J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (31 page)

H
oover later claimed, “No one outside the FBI and the Department of Justice ever knew how close they came to wrecking us.”
¹

But it was Hoover himself who triggered the “near-fatal” attack on the FBI, with his appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on November 30, 1939.

First he presented a fait accompli. Citing as his authority “the President’s proclamation” of September 6, the FBI director informed the committee that he had already hired 150 new special agents, opened ten new field offices, and placed the Seat of Government on a twenty-four-hour standby basis. For this he needed an emergency supplemental appropriation of $1.5 million.

This was a huge increase—bringing the number of SAs to 947 and the Bureau’s annual budget to nearly $9 million—and the congressmen wanted assurances that once the present emergency had ended the FBI would return to its former size. After procrastinating a bit, the director finally assured them it would.
^*
2

Hoover then dropped his real bombshell. Two months earlier, he announced, “we found it necessary to organize a General Intelligence Division in Washington…This division has now compiled extensive indices of individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in subversive activities, in espionage activities, or any activities that are possibly detrimental to the internal security of the United States.

“The indexes have been arranged not only alphabetically but also geographically, so that at any rate, should we enter into the conflict abroad, we would be
able to go into any of these communities and identify individuals or groups who might be a source of grave danger to the security of this country. These indexes will be extremely important and valuable in a grave emergency.”
⁴

With an arrogant disregard for the criticisms of the past, J. Edgar Hoover had resurrected the despised GID, complete with indices and lists of alleged subversives. He hadn’t even changed the name.

Nor was this all he had done. Though he kept its existence secret from Congress, and the public, Hoover had also—on his own initiative and without any statutory authority—set up a Custodial Detention list, of persons to be rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps, should the need arise. The list included—in addition to “both aliens and citizens of the United States [of] German, Italian and Communist sympathies”—radical labor leaders, journalists critical of the administration, writers critical of the FBI, and certain members of Congress.
^*
5

Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York was among the first to react to Hoover’s announcement that he had reestablished the General Intelligence Division, which Attorney General Stone had abolished in 1924. In a speech before the House, Marcantonio charged that Hoover’s “system of terror by index cards” smacked of the Gestapo and was nothing less than preparation for “a general raid against civil rights…very similar to the activities of the Palmer days.”
⁶

That Marcantonio was “left wing,” and often supported causes also espoused by the Communists, could be used to blunt his criticism. Dealing with Senator George Norris, however, wasn’t that easy. Complaining first to the attorney general and then to the Senate, the seventy-nine-year-old Nebraska Progressive stated that he was “worried” that the FBI was “overstepping and overreaching the legitimate object for which it was created.” As for Hoover, Norris called him “the greatest hound for publicity on the North American continent.” He had a friend, Norris said, the editor-publisher of a daily midwestern newspaper, who told him that “he received an average of one letter a week from Mr. Hoover.” All he needed to do was mention the FBI in what might be construed as a favorable light, and he would receive “a letter from Mr. Hoover.” The FBI, Norris charged, was more interested in trying its cases in newspapers than in courts.

In saying this, Norris admitted, he was well aware that certain papers, and various public persons, would “spring to the defense of Mr. Hoover” and charge him with trying to “smear…one of the greatest men who ever lived and who now held the future life of our country in the palm of his mighty
hand.” But so be it. What he’d said was the truth, and it needed saying.
⁷

Other attacks followed, from both the left and the right, their number and their intensity magnified by two well-publicized FBI raids.

Late Sunday, January 14, 1940—in time to make Monday-morning headlines—newspapermen were summoned to the New York field office, where Hoover announced that the FBI had just completed a roundup of seventeen men who were engaged in a “vast plot” to overthrow the government and establish a Fascist dictatorship. This time the conspirators weren’t General Smedley Butler’s corporation heads but members of Father Coughlin’s Christian Front. The group, according to Hoover, had been stockpiling ammunition and explosive devices, and the FBI had acted only on learning that it intended to blow up a public building. When a reporter commented that seventeen men hardly constituted a “vast plot,” Hoover responded with one of his favorite lines: “It took only twenty-three men to overthrow Russia.”
⁸

Then, on February 6, in a series of 5:00
A.M.
raids, the FBI arrested twelve persons, all veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who had fought on the Loyalist side against General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish civil war, charging them with violating a federal law prohibiting recruitment of personnel for a foreign army on U.S. soil.

It was an old case—the recruitment had taken place in 1937 and the war itself was now over, Franco having won—but Attorney General Frank Murphy, undoubtedly encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, had dusted it off and presented it to a federal grand jury.

Reacting to the raids—and charges of FBI brutality—most of the American Left, together with the
Washington Times Herald,
the
New York Daily News,
the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
the columnist Westbrook Pegler, more than a hundred ministers, and over a dozen labor unions joined with Senator Norris in demanding that the attorney general investigate “the American OGPU.”
⁹
Even the ACLU criticized the raids, although by now Hoover had established an even closer
personal
relationship with the civil rights organization. Worse, Hoover could no longer even count on the support of Frank Murphy.

Frank Murphy had become attorney general in January 1939, following the resignation of Homer Cummings, one of the casualties of FDR’s Court-packing plan.

Even before Murphy had been sworn in, Hoover had opened a file on his new boss. It was not without derogatory information. Like Hoover, Murphy was a lifelong bachelor; unlike him, the former Michigan governor was a “notorious womanizer,” with apparently little regard for the marital status of his conquests (one Washington hostess allegedly took a shot at Murphy, causing him and her other dinner guests to flee through the windows).

On taking over the Justice Department, Murphy announced that the FBI was in such capable hands that he intended to leave it alone. And, for the most part, he kept his promise. But Murphy was an Irish pol of the old school, with what some felt was “an insatiable, almost pathological passion for publicity,”
¹⁰
and he quickly learned that one way to get it was to fasten on to Hoover’s coattails. In the spring of 1939 the director, ever loath to share the spotlight, found himself pulled along on a speaking tour of the United States. Murphy being given to overdramatic gestures, they made headlines, as when the pair arrived unannounced in the yard of Leavenworth prison and nearly started a riot.

On another occasion, both Murphy and Hoover were to address a bar association convention in El Paso. Since the FBI director was speaking first, he and Tolson arrived a day early and, with time to kill, the local SAC asked them if they wanted to accompany him across the border to Juarez. He had to verify some information from an informant, who also happened to be the proprietress of a sporting house.

Hoover and Tolson went along for the ride and, as Hoover later put it—it was one of his oft-repeated stories—“had a nice visit with the good lady, about FBI business of course.”

The next day Attorney General Murphy arrived in El Paso. He’d often heard about the nightlife of Juárez, he told Hoover, and wondered if the director could arrange a tour.

The tour took them past the brothel. To the astonishment of the attorney general, one of the girls, recognizing Hoover and Tolson, leaned out the window and yelled: “Hey, you guys back here again tonight?”
^*
11

In later years the director recalled Murphy as one of his favorite attorneys general, undoubtedly, in part, because Murphy served only one year, before being appointed to the Supreme Court. Also, during that year they had only one major disagreement, and Murphy resolved it to Hoover’s satisfaction. Unlike Cummings, Murphy was against exempting the FBI from civil service—but he agreed to withhold action until the “emergency” was over. By the time the war ended, Murphy was long gone and none of his successors dared challenge the FBI director.

Although his tenure was brief, Frank Murphy was important to both Hoover and the Bureau mostly for what he didn’t do. He didn’t oppose Hoover’s plan to resurrect the GID. Instead, as evidenced by the speed with which he pushed through the director’s request for presidential approval, he wholeheartedly backed the Bureau’s return to the investigation of personal and political opinions. Even more significant, Murphy made no move to stop Hoover when he began bypassing him, reporting directly to the president, both by memo and in person. In so doing, the attorney general of the United States decreased the power of his own office, while permitting the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to greatly increase his own.

Eleven days after Murphy was sworn in as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Robert Jackson, his successor as attorney general, dismissed all the charges in the Spanish Loyalist cases, stating he could see “no good to come
from reviving in America at this late date the animosities of the Spanish conflict so long as the conflict has ended.”
^*
12

Under attack from all sides—and without even the support of his nominal superior—Hoover, accompanied by Tolson, flew to Miami, where, ensconced in a cottage in the plush Nautilus Hotel, he personally directed a series of much publicized vice raids. But even this backfired. According to the
Washington Times Herald,
Hoover was frequently seen “in night spots at the beach where the presence of the G-men and the publicity accompanying their activities is said to be about as welcome as poison ivy to local boosters seeking more fun-bent visitors with ready dollars.”
¹³
The vice raids—the last Hoover personally supervised—also caused Florida’s Claude Pepper to take to the Senate floor and charge the FBI director with infringing on states’ rights.

The criticism did not let up on his return. After Hoover was spotted weekending in New York with his friend Walter Winchell, Representative Marcantonio loosed another blast, calling the FBI director a “Stork Club detective,” while the
New York Daily News
ran an old photograph—taken on New Year’s Eve three years previously—in which Hoover, wearing a funny hat, “covered” the current heavyweight champion, James Braddock, with a toy machinegun.
¹⁴

It could have been worse.

With perhaps more drinks than caution—after all, it was his birthday as well as New Year’s Eve—Hoover had been persuaded by Winchell and the Stork Club’s owner, Sherman Billingsley, to pose for a “gag” shot. Looking around for someone to “arrest,” Hoover spotted an appropriately thuggish-looking individual at a nearby table. But the man was a poor sport: he not only declined to pose; he also hastily left the club. Braddock then volunteered to take his place.

Both Winchell and Billingsley breathed sighs of relief. Unlike Hoover, they’d recognized the man: he was Terry Reilly, a syndicate killer, currently on parole for extortion and impersonating an FBI agent.

Although Hoover and Winchell first met in 1934, during the Lindbergh case, the two did not become particularly close friends until 1938, following the death of Hoover’s mother.

J. Edgar Hoover was forty-three years old when Annie Hoover died, after being bedridden for three years with what probably was cancer. The failure of his brother and sister to help pay for the full-time nurse-housekeeper he’d hired for her caused a lifelong schism between them. Although his sister Lillian was
widowed, in poor health, and crippled, Hoover never visited her; when she died, he and Tolson “got to her funeral late and left early,” according to his niece Mrs. Margaret Fennell, who added, “In all fairness, I must say that J. E. was always accessible if we wanted to see him, but he didn’t initiate contacts with his family…I think you would have to say that he was not a family person.”
^*
15

If the death of his father affected him, he never mentioned it to interviewers. By contrast, he never really got over the death of his mother.

Whenever Hoover went on a trip to one of the field offices, he’d call her at least once and often twice daily. On his return, he always brought a gift. It tended to be jewelry or an antique, but once it was a canary which he’d bought from Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Annie named it Jailbird and continued to treasure it even after it molted and they discovered it was a sparrow which Stroud had dyed yellow.

For years Hoover had tried to persuade her to move out of the Seward Square neighborhood, which had begun to “deteriorate.” Sunday afternoons they would look at one or two houses, mostly in Chevy Chase, an up-andcoming area which Hoover favored, but she always found something wrong with them.

The year after her death, Hoover purchased a one-story brick house in the Rock Creek Park section of Washington, paying $25,000. A second story was added after he moved in. Some felt that 4936 Thirtieth Place was almost a shrine to Annie Hoover. There were pictures of her in nearly every room. Her son lived there for thirty-three years until his own death in 1972.