J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Like Truman, Eisenhower after leaving office would be asked if he had made any substantive errors while president. “Yes, two,” he replied. “And they are both sitting on the Supreme Court.”22 Eisenhower was not half as disappointed in Warren and Brennan as J. Edgar Hoover was.

  The FBI director did, however, get to pick one justice himself during the Eisenhower years, Potter Stewart. Ironically, it was the second time around for Stewart: in 1941 Hoover had rejected Stewart’s application to be an FBI agent, in part because his mother had once belonged to an isolationist group known as the Peace League. (That he had been a Phi Beta Kappa at Yale may also have been a factor.) In 1958, however, on learning that Harold Burton was retiring, the FBI director again checked out Stewart, then on the Cincinnati Court of Appeals, and finding he was conservative, had a “clear appreciation of the problems of law enforcement,” and had “not rendered any opinions which can be construed as anti-law enforcement or anti-Bureau,” recommended him to Attorney General Rogers.23 President Eisenhower announced his nomination the next day.

  The FBI also ran name checks on the law clerks and other employees of the Supreme Court, at least some of whom, according to former Hoover aides, were FBI informants. Although this may explain J. Edgar Hoover’s often uncanny prescience regarding as yet unannounced Court decisions, one justice had another explanation: William O. Douglas believed that the Court was bugged and that it had on one occasion been the victim of a bag job.

  Probably at least one of Hoover’s informants was a justice. Tom Clark was bored on the Court. Patricia Collins, an attorney who worked for him (and thirteen other attorneys general), noted that Clark was a very gregarious person, adding, “I think the sepulchral atmosphere over there got him to him. When Tom was in the AG’s office, it was a very, very active place. He was making speeches all the time, people were sitting out there in droves waiting to see Tom Clark.” But once he was on the Court he hardly ever saw anyone. “They say that when the phone rang, he’d grab it and say, ‘Hello.’ He was dying to talk to somebody.”24

  Although they had often differed when Clark was attorney general, Hoover and Tolson now made room for him at their table at Harvey’s. Drew Pearson wasn’t the only one who noticed that these occasions seemed to coincide with the Court’s consideration of matters of concern to the FBI.

  Even though Hoover made it a policy to establish a personal relationship, if possible, with the Cabinet officers in each administration, and though some of his power derived from such associations, the most profitable alliances often occurred on a lower level, as in the case of the U.S. Post Office. As far as is known, no postmaster general was ever officially informed that the FBI was opening mail. Most did know that the FBI was collecting “mail covers,” copying addresses off envelopes, which was deemed legal, but they left the details to their subordinates, usually the chief postal inspector and his assistants, and even they were unaware of the immense scope of the FBI’s spying—that the Bureau ran eight separate programs, one lasting twenty-six years, which resulted in the opening of millions of pieces of mail. But for Hoover even this wasn’t enough. On learning, in 1957, that the CIA had its own mail-opening program (HTLINGUAL), which had been in operation for five years, the FBI director blackmailed the agency into sharing its “take.”

  The closest possible liaison was also maintained with the Internal Revenue Service, again on the lower, working levels, although at least some of the IRS commissioners did know what was going on. Beginning in the Eisenhower administration, and continuing well into that of Lyndon Baines Johnson, there is no evidence that any FBI requests for tax returns were ever refused. On the contrary, during the Bureau’s COINTELPROs, the counterintelligence programs which began during the Eisenhower era, the IRS supplied the FBI with tax information on well over a half million people and more than ten thousand organizations, many of which were “targeted” for investigation or audit not because of any suspected criminal activity but simply for the sake of harassment.

  To Hoover, as to Machiavelli, knowledge was power, and the chief source of that knowledge was, and remained throughout his long tenure as director of the FBI, his informants, who infiltrated every part of the federal government.

  Name a bureau or department or regulatory agency or office, William Sullivan once said, “and we had one or more informants in it, usually a lot more.”25

  Surprisingly, more than a few of these informants were homosexuals. According to a former Hoover aide, in doing background investigations the agents would sometime discover that a person was a homosexual. If he occupied a strategic position, one giving him access to information of interest to the Bureau, the agents would attempt to “turn” him, and—since the alternative was exposure, dismissal, and the denial of any future government employment—quite often they were successful. “In other words,” the aide explained, “if we found out that so-and-so was one, and most of them were quite covert about their activities, that person would be ‘doubled’ and would become a listening post for the FBI.”26 It was axiomatic, at the time, that the main reason homosexuals should be denied government employment was their susceptibility to blackmail. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover proved that this was true, by blackmailing them himself.

  Hoover’s power wasn’t restricted to the federal level. In addition to developing informants in many state and local offices, and in most large corporations, businesses, and banks, he also made an effort to win over certain influential national organizations.

  One of the most important, to the FBI, was an organization which Hoover’s longtime nemesis William J. Donovan had helped found, the American Legion.

  In 1953 Hoover asked one of Tolson’s assistants, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, to help him with “the American Legion problem.” The problem, Sanford Ungar has observed, was mostly overenthusiasm. The Legion, caught up in the McCarthy fervor, was demanding that the FBI investigate specific people, mostly liberals and left-wing figures. Earlier, during World War II, when the Legion had begun to get out of hand, proposing that its members investigate spies and saboteurs, Hoover had sidetracked the vigilante effort by setting up a system where Legion post commanders reported their suspicions to local special agents in charge and let the FBI do the investigating. According to Ungar, Hoover wanted DeLoach, who was a veteran, to join the Legion and “straighten it out.” DeLoach took the assignment so seriously that he became a post commander, department vice-commander, department commander, and national vice-commander and eventually was urged to run for the post of national commander, but Hoover, according to Ungar, “vetoed that as ‘too political’ a job for one of his FBI men to hold.” It is also possible he thought this would give DeLoach himself too much power. “Instead,” Ungar records, “DeLoach became chairman of the Legion’s national public relations commission in 1958,” and “in that position and in his other Legion offices over the years, he exercised a great deal of influence over the organization’s internal policies as well as its public positions.”27 The American Legion and, to an only slightly lesser extent, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Catholic War Veterans were among the FBI’s strongest supporters. Any criticism of the Bureau or its director brought a swift counterattack from the veterans, most often orchestrated from Crime Records, which DeLoach headed after Lou Nichols’s “retirement.”

  One of the most important sources of J. Edgar Hoover’s power existed entirely on the local level, in the states, cities, and, especially, the small towns. It was the police.

  This was ironic since no segment of American society was more critical of the FBI than the other branches of law enforcement. Since the days of Dillinger and Karpis, the FBI had been accused of being publicity hungry, stealing credit (and statistics) that rightly belonged to the local departments, dominating every case it entered, demanding cooperation but often failing to reciprocate, and picking and choosing its cases so that the less glamorous and decidedly dirtier scut work was done by the police.

  All this was true. But Hoover found
ways to get around it and mute the criticism. The FBI director won control over the local police by utilizing a variety of techniques, including fear, some blackmail, and more than a little coercion. But his most effective technique was temptation—the prospect of promotion, higher pay, and access to services smaller departments couldn’t otherwise afford.

  The biggest carrot the director dangled before the local police was what Hoover himself called “the West Point of Law Enforcement”—the FBI National Academy.* Carefully selected candidates, initially no more than two hundred a year nationwide, the best and brightest of their departments, were chosen by local chiefs and SACs to attend the twelve-week training course in Washington, where they were taught up-to-date investigative techniques, instructed in the use of the latest equipment, and lectured on those topics of police science deemed essential to true law enforcement professionals.

  Upon graduation, each policeman was given a diploma, signed by the director; a photograph of himself and the director, suitably inscribed; and membership in a special alumni association, FBI National Academy Associates, which issued an annual booklet listing all academy graduates.†

  Upon returning home, NA graduates were contacted at least once every sixty days by the local field offices and questioned about any cases which might be of interest to the Bureau, as well as the internal affairs of their departments. They also exchanged home phone numbers with their FBI contacts, in case either needed a favor or special assistance, were invited to regional re-training sessions and Bureau social functions, and thus were made to feel part of a very select fraternity. In return for the FBI’s investment, Hoover gained a nationwide network of informant friends, thanks to which, William Sullivan observed, “we had a private and frequently helpful line to most city and state police organizations.”29 Realizing he had a good thing going, Hoover gradually made the academy less and less select, until it was turning out between two and three thousand FBI contacts per year, probably none of whom was aware that just a few classrooms away future FBI agents were being taught how to control and dominate the local police.

  The FBI often claimed that more than 28 percent of the NA graduates later rose to executive positions in their departments, becoming chiefs, sheriffs, state police chiefs, or wardens. Although, being an FBI statistic, this was suspect, there was no exaggerating the importance of attending the FBI National Academy. The former New York City police commissioner Patrick V. Murphy would call it “a certification pit stop before advancement up the American law enforcement ladder. No one who wished to get anywhere in policing was likely to be successful without an FBI Academy ticket.”30 Murphy, who later became director of the Police Foundation and earned a top spot on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list, recalls that when another Murphy, Michael, was interviewed for the New York police commissioner’s job in 1961, the only question Mayor Robert Wagner asked the lawyer, who also had a degree in public administration, was “Are you a graduate of the FBI Academy?”31

  The NA certification was the only advanced education that many policemen could list on their résumés. To an officer who hoped to eventually retire from his department and find employment as police chief in some small town, it often meant the difference between getting and not getting the job.

  Officially, the FBI National Academy’s policy was to admit police officers from all U.S. cities as well as friendly foreign countries. But there were exceptions. Hoover had a long-standing feud with Police Chief William H. Parker of Los Angeles.* As a result, although candidates from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department were promptly admitted to the academy (the LA sheriff Peter Pitchess was an ex-agent), those from LAPD were told there was a seven- to ten-year waiting list, causing Chief Parker to comment, “I guess we are an unfriendly foreign country.”32

  Even those friendly foreign countries would cause problems, particularly those south of the border. During World War II, as a means of cementing his power in Central and South America, Hoover had brought a number of local police officers—from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, Panama, and Cuba—north for academy training. In later years they also rose, some to become the head of their country’s secret police. Suspects brought in for questioning who survived their interrogations later recalled a strange sight: a prominently displayed photograph of their torturer, shaking hands with the American FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover. These names, too, disappeared from the academy’s roster.

  Parker and Murphy weren’t the only policemen on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list. Others included O. W. Wilson of Chicago, August Vollmer of Berkeley, Stephen Kennedy of New York, Jerry Wilson of Washington, D.C., and James F. Ahern of New Haven. Although very different men, they had one thing in common: all had received national attention. There could be only one “Mr. Law Enforcement.”

  It took James Ahern no time at all to make the director’s enemies list. Shortly after Ahern was appointed police chief of New Haven, an FBI agent dropped in and introduced himself as his FBI liaison: he would come by, daily, to review the department’s active police cases and its intelligence reports. Fine, Chief Ahern responded, so long as he could, daily, review the FBI’s active case files. The agent did not return.

  Being denied admission to the FBI Academy didn’t hurt the big-city police departments all that much; most felt their training programs superior to those offered by the FBI. Hoover had other ways of making them feel his displeasure. Requests for FBI record checks or fingerprint processing were delayed or sometimes lost, doubling or tripling the paperwork. Evidence sent to the FBI Laboratory, such as a gun and bullets for ballistics testing, somehow never arrived. When the FBI published its annual national statistical summary, Crime in the United States, a city’s statistics would be omitted, the only explanation being a little footnote which stated the statistics were not acceptable. “A fellow could be really burned by the local press, taking off on that,” Murphy notes.33 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had stated, on more than one occasion, “The FBI is willing and ready to cooperate with all law enforcement agencies. The only exceptions are when officers of the law are corrupt and controlled by venal politicians; when they cannot keep a confidence and be trusted; or when they are so incompetent that to cooperate with them would defeat our purposes.”34

  Local reporters could take their pick. To the cynical amusement of those accorded such treatment, Philadelphia, which had a notoriously corrupt police department, was listed every year.

  Hoover also controlled the small-town police departments of America by dominating the leadership of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, as he had since the 1930s. Every year the FBI director was offered first chance at delivering the keynote speech at the organization’s national convention, and on more than half a dozen occasions he’d accepted. Whether he was flailing “sob-sister judges” or “lily-livered wardens,” he received standing ovations. It was a rare year when the resolutions committee failed to issue a proclamation (prepared in advance by Crime Records, the wording approved by the director himself) praising “the Honorable J. Edgar Hoover.”

  But the real manipulation of the IACP occurred behind the scenes. For many years, Quinn Tamm, Ed Tamm’s brother, was the FBI liaison to the IACP, and he helped rig its elections.

  Although Quinn Tamm never occupied the number three spot, as did his brother, his FBI career was also quite remarkable. He’d joined the Bureau in 1934; four years later, at age twenty-eight, he’d become its youngest inspector. He ran the Identification Division for seventeen years, then Training and Inspection, then the FBI Laboratory. Even after Ed Tamm’s appointment to the court, and fall from grace, Hoover continued to trust Quinn Tamm with such sensitive assignments as keeping the IACP in line.

  “We used to control the election of officers,” Tamm would admit; “we had a helluva lot of friends around, and we would control the nominating committee.”35 Only Hoover-approved candidates—those who espoused his views on law and order, with none of this social-ills-begat-crime nonsense—were nominated.


  In 1959 Police Chief Parker of Los Angeles ran for election as vice-president of the IACP, a necessary first step to its presidency and the recognition of his peers. But Parker didn’t win. A small-town chief did. Quinn Tamm’s lobbying saw to that.

  But there was more to Hoover’s control over the police than fixed elections. There was fear. No one dared oppose the FBI director. Politicians were not the only ones who were afraid of his legendary files. Rumor had it—a rumor that Hoover made no effort to discourage—that the FBI director’s files on local police departments were exceptionally detailed. Patrick Murphy knew a lot of policemen—he’d headed departments in New York City, Detroit, Syracuse, Washington, D.C.—who were “terrified” of Hoover and what might be in his files. It was common gossip in police circles, Murphy says, “that if he wanted to burn people he could do it.”36

  It is possible to pinpoint exactly when J. Edgar Hoover’s control over the International Association of Chiefs of Police ended. It occurred in 1961, when Quinn Tamm quit the FBI and—despite J. Edgar Hoover’s frantic backstage maneuverings—was offered, and accepted, the job of executive director of the IACP.

  Addressing the association’s annual convention in St. Louis a few days later, Tamm remarked that the IACP once was and should have remained “the dominant voice in law enforcement. This, I fear, has not been true.” He didn’t mention J. Edgar Hoover by name, but he didn’t need to. From now on, Tamm said, the IACP “must be the spokesman for law enforcement in this country.”37

  The gauntlet had been thrown down. But by then Hoover’s power was so rapidly eroding that the IACP and Quinn Tamm were among the least of his problems.

  Not all of the president’s appointments met with Hoover’s favor. In February 1953 Eisenhower named Allen Dulles, the brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.