoover got along with him very well. But he got along even better with William Rogers, his deputy, who replaced Brownell in 1957. According to Richard Gid Powers, “Rogers got the administration and Hoover off to a good start by letting him know that the FBI’s loyalty reports, which the Truman administration had so often disregarded, now had the force of law. He went so far as to notify Hoover that during the first year of his administration, the attorney general had refused to endorse thirty-three persons for presidential appointment solely on the basis of their FBI reports. ‘There could be no more convincing proof of the value of the FBI investigations,’ he told Hoover.”8

  Herbert Brownell was a very guarded, very private person. He had a good working relationship with his FBI director, but a friendship never developed. It was otherwise with his deputy, and successor, William Rogers. To the amazement of almost everyone in the Justice Department, and especially his own aides, Hoover even socialized with the Rogerses, dining with them at their home and joining the family in singing songs around the piano. Hoover was especially fond of Mrs. Rogers and on at least one occasion, according to James Crawford, had her over to dinner while the attorney general was out of town.

  Even more important, Rogers succeeded in bringing the FBI director into the Justice Department “family,” something no other AG had tried since Biddle, and then unsuccessfully. “Mr. Brownell and I had him participating all the time,” Rogers recalled. “We had lunches about twice a week with all the people, the top assistants, and we ironed out our problems.”9 It was probably at one of these lunches that Hoover first met and took notice of an upcoming young lawyer in the Civil Division named Warren Burger.

  Unlike many another attorney general, Rogers avoided engaging in a paper war with the FBI director, by the simple expedient of consulting with him instead. Rogers told the Justice Department attorneys, “I don’t want anyone to be arguing with Mr. Hoover or with any of the FBI agents on paper. If you have a problem, talk to them about it, and if you can’t resolve it after sensible discussions, come to me and I’ll talk to Edgar Hoover about it.”10

  As Hoover himself later stated, he and Bill Rogers “were very close. When he was attorney general and President Nixon was vice president, we woul frequently spend the Christmas holidays in Miami Beach together.”11 Hoover’s betrayal of his friend Rogers was still some years away.

  Ever since McGrath had waffled on the issue, Hoover had been trying to obtain authority to legitimize his use of microphone surveillances. Under Brownell, he finally got his chance, with the case of the bug in the bedroom.

  In February 1954 the Supreme Court, in Irvine v. California, sharply criticized local police for planting a microphone in the home of a suspected gambler. What seemed to enrage the justices most, however, over and above the unconstitutionality of the practice, was that the microphone had been placed in a bedroom.

  Seeing his opportunity, Hoover asked Attorney General Brownell for his interpretation of the decision as it affected the FBI, at the same time submitting “an informal draft” of his possible response, as prepared by Assistant Director Alan Belmont.

  On May 20, 1954, Brownell responded, “it is clear that in some instances the use of microphone surveillance is the only possible way of uncovering the activities of espionage agents, possible saboteurs, and subversive persons. In such instances I am of the opinion that the national interest requires that microphone surveillances be utilized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Nor did the attorney general restrict such use to obtaining evidence for prosecution. “The FBI has an intelligence function in connection with internal security matters equally as important.” In such instances, “considerations of internal security and the national safety are paramount and, therefore, may compel the unrestricted use of this technique in the national interest.”

  Hoover had his microphone surveillance authority, which he would use for another decade. Although it did not go as far as he wanted—it said nothing about criminal cases, a fact he would totally ignore—it used the word “unrestricted”; it left to him the decision as to what constituted “the national interest”; and it declared that the use of trespass (break-ins to plant the bugs) should be made on a case by case basis. Brownell didn’t even forbid the use of bugs in bedrooms. While this issue seemed to have “outraged” the justices, he noted, and obviously “the installation of a microphone in a bedroom or some comparatively intimate location should be avoided whenever possible,” it might, in certain cases, be the only way important intelligence or evidence could be obtained, and so Brownell declared, “It is my opinion that under such circumstances the installation is proper and not prohibited by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Irvine case.”12

  With his May 20, 1954, directive, Brownell gave Hoover carte blanche to bug whomever he chose, by whatever methods he found necessary. “There never was any definition of the methods that were to be used in carrying out the directive,” the former attorney general later testified. “The methods were left to the discretion of the FBI.”13

  Hoover would look back on the eight years of the Eisenhower administration with special fondness. “As a matter of fact,” William Rogers later recalled, “Mr. Hoover often told me that those years…when Mr. Brownell and I were attorney generals were the best and happiest years he ever had.”14

  Under President Dwight David Eisenhower, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reached the apex of his power.

  He had the ear of both the president and the vice-president, as well as of their staffs. Not only did the White House react to his complaints and approve his suggestions; he was allowed, even encouraged, to help shape policy, particularly in matters of law enforcement, internal security, and civil rights.

  His Justice Department superiors gave him free rein. He differed with Brownell on only one substantive issue, again civil rights, and when it came to a showdown Ike backed him rather than the attorney general.

  He had his FBI stable in Congress. Although its numbers would vary over the years, and the names change, George Dondero, L. Mendel Rivers, Harold H. Velde, John Rankin, H. R. Gross, Roman Hruska, and Bourke B. Hickenlooper were never anything more than FBI cheerleaders, as far as the director was concerned. They could be counted upon to root for the home team, and boo its opponents, but the real players, the capital’s A team, the men the FBI director had so carefully courted over the years, were far less vocal but much more powerful. To a large extent, they were southern, conservative, and racist, as was Hoover, and, again much like him, long on seniority, and thus occupied the positions of greatest influence: majority and minority leaders, Speakers, and the chairmen of the key committees. Included among them were John McClellan, John McCormack, Lyndon Baines Johnson, John Stennis, Everett Dirksen, Styles Bridges, Pat McCarran, Hale Boggs, and Thomas Dodd. Hoover’s most important congressional alliances, however, were with three Democrats, two of them New Yorkers.

  James O. Eastland of Mississippi headed the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had legislative jurisdiction over the Justice Department, including the FBI, but, in the Bureau’s case, never exercised its
oversight functions. Moreover, Eastland used his formidable powers to make sure no one else did.

  Eastland’s House counterpart, Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, served on the House Judiciary Committee for forty years, twenty-two of them as chairman. One of the giants of Congress, known as the champion of the underdog, Celler believed that J. Edgar Hoover had dossiers on every member of Congress and that he often tapped their phones. He would state, with some conviction, “I don’t want another Hoover. We shouldn’t put a man in there who would reach out for such power.”15 But these comments to the author Ovid Demaris were made in 1974, after the FBI director was safely dead. During Hoover’s lifetime Celler backed a score of bills which increased the FBI director’s powers.

  Third, and most important, was another representative from Brooklyn, John J. Rooney, who became head of the powerful House Appropriations Subcommittee in 1949, a post he occupied for the rest of Hoover’s tenure as director of the FBI.

  His predecessor, Karl Stefan, a Nebraska Republican, had made a near-fatal mistake, observed Rooney, and he wasn’t about to repeat it: he’d cut J. Edgar Hoover’s budget. “When Stefan went home for election that year,” Rooney would recall, “they nearly beat him because he took away some of Hoover’s money. When he came back he told me: ‘John, don’t ever cut the FBI budget. The people don’t want it cut.’…I have never cut his budget and I never expect to.” True to his promise, Rooney never did.*16

  Adding to Hoover’s power, three congressional committees were by then investigating communism. Not wanting the House Un-American Activities Committee to have all the glory, Senators Eastland and McCarran had in 1950 created the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which conducted its own hearings (for another twenty-seven years) and which maintained very close liaison with the FBI. When it came to rooting out subversives, the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee was a latecomer, McCarthy not taking over its chairmanship until January 1953.

  In addition, a number of state investigating committees were probing alleged Communist subversion; New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all had police “Red squads” or intelligence units; at the university level, campus police, many of them former FBI agents, monitored student and faculty organizations and conducted loyalty-oath investigations. All had the director’s patriarchal blessing, although he helped some more than others.

  It was a great time for ex-agents. Many of those not employed by the various committees formed their own security consulting firms, such as Fidelifax, Inc. (forty-five former FBI agents in thirty cities), which offered “fact-finding and personnel reporting services for business organizations”;17 others, such as American Business Consultants and Aware, Inc., first smeared blacklistees (in the publications Red Channels and Counterattack) and then cleared them for a fee.

  An ex-agent dominated, and terrorized, the State Department during most of the Eisenhower administration. Hired by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to appease Senators McCarthy, Bridges, and McCarran—and personally approved by J. Edgar Hoover—R. W. “Scotty” McLeod was officially administrator of the State Department Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, but he quickly took over personnel also, deciding who would be investigated, hired, and fired. (“Congress wants heads to roll and I let ‘em roll,” McLeod once said. “Blood in the streets and all that.”)18 Assembling a staff consisting mostly of former SAs, McLeod also adopted some of the Bureau’s less savory practices—surveillances, mail openings, wiretaps, and break-ins. A superpatriot, McLeod hated Commies, Comsyms, liberals, intellectuals, and fairies, as he often told his staff, in exactly those words, and apparently saw no distinction between them. Supposedly during his first seven months, 193 “security risks” were terminated. Asked how many were subversives, McLeod responded, “I don’t think the people are concerned with breakdowns. They don’t care whether they were drunks, perverts or Communists—they just want to get rid of them.”19 According to another set of figures—like his mentor Joseph McCarthy, McLeod had trouble with numbers—between May 1953 and June 1955 only 8 persons were dismissed as security risks but 273 submitted their resignations. With McLeod’s witch-hunting and Dulles’s refusal either to control him or to support those he accused, State Department morale plummeted, particularly in the diplomatic service. One result was a self-censorship which undoubtedly had an effect on American foreign policy, few daring to express their opinions freely for fear they would be accountable to McLeod and, eventually, McCarthy, with whom he shared the findings of his investigations.

  Through McLeod and his cadre, Hoover was tapped into every part of the State Department. Aides say he knew many of Dulles’s decisions even before the president did.*

  McLeod was not Hoover’s only ally at State. He maintained very close liaison with Mrs. Ruth B. Shipley, who headed the Passport Office, as well as her successor, Miss Frances Knight.†

  Shipley, Knight, and Hoover had at least three things in common: all were despots who ruled their fiefdoms with complete autonomy (Mrs. Shipley even, at one point, yanked the passport of Eleanor Dulles, the sister of her boss); they were durable, Hoover himself remaining director for forty-eight years, Shipley and Knight bettering him by two years, for a full half century, 1927-77, but only by combining their reigns; and all attempts to remove them failed. (In 1966, Abba Schwartz, Miss Knight’s nominal superior, attempted to fire her for authorizing State Department surveillance of prominent Americans traveling abroad. Knight complained to J. Edgar Hoover, who went to Senator Thomas Dodd, who put pressure on Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Schwartz was fired instead.)

  Under Shipley and Knight (and Hoover, who directed many of their moves), known Communists, such as the singer Paul Robeson and the writer Howard Fast, were denied a passport or had it revoked. So did liberal lawyers, such as Leonard Boudin, who represented passport litigants. So did critics of American foreign policy, such as Owen Lattimore and John Stewart Service. Ex-Communists who wanted a passport were first required to prove their willingness to collaborate with government agencies such as the FBI. Blacklisted Hollywood writers, directors, and actors hoping to find work abroard, such as Edward G. Robinson and Ring Lardner, Jr., were denied a passport unless they first made their peace with HUAC or one of the other committees. (Robinson did, Lardner didn’t). Those merely suspected of having questionable associations, such as the double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, had their passport application delayed for a year or more.*

  Through the use of a “watch list,” Hoover was able to monitor the foreign travels of such possible subversives as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

  Hoover’s power did not stop at the majestic doors of the U.S. Supreme Court. All appointments to the Court were first cleared by the FBI, which conducted a full field investigation. During the Eisenhower years, the president filled four vacancies on the Court. Hoover approved all four, and himself picked one of them.

  With the death of Hoover’s old mentor Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, in 1946, President Truman had appointed Fred Vinson chief justice. With Vinson’s death, in 1953, Eisenhower had a chance to change the direction of the Court. After looking around for a Republican to fill the vacancy, he picked the governor of California.

  Hoover had first met Earl Warren in 1932, when Homer Cummings had summoned a number of young attorneys to Washington to help draw up the new crime laws. Warren was at that time district attorney of Alameda County, California, and was already making a reputation for himself as a tough prosecutor. Four years after his Washington visit, Warren earned the enmity of labor for his involvement in one of the classic anti-union “frame-ups” of that era, the King-Ramsey-Connor case. This, to Hoover, was a plus rather than a minus, and the FBI director had maintained contact—Warren was on his Special Correspondents list—and followed his career as Warren went on to become attorney general, then governor of his state. By 1948 Hoover was supplying Warren with “
sanitized” information from the FBI’s files. In 1951 the director instructed an aide, “Whatever the Governor requests I want prompt attention accorded to it.”21 When Warren was in the capital, the FBI director supplied him with a car and a driver. Other favors followed, once Warren assumed leadership of the High Court, such as checking out his daughter Nina’s suitors.

  John M. Harlan joined the Court in 1954, replacing the associate justice, and former attorney general, Robert Jackson. Harlan was and remained, as Eisenhower had hoped, one of the more conservative members of the Court, but even he, in time, disappointed Hoover.

  William J. Brennan, whom Eisenhower appointed to the Court in 1956, to fill the seat of the retiring Justice Sherman Minton, also appeared to be a conservative, though a Democrat. There was in his background—after passing the bar, he’d joined a firm specializing in the management side of labor law, then moved on to the bench, eventually becoming a justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court—no hint that he would, once on the U.S. Supreme Court, become known as “the Constitutionist,” his landmark decisions greatly strengthening freedom of expression, the rights of criminal defendants, and racial minorities.