Read J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Online
Authors: Curt Gentry
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #United States, #Political Science, #Law Enforcement, #History, #Fiction, #Historical, #20th Century, #American Government
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (15 page)
In the early morning hours of May 3, 1920, Salsedo either jumped, accidentally fell, or was pushed out of a window on the fourteenth floor of the building.
When the attorney for the pair arrived later that morning, an agent informed him, “Well, your client, Salsedo, is free.”
*
35
Some held doubts about Salsedo’s “suicide”—Louis Post, for example, referred to the incident as the “Salsedo homicide”—but there was no further investigation. For some inexplicable reason, Burke arranged to have his only witness, Elia, deported, and there, it appeared, the matter ended.
But there was a legacy. About a week before Salsedo’s death, another Italian
anarchist, a fish peddler from Boston, came to New York to look for his missing friends. Although he didn’t find them, he did learn, after a number of inquiries, that they were being detained. On returning to Boston he and another anarchist friend, who was a shoemaker, began organizing a protest meeting, which they scheduled for the night of May 9. There is reason to believe that both men were under near-constant surveillance by BI agents from at least the time of the New York trip and possibly earlier.
The protest meeting never took place. On May 5, two days after Salsedo’s death, the shoemaker and the fish peddler were arrested for what they presumed to be their anarchist activities. Only later were they told that they were being charged with the murders of a paymaster and a guard, committed during a payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15th.
*
One of the many legacies of the Palmer raids was the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Despite Flynn’s claim that Salsedo signed a statement implicating the actual bombers—a claim Flynn never repeated, or backed with any evidence, the alleged statement itself having never been made public, if indeed it ever existed—their identity remains a mystery.
Even more mysterious is why—with extra appropriations of $2.6 million and a huge detective force concentrating on little else, neither the General Intelligence Division nor the Bureau of Investigation was able to discover that in 1919-20 the radical movement in the United States was poorly organized, hopelessly divided, pitifully weak, and largely incapable of carrying out anything more destructive than a few isolated acts of violence, much less a grand conspiracy to overthrow the entire government.
*
Anthony Caminetti, the commissioner of immigration, was the first Italian-American elected to Congress and one of the first to attain a high government position. Like that second-generation Irishman Francis Garvan, Caminetti loathed radicals and distrusted recent immigrants, who he felt had yet to earn America’s precious freedoms. To his mind, none of the immigration laws was harsh enough.
After being appointed head of the GID, Hoover quickly established “very pleasant relations” with Caminetti.
1
According to Whitehead, the deportation cases brought Caminetti and Hoover “together almost daily in working out legal problems.”
2
Caminetti, who had been informed as early as July that there would be a dragnet, approved so heartily that he willingly interpreted the sometimes ambiguous terminology of the immigration code to fit particular cases.
*
Wilson had no way of knowing that within hours not three thousand but ten thousand persons would be arrested.
*
During a 1921 Senate inquiry, Hoover disputed not the conditions of the corridor but its size, introducing into evidence a report from the Detroit BI chief which gave its area as 4,512 square feet. Skeptical, the Senate committee subpoenaed the assistant custodian of the building, who testified that the actual size was 448 square feet, a little less that half a square foot per alien.
†
Palmer later justified these secondary arrests by asking who would be friends with a radical other than another radical.
*
But Hoover was upstaged during his first appearance in the spotlight by none other than Immigration Commissioner Caminetti, who, according to the
Times,
lent “a spectacular touch” to the hearings by shouting derisive comments at the attorneys for the Communists.
*
The other eight signers were Ernst Freund, professor of jurisprudence and public law at the University of Chicago; Jackson H. Ralston, who had served as attorney for Post in the impeachment hearings and, together with another signer, Swinburne Hale, had done most of the editing of the pamphlet; Frank P. Walsh, a famed New York defense attorney; Tyrrell Williams, professor of law at Washington University, St. Louis; R. G. Brown, of Memphis; David Wallerstein, of Philadelphia; and Alfred S. Niles, of Baltimore.
†
Hoover failed in this, but something far more useful turned up in Washington. The assistant secretary’s secretary had a secret nocturnal job. He was one of the editors of a gossip magazine called the
Knot Hole,
which purported to be “born in sin and conceived in Washington” and whose every issue managed to offend half of Congress and most of the Cabinet. It had nothing to do with the charges, and apparently even Post was unaware of it, but when Palmer revealed it in his appearance on the Hill, the effect was a momentary sensation.
*
In his report Hoover proudly claimed that the mass arrests and deportations “had resulted in the wrecking of the communist party in this country,” while the radical press was totally suppressed and had “ceased its pernicious activities.” But the dangers of radicalism remained as frightening as ever, Hoover asserted: what was needed now was an expansion of the crusade, in the form of legislation “to enable the federal government adequately to defend and protect itself and its institutions of not only aliens within the borders of the United States, but also of American citizens who are engaged in unlawful agitation.”
30
*
A GID report, which Hoover had specially prepared for Palmer’s appearance before the Rules Committee, was equally unfeeling. Claiming that Salsedo had been held for two months by “his own choice” and for his own protection, and that “he was never mistreated at any time and never struck, intimidated or threatened,” it bluntly concluded, “Salsedo put an end to his part of the agreement by jumping from the fourteenth floor of the Park Row building upon the street, committing suicide.”
36
*
In 1973 the Mafia informant Vincent Theresa claimed in his book
My Life in the Mafia
that the South Braintree crimes had actually been committed by the Morelli gang and that one of its members, Butsey Morelli, had admitted this to him.
The Director
“If I can leave my desk each day with the knowledge that I have in no way violated any of the rights of the citizens of this country…then I shall feel satisfied.”
—J. Edgar Hoover, acting director
of the BI, to Roger Baldwin,
founder of the ACLU, 1924
The Department of Easy Virtue
W
ith the departure of A. Mitchell Palmer and the advent of the new Republican administration, John Edgar Hoover was in danger of losing his job. Other young attorneys in the Justice Department, facing the same threat, either accepted demotions or sought employment elsewhere. Not Hoover. Already a seasoned bureaucrat, he saw in the change an opportunity to move upward, to an even more powerful position.
To accomplish this, he used a variety of tactics, some new, some by now familiar. Again he quickly made himself indispensable to the new attorney general, in this case Harry M. Daugherty, Harding’s former campaign manager. Daugherty soon discovered that the GID chief’s files contained information not only on radicals but also on Harding’s political opponents, and that young Hoover was not averse to sharing it.
Within hours after being sworn in as attorney general, Daugherty began a wholesale “reorganization” of the Department of Justice. This consisted mostly of replacing Democrats with Republican political appointees. Despite his having been closely allied with Palmer, a one-time Democratic hopeful, Hoover readily survived the purge. Since District of Columbia residents could not vote, Hoover did not have to go on record as belonging to any political party. Thus he had no trouble pledging allegiance to the new administration. Even his support of the former attorney general was a plus. Hoover’s proven loyalty to his superiors—particularly his defense of Palmer before the Senate, long after it was either popular or personally advantageous for him to make such a defense—did not go unnoticed.
Nor did Hoover wait shyly to be asked: he lobbied for the job he wanted. One of the most important lessons he’d learned from the Red raids, and especially their aftermath, was the value of establishing a congressional base. As
Palmer’s assistant, he’d become acquainted with many key people on the Hill. Albert Johnson, chairman of the powerful House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, was easily persuaded that Hoover should be given more responsibility. Another influential friend who felt young Hoover merited promotion was Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover’s confidential secretary, Lawrence Richey, who belonged to the same Masonic lodge as John Edgar. There is also some evidence indicating that Hoover received covert support and encouragement from his mysterious friends in military intelligence, Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill and the ubiquitous Major General Ralph H. Van Deman.
It is not known when Hoover and “the father of American intelligence” first met. It may be that Van Deman spotted Hoover as a “comer” while the latter was still working for John Lord O’Brian, and then did what he could to advance his career, as happened with many another promising young protégé. What is known is that in 1922 Van Deman arranged for Hoover to receive a reserve officer’s commission in the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (by 1942, when he resigned his commission, Hoover had risen to lieutenant colonel); that Hoover worked closely with Marlborough Churchill, Van Deman’s successor as head of MID, during the Palmer raids and thereafter; and that Hoover and Van Deman maintained a mutually beneficial relationship that continued until Van Deman’s death in 1952.
*
But probably as important as the recommendations was the fact that Hoover was a specialist whose particular knowledge and talents were much appreciated by the new administration. With the departures of Garvin, Burke, and, finally, Flynn, Hoover probably knew more about American radicalism than any other man in government. And he certainly knew more about the files, since he’d created them.
Hoover also boosted his candidacy with what was, in effect, a little Red scare of his own. When Daugherty first become attorney general, in March 1921, he’d shown no interest in “the menace”; by August he had all the fanaticism of the newly converted. In the interim, Hoover had inundated the AG with memos, as well as a weekly intelligence digest, on radical activities both in the United States and abroad.
†
The attorney general was a busy man. Personally involved in much of the corruption that would characterize the Harding administration, he needed five months to get around to “reorganizing” the Bureau of Investigation.
First, he fired Flynn, with a rude telegram, replacing him with his boyhood friend William J. Burns.
Then, four days later—on August 22, 1921, another date every future FBI agent had to memorize—he named twenty-six-year-old John Edgar Hoover to the post he had been lobbying for: assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation.
At the same time, Daugherty also transferred the General Intelligence Division from the Department of Justice to the Bureau of Investigation, where it remained under Hoover’s direct command. Thus Hoover, in addition to helping run the Bureau, retained control of both the GID and his ever-growing files.
Albeit unknowingly, Daugherty had made an almost permanent appointment. Hoover would remain in the Bureau until the day he died, his image and that of the organization becoming so indistinguishable that few would recall that the Bureau of Investigation had been in existence more than a dozen years before Hoover joined it or that it had already had a checkered past.
It had, for starters, been born illegitimately, on July 1, 1908. It was, as one congressman had correctly labeled it at the time, a “bureaucratic bastard,” the issue of a union unsanctioned by the Congress of the United States. However, its father was known. He was Charles Joseph Bonaparte, American-born grandnephew of Napoleon I, and attorney general of the United States from 1906 to 1908.
Bonaparte had first approached Congress in 1907, requesting authorization for “a small permanent detective force” in the Department of Justice. Although charged with the “detection and prosecution of crime against the United States,” his department had no investigators of its own; agents had to be borrowed from the Secret Service, which was under the Treasury Department. This, as Bonaparte pointed out, presented numerous problems. Since Treasury had to be informed of the reason for the loan, there was little chance of keeping an investigation confidential. Also, agents often were less than the best, those made available being those most easily spared. And they were temporary, lent out on a case-by-case basis. As is not uncommon with temporary help, an individual might want to make his employment permanent. As Bonaparte explained it, “If you pay him by the job and make his continued employment dependent on finding more jobs, you run the danger…of making him what they call abroad an ‘agent provocateur,’ a person who creates the crime in order that he may get credit for detecting and punishing the criminal.”
2
Unconvinced, House Appropriations Committee Chairman James A. Tawney turned down the attorney general’s request.
Bonaparte tried again in April 1908, but his timing couldn’t have been
worse. Congress was in a hurry to adjourn and return home to campaign; and it was widely rumored, though never proven, that the president, Theodore Roosevelt, was already using the Secret Service “to obtain interesting data when the gentlemen of Congress tread, heavily and rashly, on the Primrose Path.”
3
Again Bonaparte emphasized the gravity of the situation. In the antitrust field alone, for example, there were seven or eight very large cases pending, including that of Standard Oil.
The example was not one with which to win the heart of Congress. Many of its members owed election to the very trusts “Teddy” was so determined to bust.
But Congress had still other reasons for opposing a permanent federal police force, which came out during this and subsequent hearings.
Wasn’t there a risk these detectives would become a secret police, carrying out the dictates of whoever was in office?
Bonaparte admitted that “there are certain inherent dangers in any system of police and especially in any system of detective police,” but he assured the congressmen his force would never be used for political purposes.
4
What was to keep them from snooping into the private lives of Americans?
Bonaparte replied, “I do not approve…of the use of a detective force either by the Government or by anybody else for the ascertainment of mere matters of scandal and gossip that could affect only a man’s purely private life.”
5
What about the kind of men he’d employ? one congressman asked, recalling the old adage “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”
“The class of men who do that work as a profession is one you have to employ with a good deal of caution,” Bonaparte granted, yet if he could pick his own men, and train them, he was sure he could create an elite, highly disciplined unit.
6
Every new agency
starts
small; what was to keep this one from growing into just another appropriations-eating monster?
He wanted to keep its size down, Bonaparte explained, because he was convinced a small force would be not only more effective, having its own esprit de corps, but easier to supervise.
What controls, if any, would there be over these federal detectives?
“The Attorney General knows, or ought to know, at all times what they are doing,” Bonaparte observed. Then, too, Congress could investigate any alleged abuses.
7
One congressman noted that he could see the day when the bureau might hide things from Congress. Bonaparte deemed this unlikely.
Congressman J. Swagar Sherley, Democrat of Kentucky, found still another reason for opposing a federal police force. “In my reading of history I recall no instance where a government perished because of the absence of a secretservice force, but many there are that perished as a result of the spy system. If
Anglo-Saxon civilization stands for anything, it is for a government where the humblest citizen is safeguarded against the secret activities of the executive of the government.”
8
Had the representatives been more charitably disposed, they might have simply voted down the attorney general’s request. Instead they added a rider to the Sundry Appropriations Act—which became effective at the beginning of the new fiscal year, July 1, 1908—prohibiting the Justice Department from even borrowing agents from the Secret Service.
In their arguments, however personal or partisan their reasoning, the congressmen had foreseen almost every problem the Bureau would have in the years ahead, with a single exception: although they feared the use a president or attorney general might make of such a police force, they failed to consider the possibility that its own chief might someday become so powerful that he would dictate to presidents, attorneys general,
and
Congress.
Unlike his granduncle, Bonaparte refused to accept his defeat. Using his limited discretionary funds, he quietly went shopping—in the Treasury Department. Unfortunately for his purposes, the most experienced Secret Service agents were also the best paid, so he had to compromise between quality and quantity, finally choosing nine men.
On June 30, just hours before the deadline, the nine resigned from the Treasury Department and were immediately put on the Justice Department’s payroll.
With the nine, plus a number of examiners and accountants whom Bonaparte transferred from other parts of Justice the next day, the attorney general now had his elite detective force—very elite, consisting of just twenty-three men—although another year passed before Bonaparte’s successor, George Wickersham, christened it the Bureau of Investigation (BI), and not until 1935 did it become known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
On July 26, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt issued a presidential order authorizing Attorney General Bonaparte’s permanent subdivision, thus giving it a sort of postdated legitimacy.
Predictably, Congress complained, but not too loudly. No one wanted to be accused of aiding and abetting criminals, especially during an election year. There were additional hearings, but since they were now dealing with a fait accompli, little came of them. The need for controls was much discussed, but no one ever got around to voting any. Also, ever pragmatic in such matters, Congress quickly realized that a new bureau meant new patronage appointments.
So the “bureaucratic bastard” was born and belatedly legitimized. As its first chief, Bonaparte appointed Stanley W. Finch, his head examiner, who served until 1912.
By then the Bureau had grown in size to just under a hundred men and,
more important, expanded in directions attorney general Bonaparte had never anticipated.
Perhaps the best capsule description of the new bureau was that of Francis Russell, who called it “an odd-job detective agency with fuzzy lines of authority and responsibility.”
9
The Secret Service guarded the president and chased counterfeiters and spies. The Post Office had its own investigators to ferret out mail fraud. So it was with most of the rest of the agencies of the federal government. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation picked up what was left. In its early years this included investigating: antitrust, banking, bankruptcy, and neutrality violations; crimes committed on Indian reservations; the interstate shipment of stolen goods, contraceptives, obscene books, and prizefight films; and, after 1910, madams, prostitutes, and pimps.
It had taken less than two years for the Bureau to depart from Bonaparte’s promise not to investigate personal morality. Ironically, it did so under a mandate from Congress.
The White Slave Traffic Act of 1910—best known by the name of the congressman who introduced it, James Robert Mann of Illinois—was aimed at the traffic in foreign-born prostitutes. But prostitution also had its American roots, as the special agents soon discovered.
As a first step in enforcing the new law, an attempt was made to survey every known house of prostitution in the United States. The madams and each of their “girls” were questioned to determine their true names, places of birth, business histories, and procurers’ identities. Unscheduled spot checks followed, although these often netted less usable evidence than did informers. Many of the madams became regular “Bureau sources,” not only turning in their competitors but providing information on wanted fugitives, fencing operations, and other crimes. Such information would, in a few years, lead to the killing of John Dillinger and the capture of Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, last member of the infamous Ma Barker gang.