J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE FBI
Staff, The New York Post
obliged to concede that the party had grown smaller. Clearly there was a limit to this inverse law of danger; it was almost as if he were saying that the Communist threat would be most formidable...
...The chain of events which Hoover says was the most damaging to the prestige of the FBI in modern times began when an intelligence investigation of Judith Coplon, employed in the Justice Department's Foreign Agents Registration Section, was triggered into her arrest for espionage 10 years ago...
...This was profoundly embarrassing to the Justice Department and to the FBI...
...There were two possible justifications for FBI intervention: (1) Parker might have been taken across a state line in violation of the federal kidnaping statute...
...Both mayors were given to understand the agents were following Hoover's orders...
...New York police and firemen don't care much for his methods after having to work under a barrage of federal bullets aimed at a criminal who had been treed by the New York force in an apartment to which he later set fire...
...It was F.D.R...
...In 1953, he turned down two requests from the Senate Internal Security subcommittee and then agreed to appear before it...
...The aides said the FBI and Attorney General Tom Clark were in on the decision...
...It investigates the consciences of men of draft age opposed to parti cipation in war, requiring delicate judgments and offensive inquiries among neighbors and friends...
...At that moment of McCarthy's climactic glory, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover publicly jumped on the bandwagon of frenzy...
...The FBI Director returned to his office to send out the following personal and confidential instructions to his special agents in charge: "The Bureau desires to obtain from all possible sources information concerning subversive activities being conducted in the U.S...
...Hoover, by telling him how far he may and may not go in his ideas of what constitutes real crime and in his methods of fighting real crime...
...In September, 1938, after an alert driver for a dry cleaning firm had discovered suspicious documents in the pockets of a Soviet attache in Los Angeles, U.S.S.R...
...Hoover ordered the FBI to move in...
...Hoover Becomes 'The Most Powerful Figure on Capitol Hill' Hoover hasn't been exactly eager to go before committees that don't hold his Bureau's purse strings...
...But six days after the column appeared, the FBI had pleaded for Pegler's mercy...
...Senator George W. Norris, Nebraska Republican, blasted Hoover and called him "the greatest hound for publicity on the American continent today...
...It operates on the basis of the preposterous list of subversive organizations, over 300 of them, drawn up by the Attorney General (the FBI in fact, of course...
...With reason, he has been suspicious both of the ability and integrity of local police forces, and a good many newspapermen who have worked with the G-Men believe that the clampdown on publicity until the job is done has the purpose of preventing leaks and preventing the local coppers from stealing the play...
...telling him...
...Heretofore he had prudently avoided any overt commitment...
...The communication which has reached me has it that the FBI is doing this dirty work reluctantly and would be glad to use the manpower involved in its anti-Communist work which is now a very urgent concern...
...But still, there were two FBIs, and in the postwar period, as in 1940, the most spectacular FBI failures came to pass when one FBI's intelligence investigations got intertwined with prosecutions by the other...
...Writers took note of the "grisly" comic strips, radio programs and movies celebrating and glamorizing the adventures of the G-men with semi-official sanction from the Bureau...
...Having gambled as an intelligence agency—and lost—the FBI had no choice but to gamble again...
...Golos was never indicted for espionage...
...the second FBI was created by a secret handwritten memo by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the fall of 1936...
...it is no answer at all for the other FBI—the secret agency engaged in intelligence and counter-intelligence...
...Hoover too much money...
...When certain elements cease their attacks on me, I'll know I'm slipping...
...Amid all the controversy, little note was taken of a serious inconsis tency in his testimony...
...The course we took," he said, "protected the public interest and security and, at the same time, permitted the intensive FBI investigation then in progress to go forward...
...I want you to do a job for me and it must be confidential," Hoover recalls F.D.R...
...We should like to have asked him but he declined to grant us an audience...
...Three months later the costly venture was abandoned and the FBI forces were dispersed...
...he reiterated his charges and concluded: "The FBI is a cat's paw for the Civil Liberties Union, ADA, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in this situation...
...Congress has imposed on it funotions which in our view no police agency of government should possess...
...Hoover Reveals Split Personality In Pursuing Civil Rights Cases Once upon a time not too many years ago Westbrook Pegler turned his typewriter on J. Edgar Hoover...
...There is a movement afoot, in which the FBI has become an accomplice, to discredit the police authority of the states and cities by harassing individual policemen with 'investigations' and lawsuits for enormous 'damages,'" Pegler wrote in August, 1953...
...Does the top G-man regard the protection of civil rights as "dirty work" forced upon him by political expediencies...
...The new Eisenhower Administra tion's Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, Jr., Hoover's titular chief, had got the ball rolling in a speech to an advertising men's club in Chi cago two weeks before...
...Platoons of agents began working day and night to pin down the conspiracy charges...
...The Parker case has caused some NAACP officials, including Clarence Mitchell, to modify their thinking on the FBI's role in more recent civil rights cases: "I'm satisfied they found the lynchers and that they were ready—in fact, would have been delighted—to arrest them," says Mitchell...
...If you want to enjoy the sensation [of being tailed]," the author, Ray Tucker, wrote, "just write or speak in criticism of this shady stuff, or incur the displeasure of Mr...
...If Hoover was withholding judg ment on McCarthy's "techniques," he was clearly passing judgment on Mc Carthy's critics...
...Miss Coplon insisted on her innocence and refused to confess or name accomplices...
...Now, during a vacation interlude at La Jolla, California, Hoover finally spoke out...
...Still, they were making some headway when Faubus boldly blasted Hoover in public and accused his agents of holding high school girls incommunicado for hours...
...We are at a loss to understand why the FBI, which, overall, has made an excellent record of enforcing these constitutional rights, should be the subject of such an attack," the ACLU wrote, "especially as your speech indicated no criticism of the FBI's investigative procedures, but emphasized opposition to its coming on to the scene at all...
...I had the assurance of Edgar Hoover personally years ago that he would at once discipline any agent proved to violate the rights of any citizen...
...The report cast embarrassing doubts on the whole character of "raw" FBI dossiers...
...Only this year, in rebutting criticism of the FBI's failure to penetrate and head off the Golos-Bentley espionage operation, a Bureau spokesman made a rare comment on Golos: "As of 1940, the FBI had no information that could serve as a basis for his arrest as a spy...
...In 1938, Editor & Publisher editorialized, after an FBI publicity controversy in a kidnapping case: ". . . Mr...
...This is the way John O'Donnell reported the President's decision in the New York Daily News of April 29, 1940: "President Roosevelt whittled J. Edgar Hoover, Chief of the G-men, down to size of a number one cop today...
...I have no doubt there are such cases...
...In February, 1940, when the Spanish war was over and the international political picture totally changed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the FBI, now police and not counter-spies, made a spectacular early-morning roundup of a dozen Detroit Communists...
...As far as its police work is concerned, the question is inevitably jurisdiction...
...I've come to know him [McCarthy] well, officially and personally...
...Brownell as of now, and at his recent predecessors under Truman...
...official Mikhail Gorin and an accomplice were arrested by the FBI and convicted of espionage...
...Hoover has repeatedly insisted that the FBI does not "evaluate" the data its agents assemble...
...If Hoover were the man that some of his liberal admirers think he is, one might assume that he would have welcomed this attack...
...The report failed, however, to mention any bombing which had been solved or any perpetrators who had been punished, by coordinated efforts or otherwise...
...since no overt acts had so far been committed, the federal courts had not issued injunctions against individuals by name and the FBI men were without power to arrest them...
...I view him as a friend and believe he so views me...
...A nonpolice agency should do that job...
...The FBI's record in civil rights cases remains a matter of controversy...
...The major complaint we defend ers of civil rights bring concerns not the lawlessness of the FBI but its law ful functions...
...Now McCarthy is gone...
...Hoover said he would have preferred catching the plotters in an overt act but the early arrests were necessary to head off a bomb plot...
...A Neutrality Law Unit [has] been set up to handle all wartime offenses . . . Hoover not only loses his former power but is protected from charges that he is evolving into the American equivalent of the Gestapo . . ," Courts Slap the FBI For Illegal Procedures The story of the FBI's wartime operations—as reported by author Don Whitehead and others who have been given access to the FBI archives—is an uninterrupted success story...
...Television and newsreel cameras trained on him as he settled into the witness chair...
...You will be 'tailed' immediately, and sometimes they investigate your wife, your friends, even your ancestors...
...In the face of a U.S...
...This new development in the unremitting campaign to inflame one [group] against another, especially Negroes against white policemen, is the doing of private organizations professing to promote 'brotherhood.' . . . "The FBI has let itself be drawn into the mess through a mistaken obedience to the political agita tion which was maintained for years by the Roosevelt and Tru man Administrations...
...Pegler was not entirely mollified by the disclaimer...
...Attorney General Clark tried to make the best of the situation by announcing that Miss Coplon had been trapped as a result of the loyalty-security investigation...
...When the two-year epidemic of Southern bombings reached a climax shortly before the 1958 elections with the dynamiting of an Atlantic synagogue, President Eisenhower departed from the prepared text of a speech in New York to denounce the violence and announce that he was going to ask the FBI to investigate...
...If the FBI has run into trouble because of conflicts between two areas of responsibility—counter-intelligence and police work—it has managed to stay out of trouble because of them, too...
...The special agents left their office and began a vigorous search for the identity of the mob's leaders...
...Until his death in 1943, and while under what was later termed "intermittent" surveillance, Golos lived with Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley and helped recruit other spies and couriers—including Harry Gold and Julius Rosenberg, convicted 10 years later for supplying atomic secrets to the Soviets...
...Meanwhile, the trail to the mob leaders had cooled...
...Single-mindedly, Mr...
...Then, in a nationally televised speech, Truman made a personal reply to Brownell...
...I was at the meeting to furnish facts," he said, "which I did...
...The Attorney General is his rightful boss...
...Finally, when is the decision on jurisdiction an FBI decision, a Justice Department decision, or a decision by a higher authority than both...
...Then, as the clamor over the FBI "pull-out" grew, the FBI turned over its report, reportedly naming the lynchers, to Governor Coleman...
...When Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard to block the admission of Negro students, Hoover moved swiftly to beef up the Little Rock office of the FBI...
...Some of the most conspicuous FBI failures can be traced to the fact that the Bureau had two distinct responsibilities and that the intelligence investigations of one were triggered into criminal prosecutions by the other...
...The FBI even refused to mastermind the work of local police, the mayors said, and turn over their leads to local prosecutors...
...It became his most impressive appearance on the stand...
...Dual Duties of the FBI Get the Bureau Into Trouble For more than 20 years there have been—in reality if not in form—two FBIs...
...He is earnest and he is honest...
...but Hoover still maintains an apparently warm association with Clint Murchison, the Texas oil millionaire who was once one of McCarthy's most dedicated fans...
...Miss Coplon's conviction on the New York charges was unanimously reversed by the U.S...
...The controversy became so heated that Attorney General Jackson ordered an investigation of the entire roundup and, on February 16, ordered the indictments quashed...
...Then, still on the stand, he said, "I told the Attorney General I felt it was unwise for White to serve...
...In his celebrated speech to the American Legion in September of 1957, J. Edgar Hoover warned against the folly of "technical rather than logical interpretation of the law" which permits subversives to run loose and threaten the security of the nation...
...What is more important is to ascertain his contacts, his objectives, his sources of information and his methods of communication...
...Roosevelt discussed the international character of communism and fascism...
...Gently but firmly, the much-publicized Federal Bureau of Investigation has been stripped of its power to make so much as a single arrest on any complaint involving espionage, treason, sedition, foreign enlistment, sabotage and the hundred and one Foreign Agent charges that sprout in periods of war hysteria...
...Near the end of August, 1953, McCarthy was riding high...
...Harry Dexter White," Brownell charged, "was known to be a Communist spy by the very people who appointed him to the most sensitive and important position he ever held in government service...
...Hoover has been accused of such doings in other cities...
...he was summoned 20 times before a grand jury, tons of his official files were carted off for examination, and finally, on January 1, 1940, charges of military espionage were lodged against him...
...Yet Congress has directed the FBI to attack these rights in the name of a spurious security...
...Within months, the dual chores of the FBI were to get Hoover and the Bureau into hot water...
...Orders had been issued in Washington to destroy the wire-tap records and— as is perfectly proper for a secret counter-intelligence agency but not for a police agency—to destroy the printed form authorizing their destruction...
...My intermediary tells me it greatly abhors this nasty political duty...
...Twelve incidents involved schools and 16 involved churches or synagogues, he testified...
...The FBI's chief witness turned out to be more an agent provocateur than a bystander-informant...
...Thus the FBI files were divulged in open court...
...He's Irish...
...Thus, when the mob gathered to howl its defiance of the Supreme Court decision and the orders of the District Court, the small army of FBI men remained sequestered in the Federal Building, more than a mile from the scene...
...He called Hoover a "nightclub fly-cop...
...That same year, Westbrook Pegler accused Hoover of assembling dossiers, tape recordings, and movies on the activities of Washington officials...
...Hoover or some of his political superiors...
...The Days of Poking Fun At Hoover's Campus Cops* Are Gone It is strange, on an afternoon late in 1959, to read through yellowed accounts of the Thirties before Hoover or his G-men were old enough to become an institution, and to find so many harsh, brash, irreverent voices raised in criticism—and even ridicule...
...He pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to register as a foreign agent, was fined $500 and placed on probation...
...attache, Valentin Gubitchev, were kept in custody, charged with espionage, and their cases went before grand juries in Washington (where she had filched the FBI files) and in New York (where she had attempted to pass them on to Gubitchev...
...At least three times since she'd been hired in 1943, Miss Coplon had survived extensive loyalty and security checks...
...The G-Men and Their Chief Are Defended by Civil Libertarians The American Civil Liberties Union has several times come to Hoover's defense...
...We do not express opinions or draw conclusions in our investigative reports," he had testified, referring to the reports on Harry Dexter White...
...Certainly he is a controversial man...
...The President wondered if there were some way by which he could obtain a broad intelligence picture of Communist and Fascist activities in relation to the economic and political life of the country...
...But on the public record Hoover had remained above the battle...
...When Mack Charles Parker, the 23year-old Negro accused of raping a white woman, was dragged from the county jail in Poplarville, Mississippi, last April, the FBI quickly entered the case at the request of Governor Coleman...
...In 1952 it replied to a charge by Governor Fine of Pennsylvania that the G-Men, by investigating treatment of prisoners in state institutions, were encroaching on police powers of the states...
...The investigation was to be for intelligence purposes only, and not the type of investigation required for collecting evidence to be presented to a court...
...And when the Coplon case came up for trial, FBI troubles multiplied...
...or (2) state officials might have participated in the "conspiracy" to deprive Parker of his constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment...
...I was never able to submit a case which stood up...
...We think it is time for the Attorney General to lay down the law to Mr...
...Arrest and public disclosure are steps to be taken only as a matter of last resort...
...He emerged from the Senate's marble-columned caucus room that hectic autumn day, as James Reston of the New York Times put it, "probably the most powerful figure on Capitol Hill...
...After an intensive, month-long FBI investigation of the case, the Justice Department announced the Bureau had no jurisdiction...
...In her purse at the time of her arrest, the FBI found data from its files copied in her own handwriting...
...It took her into custody without a warrant and questioned her at length in the hope that she would cooperate and disclose other members of the ring so that they could be kept under surveillance...
...it would be inconceivable that so large a force did not display either ignorance or disregard of rights in their zeal to get evidence...
...So this time, at least so far as the record is concerned, he omitted the numbers, simply observing ominously: "I cannot emphasize too strongly that the numerical strength of the Communist Party means nothing...
...The very people," of course, was Harry Truman, who first denied knowledge of two FBI reports on White, then said he'd "fired" White on learning he was "disloyal...
...The New York trial also produced disclosures that the FBI had taken extensive wire-tap recordings of Miss Coplon in telephone conversation with her lawyer during the course of her earlier trial in Washington...
...Both mayors were told that the FBI had no jurisdiction...
...There was only one cautious note in Hoover's eulogy: "I am not passing on the techniques of McCarthy's committee or other Senate committees...
...The Harry Dexter White case had become a huge political issue, so momentous that the matter of White's alleged links to the Communists actually became irrelevant to the issue of whether his case had been properly handled...
...It was one of the rare interludes when Hoover overtly threw his weight into a political fray, abandon ing the above-the-battle stance which he has long cultivated...
...The FBI's case against Golos, the Bureau has since conceded, was not as watertight as that which developed from the driver's discovery in Los Angeles...
...The wide network of suspicion created by these inquiries strikes at the freedom of citizens to think, talk, print and associate...
...The FBI put Soviet travel agency officials around the country under steady surveillance...
...Both Truman and Brownell had engaged in partisan struggle over what had become a crucial political struggle...
...Suspecting that Miss Coplon was serving a Soviet espionage ring, the FBI took a big gamble...
...Bureau officials again insisted the FBI had no jurisdiction...
...These rights are basic to a democracy...
...Yet all the while, the FBI insisted it had no jurisdiction...
...Whenever you attack subversives of any kind, Communists, Fascist, or Ku Klux Klan, you are going to be the victim of the most vicious criticism that can be made...
...In wartime, the FBI was specifically charged with responsibility for the internal security of the continental U.S...
...District Court order, Faubus withdrew his troops, but FBI reinforcements continued to pour in...
...When the case came to trial in April, 1940, however, the FBI's case collapsed piece by piece...
...His financial shenanigans were about to be whitewashed by the Justice Department...
...After the bombing of synagogues in Jacksonville and Miami last year, the mayors of both citites appealed to the FBI for help in the kind of coordinated effort which J. Edgar Hoover has since claimed can curb the violence...
...They have subpena rights without which some vital investigations could not be accomplished...
...The original Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice— renamed the FBI in 1934—was created with the grudging consent of Congress in 1909...
...does it have possible jurisdiction...
...It has been challenged at several points by rival government agencies and officials—the Federal Communications Commission, the Office of Strategic Services, and military and naval intelligence agencies—which had wartime jurisdictional run-ins with the Bureau...
...Miss Coplon and the Soviet's U.N...
...The Bureau withdrew...
...It investigates the political opinions and associations of public employes and private citizens to determine political heresy...
...But Golos wasn't simply placed under surveillance...
...Court of Appeals on the grounds that her arrest by FBI agents without a warrant was illegal...
...A federal grand jury was impaneled...
...When the federal court ordered that the Negro students be admitted to the high school on Monday morning, September 23, it was assumed the dozens of FBI men would be assigned to patrol and observe the area around the school building...
...Then Truman's aides leaked the story that White was deliberately allowed to take over the International Monetary Fund so that he could be watched more carefully...
...Applause broke out as the crowd in the packed Senate caucus room recognized him...
...They had questioned one teenage segregationist for two hours...
...Yet in the light of the Pegler episode the nagging questions remain...
...The following year, however, the chief of the Truman Administration's loyalty program, Seth Richardson, testified that the loyalty-security apparatus had disclosed "not one single case or evidence directing toward a case of espionage...
...The stories included a timetable of the lynching and clearly indicated that the Bureau wanted it known that it had cracked the case...
...and with counter-intelligence operations in the entire Western Hemisphere...
...In the 1954 campaign movies of his performance on Capitol Hill were exhibited by the Republican National Committee without any sign of dissent from the FBI...
...Most of the defendants were acquitted...
...Does he "abhor" this "nasty political duty...
...With this interview he blasted the fiction of neutrality he had so long sustained during the McCarthy controversy and in effect supported the Senator's view that op position to his works was a symptom of subversion...
...The secret form was not destroyed and Miss Coplon was thus handed grounds for appealing the Washington conviction...
...It is better to know who these people are and what they are doing, and to immobilize their efforts, than it is to expose them publicly and then go through the tireless effort of identifying their successors...
...One of them was Jacob Golos, Gorin's opposite number in New York, director of World Tourists Inc...
...The furor didn't die down until the following year...
...Had they shown up the day of the riot—even as observers—they would have had little trouble identifying the leaders...
...In 1944, subpenaed by a special House committee investigating the FCC, he declined to answer almost every question on the grounds that a written directive from President Roosevelt barred him from discussing any question relating to national security...
...Nobody kids the FBI today...
...it was almost as if he were saying that the Communist threat would be most formidable when there were only a dozen of them left...
...The gamble didn't pay off...
...Unquestionably, the Bureau can do a job in the South when it wants to—with or without jurisdiction...
...FBI Abandons Little Rock Mob To Go After Governor Faubus Hoover struck back, calling Faubus a liar and sending new instructions to his men, according to the word his agents passed on to reporters at the scene: stop concentrating on the mob leaders and start looking into the feasibility of conspiracy charges against Faubus...
...And so, after the first months of 1940, President Roosevelt and Attorney General Jackson began to have some sober second thoughts about the ability of Hoover's FBI to help meet the wartime challenge...
...The reappraisal resulted in an unprecedented attempt to trim the FBI powers...
...But sometimes a knock is a boost...
...Coming from the nation's leading law enforcement official, his remarks were headlined as a bold criticism of the Supreme Court's decision in the Jencks case, which Congress had virtually overridden with new legislation only a few days before...
...charges against the others were dropped...
...Federal Judge Reeves ruled that the authenticity of the copies could not be established unless the originals were produced in court and that the espionage charges depended on what the copied files contained...
...One was the secret report of a special agent to whom an informant had reported that his child had seen their neighbor walking around unclothed in his own home...
...At no time," he testified, "was the FBI a party to an agreement to promote Harry Dexter White and at no time did the FBI give its approval to such an agreement...
...Her arrest would raise questions as to the effectiveness of the whole loyalty-security apparatus...
...Government prosecutors insisted that secret FBI files—which Miss Coplon had copied and taken in her handbag—should not be disclosed in the interests of national security...
...Nobody argued the point...
...Pegler wrote: "I have received word through a reliable medium that the FBI is acting under special orders to invoke this [civil rights] law .. . "My informant, whose services were invoked because the FBI is muzzled by politics, tells me that the FBI feels that the criticism for this sudden revival of the Civil Rights law should be directed at the Attorney General, Mr...
...The following day, Hoover testified...
...Roosevelt Whittles Hoover 'Down to Size of No...
...But on jhe eve of the anticipated mob violence, FBI agents told reporters on the scene that they had been ordered by the Director in Washington not to leave their office...
...Here again, somebody goofed...
...That's the Sena tors' responsibility...
...Whatever else the record may show, it is no inconsiderable achievement for a government official to have held the hand of Joseph R. McCarthy without provoking the all-out assault of men who have devoted their lives to the battle for civil liberties...
...who gave J. Edgar Hoover the most sweeping secret powers ever handed to a police chief in this country...
...But if J. Edgar Hoover should say that he would be in great trouble...
...by Communists, Fascists, and representatives of other organizations or groups advocating the overthrow or replacement of the government of the United States by illegal methods . . And that's how subversive activities, counter-intelligence, and "the radical situation" came to be under the aegis of the FBI...
...Attorney General Brownell was soon to deliver his own "years of treason" assault on Harry Truman, enthroning McCarthyism as official Administration doctrine...
...And, though Little Rock was swarming with FBI agents, the ringleaders of the riot went unindicted and untried in large part apparently because of a "technical rather than logical" interpretation of the law...
...In 1941, declining a request from the House Military Affairs Committee to testify in its investigation of Communist influence in strikes against defense industries, he insisted that he never appeared before Congressional committees except on appropriations, and then only for testimony on the FBI budget...
...Combine those and you're going to have a vigorous individ ual who is not going to be pushed around...
...McCarthy is an ex-Marine...
...But the FBI was stopped by an administrative decision within the Justice Department...
...He was an amateur boxer...
...Ironically, the most spectacular challenge to the United States government in recent years—Governor Faubus' revolt against the court-ordered admission of Negro students to Little Rock's Central High School—also took place in September of 1957...
...Perhaps the most comprehensive appraisal of the FBI from the ACLU point of view comes in a formal statement to us from Roger Baldwin, its founder and executive director for 30 years: "If I were asked to produce evidence of transgression of citizens' rights by the FBI, I could cite only scattered cases...
...But the agents apparently failed to get a case against Faubus or against anyone else—and the grand jury failed to indict...
...I believe that these outrages can be materially curbed," the FBI chief said, "by a coordinated effort on the part of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, by stern treatment of the perpetrators and by an aroused public opinion...
...His charge was that Hoover was guilty of meddling in the internal affairs of local police departments by invoking the "dead-letter" civil rights statute of 1866 against cops who pushed people (most often Negroes) around...
...It was, after all, a form of rebuttal to the recur rent charge that he and the Bureau were frequently lacking in diligence and passion in enforcing the civil rights statute...
...Roosevelt died before he could act on a proposal by leading figures in the government to take those powers away...
...But the investiga tive committees do a valuable job...
...Stories that could have been based only on FBI material were leaked to reporters in Washington by "high government officials" and "authori tative sources...
...It's a sort of game with Mr, Hoover and his boy detectives...
...They arrived in such numbers that the Sam Peck Hotel, across the street from the Federal Building, had to evict newspaper men to make room for FBI men...
...After the riot, the FBI's public position of non-intervention suddenly changed...
...More astonishing was an article in so uncontroversial a national publication as Collier's, which poked malicious fun at Hoover's "campus cops," under a cartoon which depicted them peering from peepholes, sewers, trash cans and tree-tops in attempts to "tail" everyone in Washington...
...Does it have clear jurisdiction...
...in any given case, does it want jurisdiction...
...Eventually the court remanded this conviction to the lower courts for another hearing...
...Hoover set out to get his man, regardless of the fire peril to other occupants of the house, or of the danger his bullets made for other public servants doing their duty...
...Fully publicized, the arrests produced an uproar in Congress and in the press...
...Even the New York Daily News, in 1936, was attacking Hoover for his absorption with white slavery cases, and as late as 1940 it was warning editorially: "If Congress doesn't want an American OGPU, Congress had better ask itself whether it hasn't been giving v Mr...
...1 Cop* Simultaneously with the uproar over Detroit, Hoover personally announced the arrests of 17 Christian Fronters in New York for plotting the overthrow of the government...
...More than one magazine article of that period, for instance, notes disapprovingly the credit-snatching, press-agentry and even "illegal" maneuvers by the G-men...
...Near the close of the war, Hoover's FBI lost jurisdiction over intelligence in South America and its operations were confined to the continental U.S...
...It was Hoover himself who explained the difference before a Senate committee in 1950: "In an espionage case the identification of the wrongdoer is only the first step...
...This is a good answer for one FBI...
...But, having missed the violence, they were reduced to the job of interviewing the reporters who were there...
...In his January, 1959, testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, released on May 10 this year, the 35th anniversary of his appointment as Director of the FBI, Hoover reported a national box score of 108 bombings or attempted bombings "having a racial or religious aspect" since January 1, 1957...
...It was a little heavy-handed but Tucker may have been kidding...
...When is that jurisdiction "technical," when is it "logical," and when is it merely convenient...
...In 1938, the FBI conducted a secret intelligence investigation in Detroit of the Communist-led recruiting service for the Spanish Loyalist armies...
...I know...
...He didn't like reports that Constantine Oumansky [counsellor for the Soviet Embassy] had been running around the country . . . the State Department had a right and duty to know what was going on . . . [F.D.R.] said he wanted the matter to be handled confidentially . . . The FBI should coordinate this intelligence investigation with the War Department's Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the State Department...
...He has enemies...
...In her oficial duties, she had had access to FBI files...
...There had been repeated intimations of behindthe-scenes collaboration between the FBI and agents of the McCarthy committee and strong signs that the "sacred" FBI files were quietly available to McCarthy's men...
...His gesture accomplished what the two mayors could not...
...There are both achievements and failures...
Vol. 24 • February 1960 • No. 2
