Secrecy and Power, by . Richard Gid Powers
Klehr, Harvey
T t is an article of faith on the I American left that J. Edgar Hoover was, at minimum, an ogre. The more ideological types regard him as the avatar of an American police state. During the last two...
...Hoover cautiously responded that such requests went beyond the FBI's statutory authorization to investigate violations of federal law...
...Powers exaggerates when he claims that Hoover had "more power, longer, than any political figure in American history," but few high-level bureaucrats:have ever shaped and led an organization for as long or with as much success...
...The FBI, in contrast, was regarded as the model of professionalism...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 45...
...Hoover's death in 1972 just preceded the post-Watergate attack on American intelligence that drastically altered the FBI's domestic intelligence role...
...Attorney General Mitchell Palmer gave him wide authority to arrest and deport alien radicals...
...Ironically, his caution led him to oppose an administration whose core values were closer to his own than many others he had loyally served...
...Hoover himself was outraged by the new moral standards and practices of the United States...
...But Hoover learned another lesson...
...During World War I, he worked on alien matters...
...Meanwhile Hoover stopped providing Truman with political information that might prove useful against the Republicans, but continued to pass along damaging data about Truman's Democratic rivals...
...In 1937 he requested data on fascist and Communist activities...
...Unfortunately, his attempts to link every aspect of Hoover's behavior to a desire to preserve the values of his youth becomes strained and leads Powers to ignore some of his own evidence that the dominant consideration in Hoover's decisions was bureaucratic politics...
...After Pearl Harbor, he frantically mounted a campaign to deflect blame for the intelligence failure to other government agencies...
...When the Nixon Administration, concerned by the unraveling of the social fabric, pressed Hoover to take a more aggressive role in combating radicals, he refused to expose himself or the FBI...
...Such programs had another advantage...
...Civil servants were not expected to be political partisans, and Hoover was a classic embodiment of that norm...
...Hoover had complete charge of choosing the targets, writing legal briefs, presenting the government case at deportation hearings, and organizing the Bureau's research facilities...
...W hen public support for the attack on radicals fizzled and his superior, the Attorney General, lost political support, Hoover became vulnerable...
...That conversation provided the authorization for forty years of domestic intelligence, although Hoover, ever-cautious, later got a written note from FDR, who, Powers notes, "has to bear the final responsibility for removing all effective restraints from Hoover's surveillance of the American political scene...
...Under ordersfrom Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, he avoided controversy and, indeed, publicity...
...Catapulted into leadership of the FBI by the scandals of the Harding Administration in 1924, Hoover spent the next decade professionalizing the agency...
...With relatively few exceptions, most intellectuals dismissed McCarthy's charges as unproven and deplored his methods...
...Perceiving it to be weak and susceptible to political pressures, Hoover took the unprecedented step of appearing before the Republican-controlled House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 and breaking with Truman over his loyalty program...
...By the same token, he would remain opposed to private or mass movements designed to fight Communism...
...After all, he had loyally served FDR, under whom Communists had made far greater strides, and whose values were further from Hoover than Truman's...
...He increasingly held forth on the need to preserve traditional American values and morals from the forces of evil that threatened them...
...While the deportation cases turned Hoover into the government's first expert on radicalism, the national backlash against them provided a series of lessons that he took to heart...
...At a White House meeting in August, at the request of the President, Cordell Hull told Hoover to "investigate the cock-suckers...
...He grew up in the Seward Square neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where many of the residents held modest civil service jobs with the federal government...
...and sanctioned a vicious Bureau campaign against him...
...He was severely criticized by the courts and other officials in the executive branch...
...Hoover opposed government internment of Japanese-Americans during the war and refused to allow the FBI to be involved with the Army...
...Hoover's caution was tactical...
...Their abuses of prisoners' rights and the subsequent public uproar convinced Hoover that to be successful he had to control totally his own operations...
...Whatever justifications could be offered for the government to maintain surveillance on groups that had ties to foreign powers or threatened violence, it was another matter entirely for the FBI to engage in dirty tricks on its own...
...Even had the Church Committee never existed, however, the FBI would have become a far weaker organization without Hoover at its helm...
...Hoover threw his support to Eisenhower as the symbol of authority...
...Not Harvey Klehr is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University and the author of The Heyday of American Communism (Basic Books...
...Powers tries to link the break to Hoover's values—that his disdain was based on a sense of emotional loss and resentment at the passing of his cherished boyhood verities—but a far more likely explanation is Hoover's calculated assessment that Truman was weak and that his congressional allies had enough power to protect him from the executive...
...He built up a fingerprint identification section, developed technical services for local police, and instituted uniform crime reports...
...In addition to developing a healthy respect for the need to nurture public opinion, he also determined that he would never again expose himself without firm political support...
...Years later, he would be reluctant to cooperate with other government agencies, whether the CIA or the executive branch, unless he had control of the operation...
...since they were not designed to lead to prosecution of the affected groups, knowledge of them could be held within the FBI and Hoover did not have to cooperate with anyone else...
...T he risks inherent in the FBI's domestic intelligence operations were magnified in the 1960s...
...Even the publication of authoritative accounts of the Rosenberg and Hiss cases has prompted accusations that the unprecedented release of hundreds of thousands of pages of internal FBI files was part of a gigantic conspiracy orchestrated by Hoover and the FBI...
...He also remembered past mistakes...
...unnaturally, Hoover absorbed its prejudices...
...He never joined a political party...
...Powers argues that while fear of what Hoover knew probably inhibited some critics, many simply did not care to tangle with someone so tenacious and so popular...
...Never very friendly to the civil rights movement, he became obsessed with the "immoral" sexual behavior of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...As a result Hoover was thrust into prominence during the Red Scare period following the war...
...Domestic intelligence activities, the source of his earlier troubles, were ended, to the chagrin of anti-Communists and the applause of such civil libertarians as Roger Baldwin of the ACLU...
...But he also suggested a loophole: the FBI could investigate matters referred to it by the State Department...
...The attack on King, which reached its low point when the FBI clandestinely sent him a tape recording of his sexual encounters with the suggestion that he commit suicide, was part of the Bureau's slide from investigation to active disruption of legal organizations...
...During the last two decades, the revelations of FBI illegalities, of break-ins and unauthorized wiretaps, of counterintelligence operations against a host of legal organizations, of dirty tricks and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., have provided ammunition not only to defenders of civil liberties, but also to those Hoover battled for his entire career...
...Given SECRECY AND POWER: THE LIFE OF J. EDGAR HOOVER Richard Gid Powers/The Free Press/$27.95 Harvey Klehr 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 authority to censor news in 1941, he quickly surrendered it, recognizing the potential danger to his image the new job promised...
...Two developments in the 1930s gave Hoover the ability and inclination to redirect the FBI into domestic intelligence...
...director sought to minimize his role in the Red Raids, presenting himself as a lowly bureaucrat simply carrying out orders...
...While properly critical of Hoover's excesses, Powers provides a more balanced view of his accomplishments and mistakes than we have had recently...
...Contrary to some myths about Hoover's close ties to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Powers argues that once McCarthy challenged the Eisenhower Administration, his previous friendship with the FBI—he had hired ex-agents and Hoover had leaked information to him—did him no good...
...As the FBI cornered, captured, and killed such hoodlums as Ma Barker, Pretty Boy Floyd, and, most notably, John Dillinger, the national media transformed Hoover from a faceless, colorless bureaucrat into the unbeatable and fearless leader of an incorruptible organization that always got its man...
...Hoover was too cautious a bureaucrat to get involved in intelligence operations that he did not totally control and that did not have broad public support...
...Hoover's early years were indeed important to his vision of the world...
...he "probably would have been happy to join an attack c ° someone else with a strong political base had volunteered to lead it," but he sensed the political realities and kept his distance from anti-Communist crusaders...
...Whatever his public rhetoric, however, Hoover remained a very shrewd bureaucrat...
...One of the virtues of Richard Powers's new biography of Hoover is that it vividly illustrates that such a view was not entirely wrong...
...He never voted, not even after a constitutional amendment gave residents of Washington the vote in 1961...
...Deciding that Hoover was too old and scared to help, the administration set up its own clandestine group, which led it into Watergate...
...Because the Bureau of Investigation did not have the manpower to make all the arrests, local police and civilian volunteers were used...
...H oover's newfound status and power transformed him into an American institution...
...In later years, the FBI...
...Once upon a time, J. Edgar Hoover's brand of anti-Communism was favorably contrasted to Joe McCarthy's...
...More importantly, though, he was influenced by its mildly progressive, politically neutral values...
...Hoover's power did not rest mainly on those much-rumored secret files which supposedly enabled him to blackmail recalcitrant public officials...
...Thousands of aliens were arrested and hundreds deported, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, themost notorious anarchists in America...
...Counter-intelligence programs (COINTELPRO) originally created to help destroy the Communist Party were expanded in the 1960s to disrupt the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, black radicals, the New Left, and a variety of other undesirable groups...
...Hoover's excellent relations with FDR did not carry over into the Truman Administration...
...He emphasized good government and neutral administration, values enshrined during the Progressive Era by the middle-class reformers determined to professionalize government...
...The first was his emergence as a national hero after the Roosevelt Administration decided to mount an attack on crime as a way to reassert national authority and prestige during the Depression...
...Not only did he remember the fiasco of 1919, but he did not stigmatize groups by their ethnic origin—only their beliefs...
...Not only was Hoover increasingly isolated in his own organization as his old cronies retired, to be replaced by younger men less able to stand up to him or discern danger, but the growing tendency of Presidents to use the FBI for politicaltasks reached its height during the Johnson years...
...He was increasingly suspicious of working with any other government agencies, particularly when they wanted the FBI to run risks such as installing wiretaps or opening mail...
...By the late 1930s, as world tensions escalated, Franklin Roosevelt called on Hoover to supply him with comprehensive information on domestic groups that might restrict his maneuverability in foreign affairs...
...It was resolutely respectable, middle-class, white, and Christian...
...Soon after graduating from George Washington University, Hoover landed a job at the Justice Department in 1917 through family connections...
...Although privately critical of the director, Truman continued to try to placate him for years...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
