Official and Confidential

  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 …’

  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.

&nbs
p; 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

  The 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.