Official and Confidential (6 page)

A photograph from those days shows Edgar at the center of a group of students, hands thrust deep in pockets, a flower in his buttonhole, a grave expression on his face. ‘He was slim, dark and intense,' a classmate recalled. ‘He sat off by himself against the wall, and always had the answers. None of us got to know him very well.'

As manager of his fraternity house, Edgar proved to be a budding despot. He reportedly ‘took a dim and moral view of such chapter-house capers as crap games, poker and drinking bouts.' He ‘located our contraband,' recalled Dave Stephens, who had also been at Central with Edgar, ‘and destroyed it by sending it crashing to the concrete areaway.' ‘Speed chastised us with his morality,' recalled actor William Gaxton.

While the nickname Speed stuck, some students hit on a crueler one. ‘We men who received C's,' said GWU alumnus C. W. Collier, ‘called Hoover, who received A's, “Fatty-pants.”'

Edgar had no time for the slew of writers and thinkers then changing social and political attitudes around the world. Not for him the ideas of Freud and George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx and John Reed, Pankhurst or Bertrand Russell. His favorite poets, he let it be known, were Edgar Guest and Vash Young and Robert Service, the he-man poet who told America that:

… only the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the weak shall perish, and only
the fit survive.

Edgar received his Bachelor of Law degree, without honors, in the summer of 1916. America, meanwhile, was moving closer to entering the war in Europe. There were problems at home – anarchist bombs, strikes, workers' demands for shorter working hours. Henry Ford was forced
to agree to equal pay for women – $5 a day – and a woman was elected to Congress for the first time. President Wilson promised that all women would soon get the vote. Then, on April 6, 1917, after he had told Congress ‘the world must be made safe for democracy,' the United States declared war on Germany.

That same day, his mental health now seriously impaired, Edgar's father gave up work for good. Though Edgar was now the highest-paid youth in his grade at the Library of Congress, the family faced penury. On July 25, when he learned he had passed his bar exams, Edgar quit the job at the Library. The next day, for a few dollars more, he began work at the Department of Justice.

Edgar would in future imply that he got the government job on his own initiative. In fact he almost certainly got it thanks, once again, to Bill Hitz. Hitz, by then a judge, had clout. He counted the President and Supreme Court Justice Brandeis among his friends, and himself held a senior post at the Justice Department. With connections like that, it was easy to find a place at Justice for a needy young relative.

Edgar would say his first post had been a ‘clerkship.' His personnel file describes him as having been a ‘Special Employee.' In fact he worked in the mail room. Bruce Bielaski, a senior official, recalled how – on the trolley to work one day in 1917 – he found himself talking shop with his neighbor, mail room chief George Michaelson.

Michaelson dropped the name of a young lawyer he had sorting mail, ‘one of the brightest boys around.' ‘You don't need anybody with brains doing that,' said Bielaski. ‘If you want him,' Michaelson replied, ‘you can have him.'

That conversation on the trolley was a fateful one for America. Bruce Bielaski was Director of the Bureau of Investigation, direct forerunner of what we know as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI.

The Bureau had been created in 1908, in the face of congressional fears that its powers might be used for
oppressive political ends, and that it might end up under the control of one man. It was used to probe crimes that involved the crossing of state boundaries, antitrust and banking violations, and – notoriously – offenses against the Mann Act, which made it a crime to carry a woman across state lines for ‘immoral purposes.'

Bureau Chief Bruce Bielaski did not forget the young man his neighbor had recommended – though he did not bring Edgar into the Bureau. Instead he told John Lord O'Brian, head of the War Emergency Division, about Edgar. On December 14, 1917, the name of ‘Mr Hoover, special agent,' appeared for the first time in an O'Brian memorandum.

So, a month short of his twenty-third birthday, Edgar shot from sorting mail to deciding what to do with suspect foreigners. Three years of propaganda had brought the nation to a fever-pitch of hysteria about German spying and sabotage – although Bureau operations never caught a single spy or saboteur. It fell to the Justice Department to decide the fate of many German aliens.

The first faded memos of Edgar's prodigious career tell their own story. A German alien aged eighteen arrested on the Texas border for mouthing support for the Kaiser – Edgar recommended detention until the end of the war. Another German called President Wilson ‘a cocksucker and a thief.' Edgar recommended internment again. He was overruled, on the ground that angry talk hardly justified such drastic punishment.

In 1918 Edgar worked on a drive to register all German women in the United States. That June, when
The Washington Post
reported that the work was going slowly, he rushed off a memo denying it. He would detest the
Post
and
The New York Times
all his life, would specifically exclude them from his daily reading, claiming that they ‘distort and slant the news.' ‘When they throw brickbats at the FBI,' he was to say, ‘I'm happy – brickbats from some people are like bouquets.'

Edgar worked seven days a week in 1918, often into the night, and his boss took note. ‘Hoover,' O'Brian observed then, ‘is a conscientious and honest fellow.' Edgar received three pay increases in his first year at Justice, doubling his starting salary. Yet there was something odd about all this. Why had this twenty-three-year-old not gone to war?

All American males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty were required to register for military service within weeks of the declaration of war. As the government raised an army for the war in Europe, the first officers' training camp opened in Washington. Three million men would be drafted before it was over. One hundred and fifty thousand of them would die. There was a surge of righteous anger against young men who avoided the draft. In one roundup alone, 60,000 men were picked up in New York City, 27,000 in Chicago.

Edgar was a perfect draftee: a fit man in his early twenties, with years of officer training behind him at a school with strong links to West Point. Many of his former classmates did march off to the training camps, and some were sent to the trenches in France, but not Edgar.

He would later make much of his readiness to serve his country – once the hell of World War I was over. In 1922 he would obtain a commission as Major in the U.S. Army Officers' Reserve. In World War II, by which time he would be in his late forties, he would hold the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Military Intelligence Reserve – and resign only at the insistence of the Secretary for War, who said he could best serve his country as Director of the FBI.

Two decades later, Edgar would tell a newspaper that he stayed out of uniform in World War I for the same reason – because his ‘superiors persuaded him that he could perform a more valuable service in espionage work.' Yet his voluminous staff file, filled with the details of the World War II period, is silent on World War I.

‘Espionage work' is an inflated way to characterize Edgar's
pen-pushing pursuit of aliens. His name, moreover, does not appear on the register of 102 Department of Justice employees who were given occupational exemption from military service. Sons who could prove they were the family breadwinner were eligible for exemption, but it is not known whether Edgar made such a claim.

Had he wanted to serve, as did so many of his classmates, he would have done so. The youth who enthused about the Cadet Corps more than anyone required, who as a grown man would cultivate military men as friends and contacts, who would one day persecute Vietnam War draft resisters, who would delight in combat metaphors in future speeches, could have been expected to rush to the recruiting office. Yet he flinched from doing so.

Edgar, the man whose bachelor status was to spark endless gossip, considered marriage in the closing months of the war. The episode proved a devastating emotional setback, one that may have played a key role in triggering his sexual ambivalence.

The account came from Helen Gandy, the woman who served as Edgar's confidential secretary for fifty-three years. In conversations before her death in 1988, the usually tightlipped Gandy revealed a sad story of frustrated courtship. When he was twenty-four, said the former secretary, Edgar saw a good deal of a young woman named Alice. She, too, worked in the War Emergency Division, and she was apparently the attractive daughter of a prominent Washington attorney – a factor that increased Edgar's interest. Should the end of the war bring the end of his job at the Justice Department, Edgar hoped for a job in his law firm.

On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Edgar was visited at his office by a friend named Sidney Kaufman. Kaufman was bursting to tell his news – he and his girlfriend planned to announce their engagement that very evening at Harvey's Restaurant, the Washington watering hole Edgar would
patronize all his life. Edgar and Alice were invited to celebrate with them.

According to Gandy, Edgar decided he and Alice would also get engaged that evening. He sent her a note, asking her to meet him en route to the restaurant, at the Lafayette Hotel. Alice, however, did not turn up. She soon became engaged to another man, a young officer who – unlike Edgar – had gone to war.

Helen Gandy did not divulge the full name of Edgar's lost love. There is no reason, though, to doubt the story. Gandy talked about aspects of that evening in 1918 with two FBI officials, and she was a firsthand witness to Edgar's humiliation. She herself had been present at Harvey's that night, as the partner of one of the men at the party, and it was then that Edgar, in his loneliness, first took notice of her.

‘Miss Gandy told me they had several dates,' Edgar's future aide Cartha DeLoach recalled. ‘They had a good time, but they weren't attracted to each other in that way. It cooled off, but later – when he needed a secretary – he called her.' Gandy, who was already working at the Bureau as a messenger, became a confidential clerk in Edgar's office just months later – and remained at his side from then on.

‘The shock never really wore off,' Gandy said of the Alice episode. The hurt was the greater because, Edgar discovered, the girl he hoped to marry had been romancing her army officer through the mail – while he was away at the front – all the time she was seeing Edgar. ‘This,' Gandy said, ‘may have been part of why Mr Hoover never really trusted women in that way, why he never married.'

Edgar must have been thinking of Alice when, in 1955, he made a rare comment on his relations with women: ‘I was in love once when I was young,' he told reporter Fletcher Knebel. ‘I guess you'd call it puppy love …' He told another interviewer that, in his experience, women he wanted to marry were always involved with someone else.

‘Here is something I will confess,' Edgar said in an unusually
frank interview in 1939. ‘If I ever marry and the girl fails me, ceases to love me, and our marriage is dissolved, it would ruin me. My mental status couldn't take it, and I would not be responsible for my actions.' The phrase about ‘mental status' was deleted in reprints of the interview.

In the same conversation, Edgar gave away more about his attitude. ‘I have always held girls and women on a pedestal,' he said. ‘They are something men should look up to, to honor and worship. If men would remember this and keep them there, married life would be better. I have had that idea about women all my life.'

Edgar's niece Margaret, who saw a lot of her uncle in the decade that followed the Alice fiasco, never saw him with a woman his own age. She laid the blame on his mother. ‘Edgar would never have been able to get married,' she said. ‘Nanny was truly the matriarch … she would have stopped anything rumored.'

Edgar's mother had once tried to do just that. She had tried to prevent her elder son marrying, on the grounds that his intended was not good enough for him. On that occasion she failed, but she would never lose her grip on Edgar.

After the ‘puppy love' experience, Edgar would say years later, his work took the place of women. ‘I became attached to the Bureau, and I don't think any wife would have put up with me.'

For a decade after the setback with Alice – throughout his twenties – Edgar had no emotional connection with anyone except Annie. He would come home each night to Seward Square, first to the tense house dominated by his father's mental illness, then – after Dickerson Sr.'s death – to life alone with Annie. As time passed, even that relationship soured. The strain showed in petty things. Edgar's niece Margaret, who lived with the Hoovers in the twenties, recalled the grown Edgar behaving like a spoiled child. ‘He was quite a tyrant about food … His breakfast – and this goes back to Nanny running the house for him, although they had a cook
– was a full-scale operation … His favorite breakfast was a poached egg on toast, and if that egg was broken, he wouldn't eat it. It went back to the kitchen and another egg was prepared …' Edgar would eat one bite of the second egg, Margaret said, then give it to the dog.

‘Nanny,' recalled Margaret's sister Anna, ‘always liked to leave the shades down all through the back and front parlors, so it was a very cool dark atmosphere when J.E. came home in the evening. Then up went the shades. There was no argument about it. He simply would go around and raise the shades and go up to his room. It was a kind of battle of wits on the part of two very intelligent people … You had two very strong personalities here … It was a case of dominating the situation. She ran a beautiful home for him, but he provided the wherewithal to run it beautifully. And he was very good to her. He'd give her gifts, jewelry, some very nice jewelry …'