J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE FBI
Staff, The New York Post
something unhealthy about the whole thing. It bothered me and I know that it bothered my wife. In the constant digging back for minutiae they seemed to be building somebody's coffin out of coral....
...Was he a Communist...
...He said Hoover "wasn't competent to judge whether his agents appeared 'sinister.' (His word, not mine) . . . He'll have to take our word for it that the occasion was not one of ease and good fellowship...
...FBI Agents Approach A Lady in A Lobby The FBI didn't go to Irene Munger's home...
...10, 1939) "The record of the FBI is well known...
...A generation ago, the FBI demonstrated the same "ruthlessness" in its drive against the gangsters of the bullet-riddled Thirties...
...In part this may simply reflect the accepted political law that public conflict with Hoover is an invitation to political suicide...
...I was terribly upset by the time I got upstairs to the office...
...He read Mrs...
...a curb on the powers of the central government...
...The interview kept on...
...Irene Munger?' "When I said I was they held out leather folders with metal badges and green cards that identified them as FBI agents...
...He has been transferred to Pittsburgh, where we phoned him...
...They first tangled while Fly was in the Justice Department and requisitioned FBI men for vast trust-busting investigations...
...Brown was asked if agents would question a newspaper reporter, if he were similarly accused, in the lobby of his newspaper's building...
...Mrs...
...If FBI activity were totalitarian in nature, the courts would be appealed to with dispatch...
...He asked if they could see me again after working hours and we made an appointment to meet in the reception area of my office at five that afternoon when everyone would be gone...
...I had to edge Violet back into the house...
...I wouldn't be able to answer that," Brown replied...
...Munger made a remark last November reflecting on the personal behavior of J. Edgar Hoover...
...Before anything else the heavy set man said: " 'We understand you called the office to check on us today.' "I said I had and they took out their credentials again...
...Munger phoned the Post and, afterwards, the ACLU...
...Few members of Congress and few other public officials have challenged J. Edgar Hoover since George Norris spoke his mind...
...He said he assumed the two agents had told Mrs...
...In his hands lie the future and the perpetuity of our institutions and our government . . . "Mr...
...He must be treated and analyzed by himself...
...But I could see that neither Mr...
...Munger's statement to the New York headquarters of the FBI at 201 East 69th Street...
...Hoover's quarrel is with James Cagney, not with the Gershes...
...Today, sitting in his office, Gersh recalls the incident and smiles...
...During the first, a priest told the FBI that he had been visiting Touhy in Chicago during the period when Factor allegedly was being held...
...He insisted the interview had been undertaken with no thought of intimidating her...
...Hoover is neither superman nor demon, but a rather undramatic, unoriginal, hard-working government bureaucrat who has been transformed into an untouchable legend with the craven help of the politicians, the press, and, now, by Hollywood—in the two and a half hour long testimonial, The FBI Story...
...Mrs...
...I don't remember the exact words he used next, but this is the sense of the comment: "You're clean now, Mrs...
...They might," he replied, "if it was more than a critical remark...
...But you get the feeling: this is it, buddy...
...I guess politeness and a wish to be pleasant to someone whose afternoon you've wasted made Mr...
...Munger the nature of the remark she was accused of making...
...Crime reporters and criminologists scoffed at this...
...They took the slip of paper and that's the last I have heard from them...
...They know a Lovestoneite from a Trotskyite and so on...
...The agents weren't sure she was telling the truth...
...I was shocked...
...In such a milieu, a strong secret police may imperil the civil liberties of a free people...
...There were two trials...
...The men of the FBI are taught that it is even more important to establish innocence than guilt...
...Says Fly: "Hoover sets his FBI above the law and moves in defiance of the Criminal Code and clear-cut decisions of the Supreme Court...
...Are there any plans to go to her lawyer...
...Walsh nor Mr...
...His wife had told the neighbors that they had to sell their home...
...I'd decided during the afternoon not to sign anything without talking it over with my lawyer, so I gave the FBI men his name and address and told them to get in touch with him...
...She says the two special agents walked up to her in the lobby of her office building at 625 Madison Avenue a few minutes before nine on the morning of April 22, 1959...
...This was slanderous...
...The FBI's eagerness to substantiate Cummings' thesis was perhaps nowhere more clearly reflected than in the Roger Touhy affair...
...Hoover is doing more injury to honest law enforcement in this country by his publicity-seeking feats than is being done by any one thing connected with his organization . . . "A detective who advertises his ex ploits every time he gets an opportunity, who spends the public money to see that they are spread over the pages of the newspapers in flaming headlines, will in the end be a failure in ferreting out crime and bringing persons to justice . . . "Unless we do something to stop this furor of adulation and praise as being omnipotent, we shall have an organization—the organization of the FBI—which, instead of protecting our people from the evil nets of criminals, will itself in the end direct the government by tyrannical force . . ." The words are from the late Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska...
...You can depend on us to keep it quiet...
...This is how she tells it: "I was waiting for the elevator with an office friend, Jim Blunt, when these two respectable looking men— one heavy-set with a fair complexion, the other a swarthy man carrying brief cases—came up to us...
...An Interview With The Post Results in an Agent's Demotion A New York Post reporter took Mrs...
...If the interview occurred today, he says, he would react exactly the same way...
...It was not from the FBI that we heard about the transfer...
...They are rats, vermin, vultures, regurgitating their filth to despoil the clean picture of American manhood and womanhood...
...They also have vertical agents, of course, who do all phases of one field investigation...
...Today there is little but eulogy—or silence...
...So I called FBI headquarters here to check on the two men—I didn't even have their names...
...And she didn't write an article about the encounter...
...Are there any plans to go to her again...
...Would they tell if they knew...
...Are they sure now...
...Maybe we've seen too many FBI movies...
...Address, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Oct...
...Walsh told us...
...Walsh say what he did...
...The reporter then said that, in order to make out a case of slander, damages would have to be shown...
...James Lawrence Fly, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, repeatedly clashed with Hoover in the Thirties and into World War II...
...But these two agents who interviewed my wife and me didn't know beans about communism...
...Hoover was unavailable...
...Judge Barnes' research into the case brought to light the vanished alibi for Touhy provided by the priest and included a deposition from "Tennessee Ike" admitting that he had nothing to do with the Factor kidnaping and had never set eyes on Touhy before seeing him in court...
...In this case," he said, "we didn't know where she lived...
...Hoover and his work —favorable and critical alike—dried up in terror at the approach of our reporters...
...I wasn't afraid or anything—at the beginning...
...J. Edgar Hoover protested to the editor of Commentary in a letter appearing in the June, 1952, issue...
...Gersh clearly intended to give an exaggerated and unfair account of the interview...
...That was the last time Gersh saw the FBI, but it is not the last he heard from them...
...Two days later Mrs...
...Just as Joe McCarthy once loomed large primarily because of the smallness of those who privately—but not publicly— questioned his works, so Hoover has achieved a special eminence by virtue of the frailty and failures of other men: Presidents (Democratic and Republican), Attorneys-General (Democratic and Republican), Senators, publishers, editors, and other alleged protectors of our liberties...
...It was hard to understand how they could do a good job, find the guilty and protect the innocent, without it, but I didn't quarrel with them about that...
...Communism means fewer and fewer rights for the private citizen, curtailment of freedom of speech and press and worship of God . . . The liberals do not want revolution but genuine social reform...
...I blurted out: 'I'm so busy I don't have time to make disparaging remarks about anybody.' "Then it occurred to me to ask why they hadn't come to my office to interview me...
...District Court in Chicago, Judge Barnes read a 558-page opinion which threw out the Touhy conviction...
...The bland refusal to recognize the public welfare and common sense too often result in prostitution of the law in favor of evil...
...It was the wrong thing to say to anyone with our background, especially Violet...
...Address, International Association of Chiefs of Police, San Francisco, Oct...
...He told us the transfer was simply a matter of routine...
...Why was she asked to sign a statement...
...I had been so flustered I hadn't bothered to take them down when they showed their credentials...
...I don't know what has been dropped...
...It's one person's word against another," he said...
...The FBI men said: " 'We thought you might be embarrassed by having the FBI come to your office.' " 'This must have something to do with my eviction,' I said...
...Hoover has an organization, maintained at public expense, writing speeches for him to make or for any one else to make who will take the speeches...
...Not that I know of...
...The FBI man said that the Bureau wouldn't and promised to call me back to tell me if the men were really special agents...
...I told a few people about what had happened and they were as shocked and surprised as I was...
...Why...
...But I told him I wouldn't be afraid to sign such a paper...
...Gersh, does the name [John Garfield] mean anything to you?' ". . . Violet smiled, then she giggled, got flustered, became a little frightened and finally answered: 'It does.' ". . . 'What,' asked the FBI with downcast eyes, 'was the relationship...
...he asked me to describe the two agents and tell him what they said...
...Refusing to discuss public issues on their merits and deliberately smearing loyal citizens who dare to raise their voices in criticism is an old technique of Hoover's, habitual and unrestrained . . . The FBI carelessly and ruthlessly rides the crest of public hysteria...
...How, he asked, could a secretary at HIP damage a man with the reputation of J. Edgar Hoover with a single remark...
...Address, American Legion Convention, Sept...
...Munger's complaint to the Post and to the ACLU any bearing on the disposition of the case...
...Except for one thing...
...Then we found that the FBI didn't want to talk about itself...
...It is difficult to understand why Mr...
...Then, he added, "You should know a little more about the actual story...
...These agents had only one aspect of it, I'm sure...
...She works as a secretary for the Health Insurance Plan of New York...
...He said to me: " 'We have received a complaint that you are going around making disparaging remarks about the character of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.' "He said if this were true it could lead to a possible slander suit...
...I had been interviewed by the FBI three times before about friends who'd applied for government jobs...
...It is a telling commentary on the FBI's inhibiting influence that so many potential sources of information about Mr...
...These fictitious liberals are the individuals who through insidiously slanted and sly propagandistic writings and reports oppose urgently-needed internal-security measures, conduct a one-sided campaign to discredit government witnesses, present the menace of communism as a myth of hysteria, urge that we tolerate the subversive acts of Communists because Communists are only 'non-conformists,' contend that the Communist Party is a political movement and that it is improper to consider it a criminal conspiracy linked to a world conspiracy to overthrow our government by force and violence...
...And so they talked about John Garfield...
...he is the victim of his own press-agentry...
...Liberalism means increased rights for the citizen...
...For years afterwards, people I met would say: 'Oh, you're the guy who did the story about the FBI.' "It's heartening in one sense...
...As I told the story I realized that I didn't even know if the men were from the FBI at all...
...By five o'clock I had gotten no call so I asked Jim Blunt to come along with me—so that if the men turned out not to be from the FBI I would have another witness...
...And we didn't know whose . . . ". . . About half an hour after they started the questioning .. . we still hadn't the faintest idea why they had come...
...Hoover refused to receive us...
...Thus the normal processes of free inquiry into the operations of a key area of government were seriously obstructed...
...Later, more importantly, they battled over wire-tapping...
...He has pushed around a lot of people without audible dissent...
...In the U.S...
...And there the matter rests today...
...Suddenly Mr...
...He explained that "a person whose reliability we have no reason to question" had informed the FBI that Mrs...
...It was apparent that they had no special knowledge of the left-wing or Communist movement in this country...
...Every fact was fitted to the theory, and the theory was correct...
...That interested them...
...Fly insisted that Hoover was continuously trying to circumvent Supreme Court decisions holding that the federal law banning wire-tapping meant what it said...
...It was as hard to get the case for him as against him...
...Then why has the case been dropped...
...Fifteen years later, Federal Judge Barnes ruled, in effect, that the jury had been wrong in the Factor case...
...I told the man who answered the phone at the FBI what happened...
...If that explains our reaction, Mr...
...We were trying to find out if she made the statement—and why," Brown said...
...I gained a certain measure of fame, that's all...
...The second trial produced the testimony of a hoodlum known as "Tennessee Ike" who said he had taken part in the kidnaping and then made a positive identification of Touhy...
...No, Mrs...
...I kept thinking: these men are going to make me late...
...To dismiss lightly the existence of the subversive threat in the United States is to deliberately commit national suicide...
...Voices From The Past Echo In Today's Silence A prominent Senator from the Midwest stated his case against J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in no uncertain terms...
...A published letter defended the article as a "piece of reportage—not only of events, but of the effects of those events upon a family of normal, law-abiding citizens...
...New York Times Sunday Magazine Section, April 16, 1950) "We are being stifled by technicalities and by the throwing of roadblocks in the pathway of our traditional methods of justice...
...That is why the Communists detest them . . (Masters of Deceit, 1957) "It is through the 'pseudo-liberals' that the Communists do some of their most destructive work...
...We heard about it from some readers in Upper Montclair, N. J., where Brown had lived with his wife and family during his tenure in New York...
...Gersh,' he said, 'that's all behind you now.' "Violet looked peculiar...
...Whatever you've done before or whatever you may write in the future won't count...
...Oh, you've been evicted?' the agent asked...
...It approached her in the lobby at her place of business...
...A few have been knowledgeable about the Thirties—the period you have to understand if you are to understand American communism...
...J. Edgar Hoover has clearly been captivated by the public portrait his machine has created...
...To draw binding overall generalizations as to motivations, causations, and methods of operation would be both impossible and inaccurate...
...This time I looked at them more carefully and copied down their names...
...When he makes a speech, a copy is sent to practically every newspaper in the United States . . . "No organization that I know of meets in Washington without having some person appear before it to tell what a great organization the FBI is...
...They stood up when we approached...
...Touhy has since received a pardon for the kidnap charge, and a reduction of an additional 199-year jailbreak sentence, so that he could be paroled.—EDITOR] Liberals, Reactionaries Support Double-Talking Hoover One of the perennial problems in assessing the approach of the FBI— whether to gangsters, subversion, the law, or civil liberties—is the addiction of its director to speaking out of both sides of his mouth...
...We have sought to discharge our responsibilities with impartiality, fairness, and regard for nothing but the truth...
...It would be the worst kind of folly to allow the spy and subversive immunity through technical rather than logical interpretation of the law, while they plot the destruction of our democratic form of government...
...CRIMINOLOGY: "There is no romance in crime and there is no romance in criminals," Hoover told the National Congress of Hi-Y Clubs in 1936...
...The FBI men waved once going across the street, got into their car, and drove off...
...How would they know...
...so was virtually his entire staff, on orders from above...
...You see," he says, "I've met about ten or twelve FBI men...
...An Innocent Relationship Becomes A 'Shady Past' "The FBI men had been pleasant, thoughtful of the niceties, and averagely intelligent about the subject of their investigation," Gersh concluded...
...Gersh chose to distort the circumstances of the interview in such a way and that the agents were portrayed as sinister individuals, and that he, his wife, and child were pictured as being subjected to an 'unhealthy,' as he calls it, experience...
...If Mr...
...His visit was acknowledged with courtesy and cooperation...
...The heavy-set man did all the talking...
...The priest's statement somehow never reached the courtroom, but the trial ended anyway in a hung jury...
...You're well rid of it, as we can see from this house and this street and talking to you...
...The greatest man of all, who stands at the head of it, never made a mistake, never made a blunder...
...Gersh said, he wasn't a Communist...
...Two others drew lesser terms...
...Yes, she would know by virtue of her encounters with Communists in the Thirties...
...Walsh,' she said loudly and distinctly, 'I've got a good record, regardless of what the FBI thinks, and I'm proud of it.' She went on in that vein for a while...
...The FBI works like that sometimes...
...They were not, he indicated...
...Would they know if he was a Communist...
...Yes, they would tell if they knew...
...I think that it is very evident from a review of the article that Mr...
...The heavy set man asked: 'Are you Mrs...
...Her entire version of the two encounters with the special agents was recited and Brown replied without hesitation: "It happened almost exactly that way...
...You've been mixed up in some rather shady things in the past, Socialists, Communists, but it must have been youthful wildness...
...The thing that disturbed me most was that if they wanted to talk to me in the lobby I'd be late for work— they're very strict about punctuality where I work...
...freedom of speech, religion and the press...
...Touhy and three other members of the gang were convicted and eventually sentenced to 99 years each...
...At five I went out with Jim and there were the same two men sitting in the chairs next to the desk where the receptionist sits during the day...
...The relationship was personal,' she said...
...That has no bearing on the case...
...she telephoned the New York Post and the American Civil Liberties Union...
...In some quarters we are surely doing this...
...Had Mrs...
...19, 1957) LIBERALS: "The word 'liberal* has a fine, upright meaning and is symbolic of a great9 historic tradition...
...Her husband, she said, had been transferred—and demoted—for talking to a reporter from the Post...
...It was not common practice, he explained, to question an individual against whom such a complaint had been lodged in the lobby of a place of employment...
...To say that, because you have a desirable purpose, you have the right to disregard the law is a revolutionary attitude...
...He has put himself beyond the reach of criticism which lesser men, such as Presidents and Cabinet officers, are forced to endure in the service of democracy...
...No one will know about your record...
...They said kidnaping was strictly a "one-shot" racket, mostly the work of unbalanced loners and amateurs...
...When Homer Cummings first took office as Attorney General, in 1933, it was his thesis that the big bootlegging gangs had turned to kidnaping as a livelihood after Prohibition was repealed...
...That is why the Communists appropriate the term for their own use . . . Communism is the very opposite of liberalism...
...Finally the heavy set man asked me if I would be willing to sign a paper saying that I had never made a disparaging remark about the character of J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI...
...In any case, when the FBI chief celebrated his thirty-fifth anniversary at his post last May, more than a few Senate liberals rose to second the emotions expressed by such stalwart conservatives as Senators Everett M. Dirksen, Illinois Re FBI...
...Brown understood what they had done nor why Violet was being so vociferous, so I broke in to say our goodbyes...
...I could have warned him but I didn't know how...
...Twenty years later, and after Touhy had spent 20 years behind bars, his conviction for the kidnaping of Jake (the Barber) Factor was reversed by a federal court judge...
...But you need more than a good mechanic lor this kind of job...
...Well, Mrs...
...I did and I asked him if the FBI would actually send out two men to ask someone this kind of question in the lobby of their office building...
...I had never even heard of anything like that before...
...Nothing happened to him, Gersh added, after the piece was published seven years ago...
...They sink deeper and deeper into a mire of viciousness which inevitably leads to filth in mind, filth in morals and in bodily health . . ." "Each criminal is an individual personality," Hoover wrote in Education magazine in 1950...
...He indicated that nothing more was to be done on the case...
...They were quite skillful at interrogation...
...Munger is the divorced mother of two children...
...Gersh...
...She was working up to the point where she would be sorry she voted for Roosevelt instead of Thomas...
...They were good mechanics...
...He asked me to come over to the side of the lobby where we could speak more privately...
...This is your contribution...
...I had never heard of anything like that either...
...Assistant special agent in charge, B. C. Brown, is no longer in the New York office...
...Probably the answer lies both in the nature of the man and the duplex character of his job...
...Frankly," Hoover wrote, "I was surprised to see such an obvious and intentional attempt to hold the FBI up to ridicule being printed in your magazine...
...With the kind of ingenuous candor that made his book so unpopular with the FBI, Purvis opened his account of the case by saying, "We assumed from the start, with no material evidence, that the Touhy gang was responsible for the crime...
...Hoover believes that a visit from the FBI, even to innocent people, is an occasion for jollity, he is mistaken...
...We are a human organization functioning in a field where the possibility of error is high, where temptation is sensitive, and the security of the individual is paramount...
...Among other things, he said: "Mr...
...They'd only been given a small part of the case and told to get certain information...
...The Department [of Justice]," Barnes wrote in his decision, "did evince an astounding disregard for Touhy's rights and indulged in practices which, in due regard for the administration of justice, cannot be condoned . . . The evidence discloses and the court finds that Factor, the State's Attorney's office, and the Department of Justice, once the publicity and notoriety originally set in motion by Factor started to avalanche, worked and acted in concert to convict Touhy of something, regardless of his guilt...
...The record shows he has skillfully enlarged his power while creating the public image of a dragon-slayer whose technique and style are not to be questioned lest the country be devoured during his momentary distraction...
...New York Times Sunday Magazine Section, April 16, 1950) CONSTITUTIONAL PROCEDURE: "The judiciary remains the protector of our way of life...
...They were uttered in 1940...
...No plans that I know of...
...Gersh had the last word...
...The FBI's Curious Conduct In the Touhy Case FBI agent Melvin Purvis provided the details of the case in his book, published in 1935...
...FALLIBILITY: "We are constantly surrounded by nitwits and porous-brained sentimentalists who, either through powder-puff perspective or actual affiliation with the criminal element, seek to undermine the foundations upon which we must stand if we are to protect the American home...
...3, 1955) Whatever the verdict of history, it must be conceded that Hoover has achieved a large measure of success in beguiling or neutralizing potential liberal critics even while remaining the pin-up boy of American reaction...
...In a free society no government official or agency should be spared such scrutiny—least of all a secret police and its director...
...If the FBI was merely interested in obtaining her denial, the reporter then asked, why wasn't her word sufficient...
...Munger's statement, exactly as she offered it, to B. C. Brown, assistant special agent in charge of the New York field office...
...Moreover, he said, her employers requested she not be interviewed in the office...
...Then the heavy-set one who had done all the talking during the morning asked me whether I was ready to sign the paper now...
...Where are you living now?'" "I just told him I was living with a friend and he let the matter drop...
...It was while they were leaving that they made their big mistake...
...An earnest effort to educate and be educated was treated as if it were a conspiracy against the republic...
Vol. 24 • January 1960 • No. 1
