Record of the 'G-Men'
STEINBERG, JULIEN
Record of the 'G-Men' The FBI Story. Reviewed by Julien Steinberg By Don Whitehead. Editor, "Verdict of Three Decades" Random House. 368 pp. $4.95. NOT UNTIL one reads The FBI Story does the...
...And here and there you will come across some marvelous glints and pieces of Americana...
...Hoover once told a visitor: "No one outside the FBI and the Department of Justice ever knew how close they came to wrecking us...
...Before Karpis could be taken, Mr...
...Hoover refused—as he had earlier refused heavy additional powers during both Prohibition and the gangster-ridden Thirties — saying, "General, that plan would be very good for today, but over the years it would be a mistake...
...Also worthy of note is the fact that agents of the FBI, under Mr...
...He set new standards of competence and conduct and dumped the political appointees...
...Slowly, the reputation of the Bureau began to change...
...He opposed this "dragnet" and "roundup" procedure...
...Soon after, Hoover's chance came...
...Hoover that he intended to kill him...
...A year later, President Taft's Attorney General gave the new agency a name, the Bureau of Investigation...
...Roosevelt grinned and turned thumbs down on the table...
...Hoover's stewardship, today no longer use the word "radical" in their reports...
...Intrepid, indeed, is the conscientious writer who takes it upon himself to paw his way through even a small portion of this mountain of paper...
...Washington knew little about the activities of agents in the field...
...That's for them," he said...
...But the taunts of two men got under his skin...
...Often in the past it has needed to deal with urgent matters without the benefit of previous experience as a guide and, under such circumstances, some fluffs were unavoidable...
...Not until 1935 did the word "Federal''' make its way into the title...
...The FBI chief credits FDR and Attorney General Jackson with saving the FBI...
...He worked toward establishing professional training methods...
...Today, the agency bears no resemblance to what it once was...
...The attacks receded...
...He sought his recruits from the ranks of young attorneys and accountants...
...The new broom began sweeping briskly...
...The agents were sloppily trained or untrained...
...Whitehead cites chapter and verse to show that the FBI, on a daily basis, is as interested in clearing innocent people as in convicting the guilty...
...One man was gangster Alvin Karpis, who sent word to Mr...
...A third episode tells of Roosevelt's suggestion to Jackson in 1940 that the FBI chief take over the direction of all Federal investigative and intelligence agencies...
...After a clash with Congress—which body objected, and not entirely without reason, to the manner in which TR's administration was employing Secret Service men—the Attorney General was prohibited by Congress from making further use of Treasury agents...
...Karpis was sitting in an auto when Hoover raced toward him...
...The cleanup began in 1924 when Harlan Fiske Stone, then Attorney General, acted favorably on the suggestion of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to appoint 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, who had been with the Department of Justice since 1917, as chief of the Bureau...
...Another detailed passage concerning FDR informs us that the FBI's full-scale investigation of Communism began in 1936 when the President summoned Hoover, told him that he was becoming increasingly concerned about Communist and Fascist activities in the U.S., and helped provide a legal basis for large-scale digging...
...During World War I, German spies and saboteurs had a field day...
...The number of cases that Mr...
...Hoover himself, who, the book shows, has had through the years to deal with every conceivable kind of criticism that can be thrown against a public official, and sometimes of the most absurd kind...
...Put the handcuffs on him," he told an aide...
...NOT UNTIL one reads The FBI Story does the full problem confronting the writer of such a book become clear...
...and, most influential of all, Franklin D. Roosevelt himself...
...Whitehead's book—which somehow manages to keep the story going chronologically while stopping on every other page to recount an informative case-history—not only possesses an abundance of color and soberly detailed excitement, but it also contains some notable newsmakers...
...The FBI Director issued orders that he wanted to take Karpis personally...
...The remarkable thing is how few of them there have been...
...So the aide sheepishly took off his necktie, bound Karpis's hands with that, and Hoover loaded him aboard a plane...
...Mr...
...Whitehead has shoehomed in is amazingly large...
...The overall impression conveyed by the book is that of an organization dedicated to doing its diificult jobs as well, and as fairly, as possible...
...Later, Mr...
...But the good news is that Don Whitehead—Washington Bureau Chief of the Herald Tribune and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner—has done an almost impossibly difficult job extremely well...
...The FBI was born, as few realize today, as the result of an angry reformer's demand for a governmental investigating arm to deal with social abuses of the day...
...This left Teddy with a crusade against law breakers but with no law force...
...One of the standout human-interest vignettes in the book concerns Mr...
...Major General Edwin M. ('Pa') Watson, Secretary to the President...
...When the scandals of the Harding Administration broke, it was revealed that key men in the Bureau were deeply involved...
...In March 1940, at a dinner of the White House correspondents, FDR called to Hoover and said, "Edgar, what are they trying to do to you on the Hill...
...It turned out that no one had remembered to bring handcuffs...
...After the war, some of the Bureau's agents proved in the manner by which they combated subversion that they lacked special skill in distinguishing between subversives and those who were merely loquacious radicals, and that civil liberties was a phrase with which they had insufficient familiarity...
...They were Roosevelt's Press Secretary, Steve Early...
...First, there is the long period covered by the Bureau's existence—nearly half a century...
...The most striking of these are extremely cordial tales about the late President Roosevelt...
...Hoover went unaccompanied to arrest Lepke Buchalter after Winchell had persuaded the gang chief to turn himself in...
...Third, the FBI is compelled by the nature of its duties to be one of the most indefatigable collectors of information in all the world's history...
...Political endorsements carried more weight than experience or competence...
...He personally grabbed the gangster before he could reach for a rifle in the back seat...
...The recurrent rumors," comments author Whitehead, "that influential people close to the White House were going to oust Hoover always failed to note the fact that Hoover himself had friends in the Roosevelt inner circle...
...It has placed emphasis on considerations of civil liberties and rights, and all agents are taught that good intent does not absolve any law enforcement officer from harm wrongfully done...
...My favorite: The nickname "G-Men" was bestowed on the FBI by none other than George "Machine Gun" Kelly...
...In short, the glib charge of "Gestapo" which has been flung at the FBI from time to time finds no support in this book, which the reviewer accepts as a responsible rendition of the actual record...
...Hoover was summoned before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee...
...Then the drama changed into comedy...
...He depicted the cry for mass evacuation as "hysteria...
...Second, the activities with which the Bureau deals cover an extraordinary range and variety of backgrounds and locales...
...When apprehended, he pleaded, "Don't shoot, G-Men...
...More important, but little known, was Mr...
...He enforced a code and discipline to which each agent was compelled to adhere...
...His answer in 1908 was to empower the Department of Justice to create an investigative arm responsible to no one but the Attorney General...
...There Senator McKellar made a big thing out of the fact that Hoover had never personally made an arrest, thus implying that he couldn't be much of a policeman...
...The reformer was Teddy Roosevelt and his targets were big business combines that violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and land pirates who were walking off with public lands in the West...
...Hoover's behind-the-scenes stand on the tragic wartime mass evacuation of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, the great majority of them U. S. citizens...
...Hoover answered that he didn't know...
...The most important anecdote reveals that in 1940 attacks on the FBI nearly destroyed the organization...
...Perhaps the most concise way to indicate the comprehensiveness of the book is to say this: If there's a case you want to find out about, it's probably included —from Teddy Roosevelt and the "land thieves" to the Black Tom Explosion through the atom spy cases right up to yesterday, including the brutal kidnapping - murder of the Weinberger child and the vicious acid attack on Vic Riesel...
...The word is rejected as being too ambiguous and as failing to distinguish between subversives and honest nonconformists...
...He wrote Attorney General Biddle that "the necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily on public and political pressure rather than on factual data...
...Whitehead makes no bones about the character of the Bureau in its early years...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 3
