Official and Confidential (10 page)

By the end of the war, largely thanks to Crime Records, Edgar also had the Congress in his thrall. The Bureau made contact with and kept files on every single politician who made it to Capitol Hill. Men in key positions were courted assiduously, and most were happy for a chance to share
Edgar's limelight. Far from being a supplicant seeking funds, as were most agency heads, he pulled the strings.

Edgar's annual appearance before the House Appropriations Committee was a cakewalk. He would produce an array of wondrous statistics on crime, alleged FBI successes to make the Bureau look good, coupled with dire warnings to justify his latest request for cash. He was never denied a legislative mandate, and his demands were never refused. From 1924 to 1971 there was not a single public hearing on the FBI budget.

Edgar presented himself as the obedient, even obsequious, servant of authority. In theory his boss was the Attorney General. In practice, once Edgar became a public hero in the thirties, that seniority became nominal. No attorney general dared risk a head-on confrontation with the man who had become a national symbol of integrity and continuity.

The eight presidents he served, of course, had the power to fire Edgar. One or two came close and several yearned to do so, but none succeeded. Edgar had a way of making his services seem essential, and presidents who doubted it dared not offend the powerful forces who believed Edgar's cause was their own.

Edgar's vast filing system was part of his stock in trade. He was proud of it, just as he was proud of his scientific advances. Presidents and politicians, however, had to live with the threat – real or imagined – that those files could bring disaster down on their heads. From routine reports to scandal-filled dossiers, from detailed analyses to random fragments of information, Edgar's paper mountain was both bureaucratic dream and democratic nightmare. Even today, few outside the FBI understand Edgar's record system. While he was alive, no one in the outside world knew anything about it. Edgar's insistence on secrecy, which he defended in the name of protecting privacy, made sure of that.

Edgar's record system included files with names like the
OBSCENE
file, the
SEX DEVIATE
program,
COINTELPRO, OFFICIAL
AND CONFIDENTIAL, PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, JUNE MAIL,
even a
DO NOT FILE
system, so named to keep reports on illegal Bureau break-ins out of the central record system.
³

The files remained, always, under the ultimate control of just one man. Edgar's senior men might be brilliant in their specialties or mere time-serving hatchet men. Some were fine men of integrity, others devious creatures capable of great evil. All, though, depended on Edgar in a closed, compartmentalized world that permitted no alliance capable of threatening Edgar's position.

He created this private fiefdom in such a way that – as long as he lived – he had absolute power over those who served him, and the weapons to fend off those who did not. He had, moreover, created an instrument that could be used to undermine civil liberties.

6

‘I want at this time to say that so long as I am Director of the FBI, appointments will continue to be made on merit, without regard to creed, color, or nationality.'

J. Edgar Hoover, 1943

T
hose who knew him at close quarters discovered there was something obsessive about Edgar. The little boy from Seward Square, the offspring of a disturbed father and an ambitious mother, was insistent that everything should run precisely as he directed, that everything should fit his concept of perfection.

This showed itself in the little things, like Edgar's fixation on tidiness. At home, servants would report, there was hell to pay if a bedspread was even slightly askew, a cushion out of place, an undisciplined leaf neglected on the front path. Edgar's first act on reaching the office each morning, his secretary recalled, was to give his shoes a flick with a duster – in case they had lost their sheen during the ride in the car to work.

At headquarters, which Edgar had everyone call the Seat of Government, an official once found himself in hot water because his office window shade was – in Edgar's opinion – pulled down too far. He said it gave the building ‘a messy look from the outside.'

Like Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, Edgar worried constantly about germs. He waged war against them by insisting his office be kept cold, and later by installing an ultraviolet light reputed to eliminate viruses. A servant, armed with a swatter, was assigned to deal with flies. The Director
shrank from physical contact with strangers, especially those with moist palms.

Edgar defended his fragile self like a nuclear bunker. This was a man, his associates learned the hard way, who never – ever – admitted he was wrong; he could not even admit the possibility. Once, when a Special Agent in Charge felt obliged to point out Edgar was quoting incorrect figures, he sat in silence, red as a beet, until the agent slipped quietly out of the room. Later, Edgar crucified the man who had supplied the statistics.

Edgar's officials became expert at dealing with this problem – on issues that mattered and many that did not. When Edgar refused to accept solid research showing the Civil Rights movement was not, as he insisted, Communistinspired, an Assistant Director simply admitted humbly that his report had been ‘wrong.' When Edgar dismissed as ‘baloney' research confirming the existence of the Mafia, its authors did not argue. When Edgar announced his grief at the killing of an agent who had only been wounded, the man's colleagues jokingly drew straws for who would finish him off. The Director was never wrong.

Edgar could be manic about control. One veteran agent inadvertently ruined a cordial meeting by reminding his boss of the good old days when the Bureau had been smaller, when ‘you could personally keep track of everything that was going on.' Edgar exploded. ‘I still know personally
everything
that goes on!' he roared. ‘I still personally
run
this Bureau!' As he ranted on, he reached for the agent's file to score out favorable comments he had made moments before.

The corridor to Edgar's inner sanctum was known as the Bridge of Sighs, and few knew how to handle him better than Sam Noisette, the black receptionist who ushered visitors along it. ‘If it's snowing and blowing outside,' he said, ‘and the Director comes in and says “It's a beautiful sunny day,” it's a beautiful sunny day. That's all there is to it.'

*

At first glance Edgar's corps of agents, the linchpin of his reputation, seemed a representative group. It came to include former farmers, airmen, journalists, a baker, professional football players, cowboys, railway workers and miners. Some had military experience, and Edgar was especially keen on former Marines. He had no interest, however, in hiring blacks, Hispanics or women – and he discriminated against Jews.

Three women were serving as agents when Edgar became Director in 1924. Two he fired within a month. He confirmed the appointment of a third, Leonore Houston, following pressure from her Congressman, but she did not last long. FBI records say she ended up in a mental hospital, ‘threatening to shoot Mr Hoover as soon as she was released.'

From then on Edgar brushed aside all talk of recruiting women, claiming that they ‘could never gunfight, and all our agents must know how to do that.' He remained unmoved, nearly fifty years later, when two feminists sued the FBI, claiming that rejection of their applications violated their constitutional rights. As soon as he died, though, the policy was changed. Today there are nearly 900 female FBI agents, all fully trained in the use of firearms.

To the women he did employ as clerical staff, Edgar behaved like a martinet. He had grown up in a time when women were arrested for smoking in public, so he forbade them to smoke in the office. He refused to let women wear pants to work until 1971. Only then, persuaded by his own secretary that women needed pants to keep warm in the winter, did he capitulate.

Even at that stage, Edgar was still punishing employees for the way they behaved in private. ‘When a girl in the Fingerprint Section got pregnant without being married,' recalled Miami Agent in Charge Kenneth Whittaker, ‘Hoover was furious. He wanted to know who investigated her before we hired her. Was she promiscuous? When he
discovered she was living with a guy, he fired her at once. He didn't want word to get out that we'd hire girls who'd do that.'

Edgar's attitude filtered down to the ranks and generated crude contempt. Female employees were tolerated, said former Agent Cril Payne, ‘only to perform the boring clerical functions required to keep the Bureau paper flowing. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that it was perfectly all right to bullshit 'em and ball 'em; just don't tell 'em any secrets …'

Edgar was apparently prejudiced against Jews. In Miami Beach, where he stayed every Christmas, he invariably chose hotels that – until World War II – carried the sign
NO JEWS, NO DOGS
. He referred to the Irish leader Eamon de Valera, in an early report, as ‘a Portuguese Jew,' and fifty years later dismissed Robert Mardian, an Assistant Attorney General during the Nixon administration, as ‘that Lebanese Jew.' In fact, de Valera was part Spanish, but had no Jewish blood, and Mardian was a Christian, of Armenian descent.

Over the years, two Jews became Assistant Directors. Jewish employees were given days off to observe religious holidays, and Jews once made up most of the FBI basketball team. Yet Jack Levine, a Jew who joined in 1960, calculated that only one half of one percent of Bureau agents were Jewish. He found pervasive discrimination, including a supervisor who said there was nothing subversive about the American Nazi Party, because ‘all they are against is Jews,' and an instructor who described an expert witness as ‘a greasy-looking sheenie.'

Edgar hired hardly any Hispanics. ‘The average Mexican,' he said, ‘is a psychological [
sic
] liar … They have visions probably of making money.' ‘You never have to bother about a President being shot by Puerto Ricans or Mexicans,' he told an interviewer. ‘They don't shoot very straight. But if they come at you with a knife, beware.'

Edgar had no foreign friends, and had a knee-jerk distrust of anyone from a foreign country. Except for a couple of one-day excursions across the Canadian and Mexican borders, he never traveled outside the United States. He once ruled that
Newsweek
correspondent Dwight Martin was ‘not acceptable as an interviewer,' because his Chinese wife, from Hong Kong, had met American naval officers while working as a tailor's assistant.

‘I guess he was afraid she was a spy,' said Martin's colleague Ben Bradlee. ‘It was so stupid. But the really ridiculous thing was the fact that he had that sort of investigation done on a decent, respected reporter just because he'd requested an interview.'

As for black agents, Edgar's attitude was that of most white southerners of his generation. ‘Coloreds' were fine as the help, but they were to be excluded from the professions. The notion that law enforcement officers should address black people courteously seemed outlandish to him as late as 1966. ‘Instead of saying, “Boy, come here!”' he noted scornfully, ‘they want to be addressed as Mr …'

Edgar kept the Bureau in a state of apartheid as long as he possibly could. There was one black agent when he took office, an ‘Uncle Tom' figure called James Amos, who had started out looking after President Theodore Roosevelt's children. He had become an agent thanks to Edgar's predecessor, William Burns, and was used as a penetration agent against black activists. Amos was the first black agent, and would have been the last had Edgar had his way.

Of nine black men who rose from the lower grades in Edgar's first forty years, five served as his personal lackeys.
¹
Edgar's first flunkey was Sam Noisette, who moved up from messenger to become the keeper of his office door. Each morning, when a buzzer alerted him to his master's arrival in the basement garage, Noisette would wait poised to greet him at the elevator. He stayed on hand until Edgar left at night, obsequious to a fault, addressing visitors in a suitably ‘darkey' accent.

Noisette was a competent artist, and Edgar encouraged him. His painting of the Director's dog, Spee De Bozo, hung in Edgar's home, and others were displayed in the anteroom at the office. Edgar reproached aides who failed to attend Noisette's annual exhibition, and some officials bought pictures just to keep the boss happy.

A second black man, former truck driver James Crawford, joined the retinue in 1934 as head chauffeur and handyman. He would arrive at Edgar's house at 7 A.M., having first driven the Director's personal car to headquarters to pick up the official limousine, so that no one could claim an official car was being used on private time. Crawford's working day involved driving Edgar to the office, waiting on standby all day, then working until midnight if his boss had a function in the evening. He was to serve Edgar for thirty-eight years, continuing to work as domestic and gardener after ill health forced him to retire from the Bureau.

Two other blacks, Jesse Strider in Los Angeles and Leo McClairen in Miami, were to chauffeur Edgar during his vacations. Once he became established he used Pierce-Arrow and Cadillac armored limousines, custom-built by Hess and Eisenhardt. Except for the President, he was the only federal official to have the use of such vehicles, apparently because of regular threats against his life. The President, however, had only one such car, which was moved around the country as required. Edgar had three (they would cost $30,000 each by the end of his career) at his disposal in Washington, California and Florida – and at one point a fourth in New York City. On occasion, the cars were moved around by military transport aircraft.