Official and Confidential

  Perhaps an alert public should have realized at the time that Hoover’s image was too good to be true. Yet in large measure because the nation’s press was so timid, it did not.

  ‘If we didn’t have Mr Hoover and the FBI,’ a television viewer wrote NBC shortly before the Director’s death, ‘I would like to know how you and I would exist.’ Many ordinary citizens expressed such sentiments.

  Others differed. The poet Theodore Roethke called Hoover ‘the head of our thought police – a martinet, a preposterous figure, but not funny.’ Hoover’s FBI, wrote novelist Norman Mailer, was ‘a high church for the mediocre.’ ‘It was a relief,’ said pediatrician Benjamin Spock on hearing of Hoover’s death, ‘to have this man silenced who had no understanding of the underlying philosophy of our government or of our Bill of Rights, a man who had such enormous power, and used it to harass individuals with whom he disagreed politically and who had done as much as anyone to intimidate millions of Americans out of their right to hear and judge for themselves all political opinions.’

  A former Assistant Attorney General under President Johnson, Mitchell Rogovin, thought Hoover’s life had been ‘a passion play of good and evil. And when there was good, it was hollow.’

  What manner of man stirred such different responses? He came to be regarded, the New York Post once said, ‘with the same awe and reverence accorded the other monuments of Washington. Only he’s closed to the public.’ That a man with a crippled psyche, capable of great evil, became the trusted symbol of all that was safe and good is a paradox of our time. So too is the fact that, in a tribute after Hoover’s death, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said he had ‘epitomized the American dream,’ while renowned psychiatrists consider he would have been well suited for high office in Nazi Germany.

  In spite of all the damaging information that has emerged about Hoover in recent years, and in spite of congressional motions to remove the words ‘J. Edgar Hoover’ from the wall of the FBI headquarters, the building still bears that name, in gold lettering, as though nothing had changed.

  To explore such contradictions is to make a vital journey through the twentieth century, a time of deception and selfdeception about our values, our freedoms and our heroes. Perhaps, because this man’s life spanned a period in which the American dream went so badly wrong, understanding him may help us to understand ourselves.

  To bring him into mortal perspective, J. Edgar Hoover – the child and the man – will remain ‘Edgar’ throughout this book. His story began on a freezing New Year’s morning, more than a hundred years ago.

  2

  ‘The Child is father of the Man.’

  William Wordsworth

  ‘On Sunday January 1, 1895, at 7.30 A.M. J.Edgar Hoover was born to my father and mother, the day was cold and snowy but clear. The Doctor was Malian. I was born at 413 Seward Square, S.E. Wash. D.C …’1

  The boy who was to become the world’s most famous police official kept a dossier on himself as a child. Edgar’s formal report on his own birth fills a page in a small leatherbound notebook, inscribed on the front, in schoolboy handwriting: ‘Mr Edgar Hoover, private.’ It was one day to lie in a muddle of memorabilia, yellowed papers and faded photographs, stored at the House of the Temple, headquarters of the Masons’ Supreme Council, Thirty-third Degree, in Washington, D.C. They transport us into a nineteenth-century world.

  Edgar was born when the Civil War was still a vivid memory, when the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was little more distant in the past than is that of President Kennedy today. The Union Lincoln had forged still had only forty-five member states. The year 1895 saw talk of war with England over territories in Latin America, and soon there would be conflict with Spain, resulting in U.S. conquest of the Philippines. Just four years before Edgar was born, the white man’s war against the Indians ended at Wounded Knee.

  Edgar, who would die in the era of the jumbo jet, was born when Edison’s two inventions, his Light System and his Moving Picture Machine, were still marvels. The telephone was reserved for government officials and the wealthy. There were less than 150 miles of paved road in the nation, and only a few thousand cars. The bicycle, in exotic variety, was the fashionable thing on city streets.

  American cities were already overcrowded, although the great wave of immigration was yet to come. Those earliest immigrants, the blacks, faced renewed persecution as southern states applied racist segregation laws. The morning Edgar was born, a black man was lynched by a southern mob – a common enough occurrence then.

  The whitewashed frame house that was Edgar’s birthplace – a mile or so from the White House – was insulated from all these miseries. His father, Dickerson Hoover, was thirty-eight when Edgar was born, the descendant of settlers who had moved to Washington in the early nineteenth century.

  Later, Edgar’s propaganda department would describe Dickerson as ‘a career man in the government service.’ This was technically true, but the post he held was not grand at all. Like his father before him, he worked as a printmaker for the government mapmaking department.

  Edgar’s thirty-four-year-old mother, Anna, ‘Annie’ to intimates, had a classier background. Her forebears had served as senior local officials in the Swiss village of Klosters, now the celebrated ski resort. They had their own coat of arms and a fine ancestral home next to the church. One scion of the family had become a bishop.

  Annie’s immigrant grandfather had been the first Swiss Consul General to the United States. Her grandmother, besides bearing thirteen children, had found prominence in her own right. A trained nurse known as ‘Mother Hitz,’ she had been a Florence Nightingale to wounded Union soldiers camped on Capitol Hill during the Civil War.

  Edgar’s mother had a privileged upbringing – St Cecilia’s school for girls in Washington, then a convent in Switzerland. The granddaughter who probably knew her best, Dorothy Davy, remembered her as ‘very much a lady, a very interesting person. She was loving, but she was also very proud. Granddaddy was kindly and gentle, but she was the strong one in that combination.’

  A family photograph shows Edgar’s father as a troubledlooking figure of the Victorian clerical class, cramped in high collar and formal dress, his bowler on his knee. His wife stands behind him, severe in high-necked blouse and dark jacket, her hair piled on top of her head, her lips tightly compressed, trying and failing to smile.

  The couple’s marriage, fifteen years before Edgar’s birth, was remembered in the family as ‘the largest wedding Capitol Hill ever had.’ For Annie, such a grand affair may have been in the normal course of things. For Dickerson, of humbler stock, it was probably overwhelming.

  Edgar was the last of four children. A male heir, Dickerson, Jr., had been born in 1880, followed by two daughters, Lillian and Sadie. When Edgar was conceived, his parents were still grieving over Sadie’s death at the age of three, a diphtheria victim before the age of vaccination.

  The earliest photograph of Edgar shows a glum-faced little boy, hunched at his parents’ side wearing a brass-buttoned jacket, a watch chain and knickerbockers. By one account, he was a ‘high-strung’ child, ‘sickly and excessively fearful, clinging to his mother whenever he could.’ He started at Brent Elementary School in 1901, when he was six and as Theodore Roosevelt was about to become President, and he was a star student from the start.

  ‘I passed 5th highest in the first year with an average of 93.8,’ Edgar was to write in his leather-bound notebook. The school reports confirm it. From Third to Eighth Grade, Edgar received ‘Excellent Plus’ or at least ‘Good’ in Arithmetic and Algebra, Grammar and Language, Penmanship and Reading, History and Civics.

  Not only did the teachers report on Edgar, he made notes about them: ‘Miss Hinkle, 4th Grade, who raised me in discipline … Miss Snowden who raised me intellectly [sic]… Miss Dalton, 8th Grade, a fine lady who raised me morally …’ Edgar was never ever, he boasted to his notebook, kept back by the teacher after class.

  When he was old enough, Edgar wo
uld walk the streets of Washington – safe in those days – to meet his father at his office. Dickerson, Sr., seems to have doted on his youngest child, and both the affection and the father’s modest origins shine through the language of a letter Edgar kept. ‘Dear old man,’ Dickerson wrote from St Louis in 1904. ‘I wish you was [sic] here so that I could fight you in the morning. Mamma might think you ain’t strong, but just let her try to fight you and she will find out … Be a good boy. With a big kiss. From Papa.’

  ‘Don’t study too hard,’ the father wrote cheerfully. Annie was different. ‘Study hard both your lessons and your music,’ she wrote, ‘and try to be a good boy … Was so glad to hear you were perfect in your spelling and arithmetic. Take care of everything nicely and don’t run the streets.’ Annie was strict, but according to Dorothy Davy, ‘Edgar, of all her children, was the one she spoiled.’

  In 1906, the year he turned eleven, Edgar started his own ‘newspaper.’ He collected two pages of material each week, and persuaded his elder brother – then twenty-six – to type it up. Edgar called his paper The Weekly Review, and sold it to family and friends for one cent a copy.

  The Review offered snippets of family news along with items about Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin. One early headline reported the marriage of the President’s daughter Alice to the Speaker of the House. Alice Roosevelt, beautiful, brave and outrageous, was the woman of the decade.

  By 1908, when he was thirteen, Edgar was keeping a diary. He noted daily temperatures and cloud cover, births and deaths in the family, his income from doing odd jobs, even lists of his own hat, sock and collar sizes.

  ‘All the family,’ said Edgar’s niece Dorothy, ‘had that horrible thing about organization. Everything had to be organized and catalogued, and the pictures had to be straight on the wall – always. It sounds crazy, but we were all like that.’

  On Sunday evenings, an old man with a flowing white beard would come to dinner. This was Great-Uncle John Hitz, from Annie’s side of the family, and his visits to the Hoovers meant a solemn Bible-reading session. The entire family would kneel while Uncle John, a staunch Calvinist, prayed.

  Contrary to common assumption, though, neither of Edgar’s parents was especially devout. Dickerson considered himself a Lutheran. Annie fitted in but, according to Dorothy Davy, ‘she was a Catholic, more or less. Edgar’s mother attended Catholic schools, and she would die with a crucifix in her hands.’ Edgar’s nephew, Fred Robinette, confirmed that Annie was ‘no Bible-thumper.’ Neither she nor her husband attended church regularly.

  Out of the religious mix came anxiety and confusion. In later life, in an overwrought moment, Edgar’s sister Lillian threw the family Bible into the fire. Edgar, who publicly spoke of himself as a Presbyterian, would consult with Catholic priests. One day, he too would abuse the Bible. In childhood, however, he followed in the pious footsteps of his elder brother, Dickerson.

  Though Dickerson was serious about his devotions, the Church offered more than spiritual solace. It was the keystone of the white Protestant infrastructure, a place where social and career connections were made. At the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, Dickerson found himself a wife.

  Young Edgar tagged along enthusiastically. He sang soprano in the choir, served as altar boy and, at thirteen, was baptized into the Lutheran Church by the minister who had conducted his brother’s wedding. Edgar went to a Passion play, he noted in his Excelsior diary, attended Sunday school and went to a meeting of a group called Christian Endeavour. ‘Read a little of the Gospel of Judas Iscariot,’ he noted one day. ‘(Great Book).’

  The Judas Gospel, as one might expect, is a fictional account written from the viewpoint of Christ’s betrayer. The Judas concept lodged forever in Edgar’s mind; years later he would even have FBI researchers check the biblical details for him. The possibility that he himself might be betrayed – by real or imaginary traitors – would become an obsession.

  Edgar’s childhood dossier on Edgar suggests that he did occasionally have fun like other little boys. He celebrated Groundhog Day, dyed eggs at Easter time and – aged fourteen – ‘gave out Valentines.’ ‘Fooled lots of people,’ he noted with glee on April Fools’ Day. He would also claim, years later and less reliably, that when he played cops and robbers he ‘always wanted to be a robber.’

  Edgar was fascinated by the new phenomenon of manned flight, and built model airplanes with a friend. In 1909, when he was fourteen, he saw Orville Wright make a flight from downtown Washington to Alexandria and back, demonstrating that sustained air travel was possible. In his journal that day, Edgar proudly noted that he had been ‘the first outsider to shake Orville’s hand.’

  In the fall of 1909, Edgar started at a new school – walking three miles there in the morning, three miles home at night. These were his first real steps toward fame and power. For Edgar did not go to Eastern High, the school his brother and sister had attended. ‘His mother,’ said his niece Dorothy, ‘didn’t consider Eastern good enough for him. So he went to Central.’

  Central High School was the breeding ground for a Washington elite, a springboard to success. Its advantages have been compared to those of a top British public school, minus the hideous requirements of class and wealth that form the basis of the English system. Like smart British schools, Central placed great emphasis on sport. While Edgar was a pupil, the school team – which included a future general, a future veterans’ leader and a future president of the Washington Board of Trade – amazed everyone by thrashing the University of Maryland at football, 14–0. Edgar, however, was no sportsman.

  ‘I always wanted to be an athlete,’ he would recall ruefully, ‘but I only weighed 125 lbs in my first year at High School.’ As if to prove that he was plucky for all that, Edgar claimed that a sports injury was responsible for his famous ‘bulldog’ profile. A fly ball, he said, had smashed his nose during a school baseball game. According to Edgar’s niece Margaret Fennell, however, his squashed-looking nose was the legacy of a boil that healed badly.

  Edgar held men with fine physiques in awe. At school it was Lawrence ‘Biff’ Jones, who went on to become a famous football coach at West Point. Biff, the grown Edgar would admit, was the boy on whom he lavished his ‘hero-worship.’ ‘We buddied around together all the time, and it always drew a laugh from our friends to see the big powerful Biff accompanied by a youngster half his size.’

  Edgar threw himself full tilt into the other Central High activity that mirrored the English public school: the Cadet Corps. Central regularly sent graduates to West Point, including – in Edgar’s generation – Jones and several future generals.

  Edgar’s school nickname, one which stuck for years, was ‘Speed.’ A Hoover-approved biography suggested, improbably, that this referred to his dexterity with a football. Elsewhere Edgar would claim it went back to his childhood, when he earned pocket money carrying packages for customers at the local store. He was dubbed Speed, he said, because he ran so fast with the packages.

  Neither explanation was true, according to Francis Gray, a surviving classmate tracked down for this book. ‘We called him Speed Hoover because he talked fast. He was so fast, talked fast, thought fast …’

  The extraordinary rapidity of the adult Edgar’s voice would be one of his hallmarks. ‘Machine gun,’ ‘staccato,’ ‘like a teamster’s whip when aroused’ are typical descriptions of the way he talked. ‘I can take two hundred words a minute,’ one court reporter was to protest, ‘but that man must be talking four hundred a minute.’

  William Sullivan, an FBI Assistant Director who served Edgar for thirty years and then broke with him, had an unkind explanation. ‘He didn’t want a man to ask him any questions,’ said Sullivan, ‘so he’d keep talking right up until the last and then all of a sudden break off the interview and shake hands with the fellow and send him on his way.’2 Sullivan’s complaint was to be echoed by dozens of newspaper reporters. Edgar the FBI Director did not talk with people. He talked at them.
r />   Even as a teenager, Edgar’s mind was closing on the issues that would dominate his times. Seen with hindsight, his performance in the school debating society is revealing. Cuba, then as now a political irritant, was regularly in the news. In the debating society Edgar argued and won the motion that ‘Cuba should be annexed to the United States.’ ‘Neg.,’ for negative, he wrote in his Debate Memorandum Book next to the proposition that capital punishment should be abolished. He reasoned:

  1. The Bible stands for Capital Punishment.

  2. All Christian Nations uphold it.

  3. The abolition of it would be deplorable in effect on a country. (Brief made).

  Edgar would remain in favor of capital punishment for the rest of his life.

  One issue Edgar fought and won in the debating society involved women’s rights – specifically, whether women should be given the vote. Edgar was against it – vociferously so.

  Not everyone took him as seriously as he took himself. ‘My speech is too long. I must condense it,’ Edgar was heard to say after working late into the night preparing for a debate. ‘You can condense steam, Hoover,’ retorted Jeff Fowler, editor of the school magazine, ‘but not hot air.’

  At seventeen, Edgar’s glittering scholastic progress continued. His report cards show that he scored ‘Excellent’ in almost every subject. As he carefully figured out for himself, his average grade was 90 percent or higher. He missed school only four times in four years.

  Edgar simply could not bear to come second. Another contemporary, David Stephens, remembered his reaction when, as a Captain in the Cadet Corps, Edgar’s company failed to win the drill competition. ‘As we marched off the field,’ Stephens recalled in a letter to Edgar forty years later, ‘I wondered if you were crying because you were mad or were mad because you were crying.’