by Tim Weiner
Congressman Fish wanted to strike that flag. He wanted to outlaw Communist words and deeds. He wanted the Bureau back on the case. So he called on Hoover.
The director explained his precarious position to the congressman. The Bureau’s power to spy on Americans had “never been established by legislation,” Hoover said to Fish on January 19, 1931. It operated “solely on an appropriation bill”—the slender reed of the 1916 budget language saying the Bureau could work for the secretary of state. This was not a technicality: legislative language cloaked in a spending bill was only language, not law. If Congress and the Supreme Court wanted to outlaw communism, they should do so. But until then, the Bureau had no power to openly investigate political conduct. Hoover was walking a very fine line.
Hoover also told Attorney General William D. Mitchell that secret undercover work was crucial “to secure a foothold in Communistic inner circles” and to stay abreast of their “changing policies and secret propaganda.” But “the Bureau of Investigation may be given the closest scrutiny at all times”—and it “would undoubtedly be subject to charges in the matter of alleged secret and undesirable methods,” Hoover warned. Under law, he could not investigate political acts “which, from a federal standpoint, have not been declared illegal and in connection with which no prosecution might be instituted.”
Hoover nevertheless kept spying on the Communists, hewing to his reading of the law by reporting in secret to the State Department.
On January 20, 1931—one day after his conversation with Congressman Fish—Hoover sent a letter to the State Department’s most respected Russia hand, Robert F. Kelley, the chief of the Eastern European division. He summarized a series of reports from the Bureau of Investigation’s New York office, based on the work of confidential informants within the Communist Party.
Hoover reported on an organization called the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League—which he called an “active Communist unit” of American military veterans of World War I. The veterans wanted the government to pay a promised “bonus” for their military service—a payment that was not due until 1945. The group was “trying to organize an impressive number of ex-servicemen for the purpose of a ‘Hunger March’ to Washington,” Hoover wrote. “The campaign is conducted by the league under the direction of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.” The veterans and the Communists had joined forces, Hoover said, and they were planning to mount a protest march the likes of which no one had ever seen.
Hoover’s intelligence report on the evolving plans for the Bonus March was prophetic. In the summer of 1932, thousands of ragged and unemployed World War I veterans from across the country gathered for a demonstration against the government. One Bonus Army banner read: IN THE LAST WAR WE FOUGHT FOR THE BOSSES/IN THE NEXT WAR WE’LL FIGHT FOR THE WORKERS. Marching on Washington, many accompanied by their families, they set up ragged encampments. They built a hobo jungle on Capitol Hill, pitched tents by the Anacostia River, and squatted in abandoned federal buildings.
On July 28, the president called out the troops—led by General Douglas MacArthur and his aide-de-camp, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. They met the Bonus Army marchers with tanks, mounted cavalry, machine guns, and infantry with fixed bayonets and tear gas. General MacArthur’s soldiers burned down the camps by the river; one of the Bonus Marchers was killed in the melee. The spectacle of the United States Army chasing the unarmed veterans, their wives, and their children out of the shadow of the Capitol was a scene of American urban combat without parallel since the Civil War. The newspaper pictures and the newsreels of the rout were a political disaster for President Hoover, who had just won the Republican Party’s nomination for a second term.
Attorney General Mitchell announced that the Communists were to blame. He turned to J. Edgar Hoover to back the charges. Bureau agents in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis worked for months trying to prove that the Communist Party had planned and financed the march. Infiltrating meetings and rallies, searching bank records and shadowing leaders of the march, they investigated in vain. A grand jury convened to gather proof that the Bonus Army was a Communist conspiracy. It found none.
The Bureau of Investigation had only a few hundred agents with professional expertise and a devotion to the principles of the rule of law, among whom were a few dozen experienced in the techniques of espionage and counterespionage. Neither the Bureau nor Hoover had much of a claim to fame. If Americans knew the director’s name, it was probably because the president had named Hoover “coordinator of federal assistance” in the 1932 kidnapping of the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. The case was “the crime of the century” and the search for the perpetrator would go on for two years.
“THE CRIMINAL STANDING ARMY”
Despite the political and social torments of the Great Depression—a national disaster in which the American people might have followed any politician promising a way out—the Communist Party was still a weak force when Americans went to elect a new president in November 1932. The Party had a few thousand members who devoted their lives to Stalin and the Soviets. They had made some small inroads with American workers and American unions, and their ideas held a growing attraction for intellectuals and radicals who despaired over the American political system.
The war on crime and the war on communism were not the battles in which Americans were engaged. They were struggling to survive. They were starved for a strong leader. They were ready for a president who would create “an American dictatorship based on the consent of the governed,” in the startling words of Congressman Fish. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt was foreordained from the moment he was nominated. FDR was ready to use every power the Constitution granted—and more—to save the Republic from political and economic chaos.
The FBI won its place in the firmament of American government under President Roosevelt. But it almost lost Hoover as its leader. He barely survived the transition of power.
President Roosevelt, sworn into office on March 4, 1933, had chosen Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana to be attorney general. Walsh had been a primary target of the Bureau of Investigation’s political espionage a decade before, at the height of the Harding era. He had fought Hoover and his bosses, and they had hit back. The chances that Hoover would keep his job were slim. But on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration, riding to Washington in a sleeper car with his young bride, Walsh died of a heart attack at seventy-two.
Roosevelt scrambled for a replacement. His secretary of state, Cordell Hull, recommended Homer S. Cummings, a onetime Democratic National Committee chairman. Cummings had been FDR’s floor manager at the 1932 Democratic Convention, delivering delegates and a rip-roaring seconding speech. More importantly, Cummings had served for ten years as a state prosecutor in Connecticut, and he knew a great deal about law enforcement from personal experience, unlike many of his predecessors at the Justice Department.
“We are now engaged in a war,” Attorney General Cummings proclaimed in a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution in August 1933, “a war with the organized forces of crime.”
Cummings created the “public enemies” list of gangsters like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde. Cummings gave the Bureau the power to carry guns, execute warrants, and make arrests. Cummings conceived, and Congress passed, a new federal criminal code giving the Bureau the jurisdiction to enforce laws like racketeering—running an interstate criminal enterprise. If you fled a state in a stolen car, if you assaulted a federal officer, if you robbed a bank of its United States currency, you had committed a federal crime. Cummings’s hope was that Hoover’s men would enforce the law where corrupt city police and tinhorn county sheriffs failed.
Cummings called on Hollywood to join the battle. Hollywood made the movies; the movies helped make Hoover a star. Cummings could not be the leading man. He looked like a librarian. Hoover fit the role far better. He was happy to pose for publicity shots holding a machine gun or smiling at a starlet.
He had many a cinematic model for his newly glamorous role. G-Men, starring Jimmy Cagney as a dashing FBI agent, featured a congressional hearing with a fictional Hoover testifying on behalf of the Cummings crime program. “These gangs will be wiped out!” he vows. “This is war!”
Within a year, Hoover became the public face of the war on crime, the star of a show that captured the imagination of the American people, the name in the headlines, an icon in the American political theater. His public performances, the speeches he made, and the statistics he produced for Congress became as dramatic as the movies. He would claim that 4.3 million Americans had joined “the criminal standing army” threatening the nation—“murderers, thieves, firebugs, assassins, robbers, and hold-up men.” By that reckoning, one of every thirty men, women, and children in the United States was armed, dangerous, and at large in the land. These dire pronouncements about the war on crime went unquestioned at the time. Upon inspection, many proved to be inventions. But they won publicity and power for Hoover.
With his broad new authorities and his growing national reputation came a new name for his institution: the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
There was another war coming—the war against the enemy within. It could not be fought in public. FDR enlisted Hoover to fight it with the greatest secrecy and the utmost power a president could command.
Across the Atlantic, Adolf Hitler was establishing his dictatorship, and Roosevelt soon foresaw that one day he might have to confront the Nazi threat face-to-face. Inside the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin was demanding American recognition, if Roosevelt and the Senate would grant it, and Roosevelt came to realize that Russia might one day be a bulwark against Hitler and his storm troopers. J. Edgar Hoover was ready to do whatever his new commander-in-chief asked, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
PART II
WORLD WAR
J. Edgar Hoover and President Roosevelt at the start of the war against the enemy within, 1934.
9
THE BUSINESS OF SPYING
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DELIVERED his first battle orders to Hoover on May 8, 1934. FDR said he wanted “a very careful and searching investigation” of American fascism.
The president wanted Adolf Hitler’s agents and admirers investigated on all fronts. Who were they? How strong were they? How broad a threat did they represent? Were Nazis at work in German diplomatic offices? Was Germany buying influence on Wall Street? Was Hitler controlling secret agents and secret funds inside the United States?
Hitler already represented a threat to America’s allies in Europe. FDR and Hoover both knew well what Germany’s secret agents had done to try to subvert and sabotage the United States during World War I. Now Hoover had orders to serve as the clearinghouse for all the evidence the United States government possessed. Prosecutions were not the point. The president wanted intelligence.
Hoover moved slowly and cautiously in the field of antifascism. He did not evince the boundless enthusiasm he had shown in fighting communism. He issued careful instructions to all his field offices, ordering “so-called intelligence investigations” into the American fascist movement. The director’s choice of words was apt. Over the next two years, the Bureau’s work was largely limited to collating files from state and local police, monitoring public rallies, and gathering newspaper clippings. It kept an eye on swastika-waving outfits like the German-American Bund (founded with the backing of the American automaker Henry Ford) and home-grown fascist groups like the Silver Shirts. It took note of the widely publicized right-wing rhetoric of groups like the Liberty Lobby and the increasingly popular Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio preacher. It even looked into an organization called the National Committee Against Communism. But the FBI’s Adolf Hitler file was mostly filled with crackpot death threats against the dictator.
Hoover did his best to steer Roosevelt’s attention back to the war on communism. Early in the Roosevelt administration, after a decade of debate, the United States had officially recognized the Soviet Union. That allowed Stalin to open an embassy and consulates in the United States; where there were diplomats, there were spies. Congress had passed the National Labor Relations Act, which allowed workers to organize; where there were trade unions, there were Communists. Between 1930 and 1936, Party membership had quadrupled to about thirty thousand. Now American leftists were starting to volunteer to fight fascist forces in Spain.
Hoover viewed these developments as deeply ominous. He asked to see the president in private, one-on-one.
On August 24, 1936, FDR invited Hoover to the White House. Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt routinely refused to keep written accounts of crucial meetings, especially on matters of secret intelligence. Only one record of this talk exists—Hoover’s.
Roosevelt wanted to talk about “subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” and he wanted “a broad picture” of their influence on the politics and economics of the nation, according to Hoover’s notes. But Hoover kept the focus on the FBI’s continuing investigations of communism in America. He warned the president that the Communists were taking over the longshoremen’s union on the West Coast, that they had designs on the United Mine Workers union and the nation’s supply of coal, and that they had great sway over the press through the Newspaper Guild.
“I told him,” Hoover recorded, “that the communists planned to get control of these three groups and by doing so they would be able to paralyze the country … stop all shipping … stop the operation of industry … and stop publication of any newspapers.” Hoover went on to say that Communists were boring into the government itself through the National Labor Relations Board.
Hoover then told the president that the FBI needed a renewed authority for secret intelligence operations. He cited the 1916 statute under which the State Department gave the FBI its secret intelligence powers.
FDR called for Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the three men met at the White House the next day, August 25, 1936. The president said that since the threat was international and “Communism particularly was directed from Moscow,” the secretary of state should give Hoover his approval to go after Soviet spies in America.
Nothing in writing came from the president or the State Department. Hoover did not record the precise language of the conversation. The legend at the FBI is that Hull turned to Hoover and said: “Go ahead and investigate the cock-suckers.”
Hoover now had an open-ended order from the president to run secret intelligence operations against America’s enemies. He cited the authority granted him that day for the rest of his life.
His command went out immediately to all FBI field offices: “Obtain from all possible sources information concerning subversive activities being conducted in the United States by Communists, Fascisti, and representatives or advocates of other organizations or groups advocating the overthrow or replacement of the Government of the United States by illegal methods.” Hoover tried to coordinate his intelligence work with the army, the navy, and the State Department, as he had done in the heady days of the great Red raids.
The FBI set out to investigate every member of the Communist Party and its affiliates, along with the leaders of American fascist and antifascist movements. It went after left-wing labor leaders in the coal, shipping, steel, newspaper, and garment industries. It sought to find Communists and subversives at schools and universities, in the federal government, and in the armed forces. Hoover ordered his agents to recruit new informants and to write new reports on prominent subversives. He started classifying “subversive activities” under the broadest headings of American political and economic life.
“MEN OF ZEAL”
With the new authority vested in him by the president, Hoover revived one of the FBI’s most valuable intelligence techniques: wiretapping.
Governments had been tapping wires ever since there were wires to tap. Army spies on both sides listened in on telegraph lines throughout the Civil War. Police depa
rtments and private detectives had been secretly recording conversations for decades. On the authority of President Wilson, the government took over the operation of public telephone lines during World War I. The Bureau had listened in on countless people during the lawless years after the war—not only Communists, but senators, congressmen, and judges.
And wiretapping now was legal—as long as it was secret.
The Supreme Court had drawn that fine line in a 1928 case, Olmstead v. U.S., a 5–4 ruling in which Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former president of the United States, cast the deciding vote. Roy Olmstead was a Seattle bootlegger; Prohibition agents from the Treasury Department had tapped his telephone. His lawyers had argued that the secret installation of wiretaps to gather criminal evidence violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against illegal trespasses and unlawful searches and seizures.
The majority in Olmstead had ruled that the government was within its rights: “A standard which would forbid the reception of evidence, if obtained by other than nice ethical conduct by government officials, would make society suffer and give criminals greater immunity than has been known heretofore.”
The minority, led by Justice Louis Brandeis and Hoover’s old boss, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, had issued a powerful dissent. Brandeis warned: “The greatest dangers to liberty lie in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”