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.
Washington folklore had it that Edgar’s drivers had to keep the car engine
running when they waited for him, even if it meant waiting for hours, so that he was never delayed for an instant. Harold Tyler, an Assistant Attorney General during the Eisenhower administration, discovered this story was true. ‘Hoover came to our house one night,’ he recalled. ‘I thought he’d only stay a short while, but he stayed on and on. I went out for a moment to check on booze or something and I found his driver standing there. He looked very embarrassed and said “I’ve run out of gas.” He’d just been afraid to switch off the engine. Hoover just felt he could get away with these things …’
One morning in 1946, on the way to work, Edgar was to hand Crawford an official letter – notification that suddenly, after thirteen years, he was being promoted to the rank of Special Agent. Noisette was promoted, too, but both went back to their servants’ duties once they had attended the agents’ training program. They were not real agents, just players in one of Edgar’s propaganda games. Leo McClairen, who did become a star agent on the Miami Fugitive Squad, was an exception. He resumed his chauffeur role, however, whenever Edgar visited Miami.
The elevation of a few blacks was merely a plot to placate the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had publicly accused the FBI of having a ‘lily-white’ hiring policy. The Bureau remained a white preserve until the sixties. Jack Levine, the Jewish agent who went through his training in 1961, was appalled to hear instructors refer openly to blacks as ‘niggers.’ One told recruits that the NAACP was a Communist front. A first-aid lecturer said that, while the most effective resuscitation method was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, an alternative system could be used if the victim was black.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy made a sport of nagging Edgar about the need to hire more blacks. He raised the subject again and again, often summoning Edgar back as he was leaving the room to ask, as if it were an afterthought, ‘Oh, by the way, Edgar, how many blacks have you hired this month?’ The Bureau’s whites-only policy was under serious pressure for the first time.
A handful of blacks suddenly found themselves being asked to join the FBI. Aubrey Lewis, a former Notre Dame football star turned coach, found himself seated next to a high-ranking Bureau official at a Hall of Fame dinner attended by President Kennedy. He was recruited soon after, and in June 1962 – along with former Bureau clerk James Barrow – became one of the first two blacks to be admitted to the FBI Academy in Virginia. Both men were soon featured in a carefully orchestrated article in Ebony magazine. The Bureau boasted thirteen blacks by the end of that year, out of a total agent force of 6,000 men.
Edgar remained obdurate to the end. ‘I have not, and will not, relax the high standards which the FBI has traditionally demanded,’ he blustered once the Kennedys were gone. ‘Robert Kennedy became very angry with me over this. I would not yield.’ Edgar and some of his aides claimed there were not enough black applicants good enough to make the grade. Black graduates who were, they said, preferred to take better-paid jobs elsewhere.
Edgar died leaving the Bureau with just seventy black agents, not one of them in a senior post. By 1991 the number had risen to 500, though this was still only 4.8 percent of the total agent force of 10,360. Ugly stories of discrimination against serving black agents continue to surface today.
The sort of agent Edgar did want, veteran agent Arthur Murtagh told a congressional committee in 1978, was ‘a good white Anglo-Saxon, preferably an Irishman with conservative views … another good WASP, and have him apply to the Bureau and see he gets the job – to hell with the qualification…’
Some applicants were rejected just because their faces looked wrong. ‘Didn’t you notice that he has eyes like Robert Mitchum?’ an Agent in Charge once asked Murtagh during the screening of a former Air Force Captain. ‘His eyelids fall down over his eyes. I’d be afraid to recommend him. I got transferred one time for recommending somebody that had acne on his face.’
The way a man thought was most important of all. ‘We’re not interested,’ Edgar claimed, ‘in a man’s politics.’ Not true. The Bureau simply passed over applicants whose earliest interviews indicated liberal ideas, or any deviation from Edgar’s concept of the norm. According to former Agent Jack Levine, recruits were ‘heavily indoctrinated in radical right-wing propaganda.’ Liberals who slipped through the net were moved sideways, if not out, once their deviations were spotted.
Political control extended even to the FBI dress code, which forbade the wearing of red neckties. Agents ended up politically neutered at best, at worst as right-wing zealots. ‘Mr Hoover,’ said Agent Murtagh, ‘was able over a period of nearly fifty years to bring in thousands of carefully selected agent personnel who were as politically disposed to the right as he was … The result, because of the way he used those agents, was an unbalanced, damaging influence on American culture.’
A few brave agents started speaking out against Edgar’s policies soon after he became Director. In 1927 Senator Thomas Walsh, a known critic of the Bureau, received an acid memorandum from a former Agent in Charge, Franklin Dodge. He told of unfair treatment of staff, the twisting of facts to give the Bureau credit that really belonged to the police, illegal pursuit of radicals and improper collaboration with right-wing journalists. Edgar himself, Dodge claimed, had been ‘junketing around the country’ with his ‘wet nurse’ friend Frank Baughman, spending taxpayers’ money on personal pleasure trips.
Two years later another former Agent in Charge, Joseph Bayliss, sent a detailed complaint to the Attorney General. He spoke of an agency in which bureaucratic perfection was more important than investigation of crime, of a punishment system that terrorized men and destroyed individual initiative. He accused Edgar, accurately, of giving jobs to his former law school classmates, and of making appointments ‘to please certain politically influential persons … U.S. senators.’ Bayliss thought his complaint would be ignored – and it was.
Michael Fooner, a member of the Bureau’s Technical Section in the thirties, made the mistake of supporting the formation of an FBI branch of the Federation of Government Employees. Forty years later, when he obtained his file under the Freedom of Information Act, he was astonished to discover it was six inches thick. The Bureau had watched him throughout his subsequent career, occasionally letting other government agencies know that he was a subversive character.
‘Fear,’ one agent would complain, ‘actuates every move made by the employees …’
In 1929, however, as Edgar marked his thirty-fourth birthday, real success still eluded him. His revamped Bureau might be clean as a whistle, but it was rather obscure. So was Edgar. In an article about a half-dozen Washington officials who all happened to be called Hoover, he was listed last – two below his elder brother Dickerson, by this time an important official at the Department of Commerce.
These were doldrum days in Washington. After the years of drift under Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover was beginning the third consecutive Republican reign at the White House. Within months, this businessman president would fail to realize the gravity of the Wall Street Crash, and would announce the Depression ‘over’ when the real misery was yet to come.
By 1932 more than 13 million Americans, a quarter of the work force, were unemployed. Thousands of men and women stood in soup lines. A million and more were homeless. President Hoover’s very name had become synonymous with economic blight. There were Hoover blankets, the newspapers used by the destitute to ward off the cold; Hoover flags, pockets empty of money; and Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the homeless.
Edgar allowed the Bureau to be used – entirely improperly – to silence one of the President’s persistent critics. He sent no fewer than five agents to interrogate the publisher of the Wall Street Forecast, George Menhinick, who had been printing articles on the dire state of the nation’s banks. ‘Menhinick,’ Edgar reported with satisfaction, ‘was considerably upset over the visit of the agents … He is thoroughly scared, and I do not believe that he will resume the dissemination of any information concer
ning the banks.’
Then, on a March night in 1932, the disappearance of a baby from a nursery in New Jersey brought a much needed diversion for the President and a first taste of fame for Edgar. The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son, and the subsequent discovery of his body, caused an explosion of publicity. In a time of gloom, the aviation pioneer was a symbol of all that was positive about America. The President sent Edgar to the scene of the crime as his personal representative.
The case did not go well. In spite of publicity touting Edgar as a ‘world authority on crime,’ his involvement brought no magical breakthrough. Scornful of the Sherlock from Washington, local police told how, spotting a pigeon perched on the eaves of the Lindbergh residence, Edgar wondered aloud whether it was a homing pigeon bearing a message from the kidnappers.
One agent on the case, John Trimble, recalled being ‘stationed at a hotel in Trenton … solely for the purpose of relaying any news break to Mr Hoover so he could get it to the press …’ Edgar, Trimble thought, was just ‘using the case for publicity purposes.’
One of the shrewdest minds on the investigation was that of Elmer Irey, head of the Internal Revenue Service’s intelligence unit. It was he who saw to it that part of the ransom money was paid in identifiable notes and certificates, the measure that eventually led to the capture of alleged murderer Richard Hauptmann. Yet Edgar tried to have Irey removed from the case, upsetting Charles Lindbergh in the process.
According to Trimble, Edgar placed Irey and one of his aides under Bureau surveillance. It was the start of a long enmity. Five years later, long after the case was resolved, Irey would still be having his phone checked for signs of Bureau wiretapping.