Bulldog of the Bureau
OSHINSKY, DAVID
Bulldog of the Bureau Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover By Richard Gid Powers The Free Press. 624 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history,...
...Everybody seemed to be on guard against "alien forces, strange peoples, and dangerous ideas...
...Unlike Palmer, he took the "radicals" as seriously as they took themselves...
...When his men could not produce it, he had them make it up...
...Under Hoover's meticulous supervision, the Bureau set up a crime lab, a fingerprinting system, and a rigid chain of command...
...The Director supervised every script and even suggested James Cagney for the lead...
...Hoover was the youngest child in a close-knit family, surrounded by doting siblings and a powerful mother...
...Richard Powers begins his excellent biography by describing the 19th century world that Hoover grew up in and never left behind...
...There was little vigilante action because Hoover convinced the American Legion and other patriotic groups that everything was under control...
...many of them had law degrees...
...The Bureau must hire men "of good character and ability...
...He was born in Washington, a few blocks from the Capitol building, in 1895...
...Onceagain, Bolshevism was spreading from Russia...
...Tom Walsh of Montana, was one of Hoover's staunchest critics...
...FBI agents broke into the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles and acquired a full picture of the Japanese spy system on the West Coast...
...He left the details to his special assistant, who moved with incredible energy and zeal...
...The Roosevelt landslide of 1932 had ended a decade of Republican rule...
...His assignment was to handle the paperwork generated by the new regulations on enemy aliens...
...Still, Hoover's job was in jeopardy...
...The salaries were no longer competitive, the work was uninteresting, and personal restrictions seemed petty and anachronistic...
...He did not think profound thoughts, and he did not pretend otherwise...
...Despite its questionable methods, the FBI successfully blunted the wartime hysteria that had plagued the homefront during World War I. Yet Hoover worried about his future...
...By 1930, the FBI had earned the respect of criminologists and civil libertarians alike...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Agents tapped telephones, bugged hotel rooms and compiled dozens of explosive dossiers (including one on Eleanor Roosevelt that Hoover kept in his personal files...
...His summaries of the Hiss case, the Rosenberg case and Smith Act prosecutions are based almost exclusively on the research of others...
...radicals and their friends were giving support to Moscow...
...The director would have been fired had Walsh not died of a heart attack on the way to FDR's inauguration...
...Secrecy and Power is a first-rate piece of work, both as a political biography and as a social history of Hoover's times...
...The Bureau's files became the lif eblood of the anti-Communist establishment...
...The civil rights movement, the anti-war protests, the youth culture, the sexual revolution—all were alien to his narrow world...
...Hoover agreed...
...His relationship with Clyde Toison, the Bureau's assistant director, was almost certainly homosexual, though Powers carefully avoids that conclusion...
...Both loved power and knew how to wield it...
...Powers' chapters on the Cold War years do not break new ground...
...As a result, the Bureau opposed as unnecessary the mass roundup of Japanese-Americans in 1942...
...His community was homogeneous and defensive...
...He never married or socialized with women...
...The new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, was looking for an honest, efficient, hard-working bureaucrat to lead the FBI...
...Even worse, he seemed uninterested in the Director's Cold War rumblings about the Communist menace at home...
...Both men came from the " Progressive" tradition, though not from the same class...
...He hoped that a crackdown on radicals would provide him with a ticket to the White House...
...both were unconcerned about the civil liberties of their enemies...
...In that time, his agents gunned down John Dillinger, captured Baby Face Nelson, smoked out Alger Hiss, arrested the Rosenbergs, and infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan...
...No immigrants were allowed...
...In 1936, the President asked Hoover to provide him with information about "subversive activities" in the United States...
...J. Edgar Hoover endured too long...
...He organized the...
...Hoover's mind "was filled with the echoes of thepast," writes Powers...
...it was Hoover who powered the Federal bureaucracy during America's first Red Scare...
...Palmer had Presidential ambitions...
...Of course, there was another side to the Bureau in those years —a darker side that involved the illegal surveillance and harassment of "radicals" who did not share Hoover's moral and political views...
...The Bureau had trouble recruiting good young lawyers to the ranks...
...They were used by the likes of Richard M. Nixon and Joseph P. McCarthy to batter the Democratic opposition...
...He seemed unable to change with the times—or to confront the new problems posed by labor corruption, organized crime and racial violence in the South...
...It is strenuous because Hoover wielded so much power for so long...
...After graduating from George Washington Law School in 1917, he took a job at the Justice Department...
...Yet the Director's personal story is not difficult to tell...
...In Hoover's eyes, the President had "failed to perform the most elementary function of government: to provide for the common defense...
...As the fear of Bolshevism subsided, Hoover's career was in trouble...
...He not only kept his job, he also emerged as a great national hero...
...Hoover went along...
...His deeply held beliefs did not change over time...
...He had almost no life beyond the FBI...
...As director of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, he served under eight Presidents and 19 attorney generals...
...He probably would have labored in obscurity had it not been for the Teapot Dome Scandal of 1924, which rocked the Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation...
...By the time Nixon became President, the White House was beginning to bypass the FBI in favor of its own covert operations, led by Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy and Egil Krogh...
...In 1919, Hoover became a special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer...
...Hoover wanted evidence linking them to the Communist Party...
...He knew his entire domestic security apparatus was based on a series of oral directives from the White House...
...His agents tapped the phones of these people and bugged their bedrooms as well...
...Hoover needed other allies...
...What he does show, however, is that Hoover kept hammering at the Communists long after their party had become extinct...
...He excelled in high school as a student leader, a champion debater, and the class valedictorian...
...Warner Brothers produced a series of popular movies with titles Let 'Em Have It, Show No Mercy and Public Hero Number One...
...Its function was to investigate "violations of the law," not the political associations and beliefs of individuals...
...Richard Powers has portrayed that life in a careful, engaging and surprisingly sympathetic manner...
...He struck people as a combative young man who knew just what he wanted, and how to get it...
...The quality of agents declined...
...As Hoover's agents tracked them down, one by one, the FBI became the New Deal's most glamorous success story...
...Hoover believed deeply in his mission...
...He realized that his own reputation as America's protector was based, to a large degree, on the public perception that Communism was the primary threat to the nation's security...
...It was Hoover who led the mass roundups (or Palmer Raids) of 1919...
...Once again, U.S...
...He "ended his life embittered and isolated, his Bureau a monument to his past—and to his memories of an America that hardly existed outside its walls...
...The FBI had become a political police force operating at the beck and call of [FDR].' During World War II the Bureau expanded its operation...
...When FDR died in 1945, Hoover lost his most powerful friend...
...He was appalled by Truman's cavalier approach to the Hiss case and to the FBI's repeated warnings about Harry Dexter White...
...Once again, luck was on Hoover's side...
...it was Hoover who directed the deportations of Goldman, Berkman and hundreds of others...
...His feelings about Bolshevism and racial integration were the same in 1970 as they had been in 1917...
...Many of the reports Hoover furnished the President could not be covered by even the most expansive definition of the word subversive," writes Powers...
...Hoover and Roosevelt became good friends...
...He appointed Hoover, who was untouched by the scandal, and drew up a strict set of guidelines...
...His new task was to head up the Justice Department's Radical Division...
...For Hoover, it seemed like 1919 was repeating itself...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" Writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover is both a strenuous and a straightforward task...
...There was virtually no wartime sabotage because the Bureau had 20,000 informants working in the defense plants...
...Agents were chosen on merit...
...With FDR's full knowledge, the FBI investigated Cabinet members, labor leaders, journalists, political activists, and critics of the New Deal...
...The job paid only $900 a year, but it carried a valuable exemption from the draft...
...But Powers is careful to note that Hoover honestly believed this perception to be true...
...and directed the Bureau of Investigation in beginning the files on the Communist movement that have been the foundation of the FBI's domestic security apparatus to the present day...
...Hoover selected the targets—Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and the new Communist Party, among others...
...research facilities, hired its experts...
...He found them among the Congressional conservatives who viewed Truman as "soft" on Communism...
...Truman'sproblem, notesPowers, was that he "never knew what a valuable political ally Hoover could have been—but he would learn he could not have chosen a more deadly enemy.' Hoover had a personal stake in the loyalty battle of the 1940s-50s...
...The events of the 1960s appeared to accelerate Hoover's psychological demise...
...The man appointed attorney general...
...He could not understand why people would follow a Martin Luther King Jr., a Malcolm X or a John Lennon, and he assumed that Moscow had to be involved...
...Blacks were segregated by custom and by law...
...He suspended all domestic surveillance activities and worked carefully to professionalize the FBI...
...Hoover left the continental United States only once in his life—for a short Caribbean vacation...
...The agents—known as "G-men"— were the subject of radio shows, comic books and magazine articles...
...And he was hardly alone...
...His roots were Southern, Protestant, middle class...
...At his death in 1972, the press viewed the Director as a relic from a bygone era...
...Before long, Hoover was criticizing the President's loyalty program and secretly feeding documents about domestic subversion to the House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...Hoover, then 22, was single and in perfect health...
...The new President, Harry S. Truman, did not trust the FBI...
...all of them attended a special training school in Quantico, Virginia...
...The 1930s were the years of the great American gangsters—John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelley, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd...
Vol. 70 • May 1987 • No. 7
