Official and Confidential (7 page)

For Edgar's brother, Dickerson, who was also helping out with the bills, it was galling to see Edgar bringing extravagant presents home to Annie. Dickerson, now a senior official at the Commerce Department, was jokingly called ‘the General' in the family. Edgar, the younger man, remained ‘the Major.' ‘And how is the
attorney
tonight?' Dickerson would inquire mockingly when Edgar appeared. Edgar, increasingly conscious of his status, was not amused.

At work at the Justice Department, Edgar was living up to his mother's expectations and more. In November 1918, two months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, he had been elevated to the grade of Special Attorney, with a salary of $2,000 a year – as much as his father had earned at sixty.

Though still a lowly unknown, Edgar was already working on his image – by altering the way he styled himself. Until now he had initialed documents ‘JEH' or signed himself ‘J. E. Hoover,' with a flourish to the loop of the ‘J.'. That, apparently, would no longer do. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,' the name that was to become part of the American lexicon, was about to be born.

Edgar would claim he first changed his signature in 1933, after being refused credit at a clothing store because another John E. Hoover had failed to pay his bills. Like so much of the past according to Edgar, this was not true. It was on December 30, 1918, two days before his birthday, that the young man's pen hovered over an otherwise dull memorandum for John Lord O'Brian. He signed it, with a truly enormous flourish, ‘J. Edgar Hoover.'

Perhaps, just weeks after his humiliation at the hands of Alice, Edgar simply needed to give his ego a boost. The man who headed the Bureau of Investigation at the time, and who had advanced Edgar's career, styled himself A. Bruce Bielaski. Looking back, waspish Justice Department veterans concluded that Edgar – already imagining himself at the top of the bureaucratic pecking order – was aping Bielaski.

O'Brian, who also propelled Edgar on his path to power, spoke cautiously about him while he was alive. He survived, however, to the great age of ninety-eight, outliving Edgar by a few months. Before his own death, O'Brian was asked about his role in furthering the career of the youth who became J. Edgar Hoover.

‘This,' the old man admitted, ‘is something I prefer to whisper in dark corners. It is one of the sins for which I have to atone.'

4

‘I always worry when I see a nation feel that it is coming to greatness through the activities of its policemen.'

Cyrus Eaton, industrialist and critic of J. Edgar Hoover

T
he elevation of Edgar came thanks to an opportunistic Attorney General and his anti-Communist witch-hunt. Were it not for chance, and an odd combination of circumstances, it might never have happened at all.

As America celebrated the end of the war, Edgar's future was uncertain. With the War Emergency Division about to be disbanded, he started looking for a new job. He applied to join the Bureau of Immigration, was turned down, then went to his boss, John Lord O'Brian, and asked for a transfer to the Bureau of Investigation. He did not get that either, but O'Brian mentioned his name to the Attorney General-designate Mitchell Palmer, the ‘Fighting Quaker.'

A clutch of senior officials, including O'Brian, quit the Bureau as soon as possible once Palmer was named for the post. During the war, when he had been Alien Property Custodian, millions of dollars in seized German assets had ended up in the hands of Palmer's Democratic cronies. He had ambitions to be President and saw the Justice Department merely as a stepping-stone. Just when he needed one, a political bandwagon appeared – in the shape of a wave of hysteria about Bolshevism.

Palmer took office in spring 1919, as Lenin was calling for world revolution. After months of horror stories about socialist upheaval in Europe, the American middle classes
were shocked by waves of strikes at home – 3,000 that year alone. Then a bombing campaign began, including a midnight attack on the home of the new Attorney General. The Senate called for a probe into an alleged plan to overthrow the government, and Congress funded an all-out investigation of radical groups.

The great Red scare had begun. Palmer hired William Flynn, former Chief of the Secret Service, to head the Bureau of Investigation, with Frank Burke, the Secret Service's former Russian expert, as second-in-command. As he cast around for assistants in his own department, Palmer remembered Edgar Hoover – one of only two wartime legal staffers who had asked to stay on.

A Secret Service check on Edgar turned up nothing remarkable – except that his father was now ‘very ill' in an asylum, and that Edgar was paying the bills. At twenty-four, Edgar became a Special Assistant to Palmer and head of a new section formed to gather evidence on ‘revolutionary and ultra-radical groups.'

His day-to-day chores were directed by Assistant Attorney General Francis Garvan, a counter-subversion zealot with a visceral hatred of foreigners – and Edgar soon became known as ‘Garvan's pet.' The job was tailor-made for the young man who had once delighted in sorting his books and keeping a record of his clothes sizes, then gone on to toil among the stacks at the Library of Congress. He now used his experience at the Library to build a massive card index on left-wingers.

The index proved to be astoundingly efficient by the standards of the time, the nearest thing to today's instantaneous retrieval by computer. Names and cross-references could be located within minutes. Half a million names were indexed during this, Edgar's first big operation, along with biographical notes on 60,000 people.

Edgar immersed himself in Communist literature. ‘I studied,' he was to recall, ‘the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as the activities of the Third International.'
Those doctrines, he reported to his superiors, ‘threaten the happiness of the community, the safety of every individual … They would destroy the peace of the country …'

As a reading of Soviet Communism, this was accurate enough. Yet few historians believe there was any real risk of violent revolution in the United States in the twenties. In the wake of the bombings, however – not least thanks to Palmer and his bright young men – the country lost its balance.

Edgar's chosen assistant was George Ruch, a friend from high school days who held extreme right-wing views. Ruch's concept of democracy is summed up in one of his reports, which expressed astonishment that left-wingers – like other citizens – ‘should be allowed to speak and write all they wish against this government …'

Later, when Ruch left the Bureau to head the Industrial Police for a Pittsburgh coal company, Edgar would assign agents to train the thugs he used against labor activists. Ruch named his son J. Edgar, and Edgar described Ruch as ‘one of my most personal friends.' He addressed him affectionately as ‘Blimp.'

One way to deal with dangerous radicals, the pair advised their superiors, was to throw them out of the country – by applying a law that made mere membership in radical organizations a deportable offense.

There followed a season of oppression remembered by Judge Lawrence Brooks of Massachusetts, who personally witnessed some of its outrages, as ‘the sorriest episode in the history of our country, not excepting the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy.'

It began on November 7, 1919 – carefully selected because it was the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution – with raids on the offices of the Union of Russian Workers in a dozen cities. Hundreds of suspected revolutionaries were arrested, many severely beaten. Almost all were subsequently released, either because they were not foreigners at all, or could not conceivably be called revolutionaries. The raids
were carried out by police and Bureau of Investigation agents, but ‘handled' at the Justice Department by Edgar.

The next stage of the operation gave Edgar his first taste of publicity, and one of the few opportunities he ever had to present a case in court. It was he who ensured the deportation of Emma Goldman, known to modern moviegoers as the anarchist, critic of organized religion and campaigner for birth control featured in the film
Reds
. She was also an active proponent of free love, whose intercepted letters were, Edgar said, ‘spicy reading.' As an extreme radical
and
scarlet woman, she was anathema to him.

Getting Goldman deported was a tall order. She had been living in the United States for thirty-four years, since long before Edgar was born, and her father and former husband had become U.S. citizens. Edgar achieved it, however, following a massive probe, claiming that the husband's citizenship had been obtained by fraud and that Goldman's speeches inspired the assassin who killed President McKinley eighteen years earlier.

Four days before Christmas 1919, at two o'clock in the morning, Edgar and Bureau Chief William Flynn boarded a cutter to Ellis Island, in New York Harbor. There they confronted Goldman, her lover, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other deportees, as they boarded the troopship that was to carry them to Russia. Edgar described the experience to the press the next day with relish, promising that ‘other Soviet Arks will sail for Europe, just as soon as it is necessary, to rid the country of dangerous radicals.'

On New Year's Day, Edgar had little time to celebrate his birthday. The countdown had started for the biggest Red Raid of all. On January 2, police and Bureau agents arrested some 10,000 people in twenty-three cities – again with brutality and violations of civil rights. Most of those seized turned out to be innocent and were eventually released.

Attorney General Palmer and his department came under intense criticism. Louis Post, the Assistant Secretary of Labor
who ruled on the deportations, described the operation as a ‘gigantic and cruel hoax.' Though Edgar was to claim he had ‘nothing to do with the raids,' had ‘no responsibility,' it is clear he and Ruch were the key men at headquarters on the night of the raids.

Bureau orders, sent to field offices by Assistant Bureau Chief Frank Burke, told agents to ‘communicate by long distance to Mr Hoover any matters of vital importance which may arise during the course of the arrests.' Burke, according to Agent James Savage, had long since ‘taken a shine to Hoover, taught him everything he knew, trained him and developed what talents he had.'

Edgar used the Bureau to spy on lawyers who represented those arrested or worked to expose the abuse of civil rights. The investigation of the latter, he ordered, was to be ‘discreet and thorough.' One of the targets was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, then a distinguished Harvard Law School professor. Edgar was to keep tabs on Frankfurter for half a century, referring to him privately as ‘the most dangerous man in the United States.' As late as 1961, when Frankfurter was on the Court, an old report surfaced to haunt Edgar. Dated 1921 and signed ‘J. E. Hoover,' it identified Frankfurter as a ‘disseminator of Bolshevik propaganda.' In the flap that followed, Edgar tried to say the report had been issued by someone else.

‘Hoover lies when he denies responsibility for the Red Raids,' Frankfurter told his law clerk Joseph Rauh. ‘He was in it – up to his ass.'
¹

Edgar claimed he had only been carrying out policy as instructed by others. This was a man, John Lord O'Brian would recall, ‘willing to carry out orders at any time.' Judge Anderson, who presided at the deportation hearings, had no time for such officials. ‘Talk about Americanization!' he snorted. ‘It is the business of every American citizen who knows anything about Americanism to resign if given such instructions.'

Neither Edgar nor Attorney General Palmer and the rest of his staff suffered the disgrace that should have resulted from the Red Raids. Congressional inquiries dragged on for so long – until a new Attorney General had been appointed under a new President – that everyone responsible escaped retribution.

Edgar had learned lessons he would not forget. For one thing, he now knew that state oppression could work in the United States. In spite of the furor, American Communists had suffered a crippling reversal. Party membership, estimated at about 80,000 before the raids, dwindled to 6,000 by late 1920.

Edgar also discovered it was possible to spy on people and hunt them down – not because of crimes but because of their political beliefs. To avoid being caught in the act, Edgar now knew, it was vital to ensure that – technically, at least – ‘due process' was always observed. He also learned that a way had to be found to keep the investigator's greatest treasure, his secret files, out of the public eye. Too many embarrassing documents came to light during the Red Raid hearings. Later, as FBI Director, Edgar would perfect a file system that, except on rare occasions, proved inaccessible to outsiders. Documents would be released on occasion, but only when it served Edgar's purpose.

He was also learning about politics and the perils of allegiance to any one man. In June 1920, when Attorney General Palmer went to fight for the presidential nomination at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Edgar went along. ‘At the time,' political veterans recalled, ‘he saw his future tied to Palmer's political fortunes. He served above and beyond the call of duty, and mobilized all his official contacts to serve Palmer's cause.'

Later, after Palmer had failed to get the nomination and the Democrats had been defeated, a Senate probe discovered that Edgar and three other officials had traveled to San Francisco at taxpayers' expense. Edgar claimed he had been on a routine investigation of radicals.

The probe could have cost Edgar his job, and he henceforth posed as a man above politics. He never joined a political party and – as a resident of Washington, D.C. – never voted.
²
‘I don't like labels and I am not political,' he liked to say in public.

This was not true. Edgar was a staunch right-wing supporter of the Republican Party from 1921 until the end of his life. ‘My associations have been with the Republican interests,' he told a former colleague, Denis Dickason, in a private letter after Herbert Hoover's victory in 1929. ‘The results of the last election are particularly gratifying to me …'