G-Man, page 2
As an appointed official, Hoover sometimes found his professional obligations at odds with his personal views. His greatest abuses of power tended to occur in just such situations. When Hoover wanted to target a particular group or individual but did not necessarily have the law on his side, he turned to the tried-and-true method of secrecy. He created COINTELPRO, now the most notorious program of his career, in order to continue attacking the Communist Party once the Supreme Court ruled other techniques unconstitutional. He justified bugging Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms as a vital national-security imperative, though he acknowledged that the FBI would be subjected to ferocious criticism if caught. During Hoover’s lifetime, there were no congressional intelligence committees to hold the Bureau to account. Even his ostensible boss, the attorney general, did not necessarily have access to Bureau files. With good reason, Hoover expected that everything the FBI did would remain secret unless he dictated otherwise. Partly as a result, FBI files are filled with remarkably candid discussions of his strategies, priorities, and prejudices.
If Hoover’s outsize faith in his own judgment often pushed the FBI into questionable and even illegal territory, on occasion it also led him to take enlightened positions and to ally with unlikely bedfellows. During World War II, he opposed Japanese internment on grounds that it was unconstitutional and likely to disrupt the FBI’s home-front policing. He built working relationships with the NAACP and the ACLU, activist organizations whose leaders would later view those collaborations with dismay. During the 1940s, he faced down white Southern opposition in order to investigate racial lynchings, convinced that the FBI’s legitimacy was at stake. In the 1950s, he quietly helped to destroy Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he viewed as a friend but also as a loose-cannon threat to the anticommunist cause. In the years that followed, he initiated famously vicious campaigns against civil rights and New Left activists, including King. To a lesser degree, he also went after the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist groups, viewing them as dangerous vigilantes. When Nixon became president, Hoover was thrilled to have a close friend in office but opposed Nixon’s attempts to undermine FBI independence and use its agents as a personal dirty-tricks squad.
While Hoover occasionally made common cause with liberals and civil libertarians, he found his deepest affinities among conservatives, men and women who shared his views on race, religion, and Reds, the three volatile R’s of mid-century politics. Anticommunism defined Hoover’s outlook, the first principle of a worldview that extended from weighty matters of foreign policy and political surveillance down to the advice he regularly doled out to American parents. Seeking to understand the rise of modern conservatism, historians have often emphasized a postwar trajectory leading from William F. Buckley through Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and on up to Ronald Reagan. Hoover’s story suggests a different genealogy: he formed his worldview during the Progressive Era, and changed it little in the ensuing years. His career also underscores the importance of examining those conservatives who exercised real state power throughout the middle of the twentieth century, years supposedly dominated by an entrenched liberal consensus.[3]
Measured by what he accomplished—not just by what he said—Hoover was among the most powerful conservative political figures of the twentieth century, able to steer the ship of state in his direction even when electoral politics and White House sentiment might have dictated otherwise. He never allied himself with a political party. As a Washington resident, he never even cast a vote. That nonpartisan identity helped him to survive in office as other Washington power brokers fell by the wayside. It also gave him a platform from which to opine as a seemingly objective expert about those groups and individuals he deemed to be dangerous to the country at large. Most of those groups came from the left—not just the Communist Party but also the full array of civil rights, anti-war, New Left, labor, gay rights, and socialist organizations that sprang up over the course of his career to challenge the status quo. But Hoover was never entirely comfortable with his far-right supporters either, viewing many of them as irresponsible conspiracy theorists who detracted from rather than reinforced FBI authority. In choosing which groups to disrupt and which to ignore, Hoover altered the trajectory of American history, turning the FBI into an enforcement arm for his personal vision of national virtue.
How he balanced the competing priorities of his job changed over the course of his half century in office. Hoover came to government work in the chaos of World War I and the first Red Scare, trained early on in the art of political surveillance. When the public turned against such activities, he refashioned himself as a good-government reformer and devotee of civil liberties, dominant features of his image well into the 1940s. Hoover built the FBI while insisting that he opposed the creation of a national police force, positioning himself as a champion of local law enforcement. Once the FBI was firmly established, he turned back to the themes of his early years, proclaiming his Bureau to be the nation’s great bulwark against communism. The 1950s marked the height of Hoover’s popularity. That decade was also the period in which his institutional and ideological agendas most closely aligned. During the 1960s, the FBI slipped into crisis, as Hoover increasingly abandoned the professional, apolitical ethos supposedly at the heart of Bureau operations in favor of crusades against his political and ideological enemies.
Hoover’s determination to forge his own path through American politics does not mean that he ignored popular sentiment; far from it. No modern official better understood how crucial public opinion was to the accomplishment of bureaucratic goals—and to the legitimacy of federal power. As early as the 1930s, polls ranked Hoover as one of the most admired men in America. Even in the 1960s and early 1970s, by far his most controversial years, he was a consistently popular figure. Some of that popularity rested on his ability to keep secrets, to hide from the public what the FBI was really doing. In many cases, though, Hoover was perfectly open about his opinions and priorities. Though many Americans were shocked to learn about COINTELPRO, it is now clear that Hoover informed Congress, the president, and the attorney general about the program in the late 1950s—and none of them registered any objection. And when he revealed his own biases and agenda to the broader public, Americans by and large approved. After he denounced Martin Luther King in 1964 as the country’s “most notorious liar,” polls showed that 50 percent of Americans supported Hoover, while just 16 percent sided with King. The fact that these two men have since exchanged places in our preferred national narrative should not obscure the less palatable historical realities.[4]
If there is a tragic element to Hoover’s story, it is that he failed to abide by his own best principles. And his tragedy, in turn, became our own. Hoover did not invent most of the ideas he espoused. But he legitimated them and knew how to put them into action. His emphasis on professionalism and apolitical expertise insulated him from critics who said he was nothing but a far-right ideologue. Conversely, his declamations on the perils of communism, atheism, social disorder, and defiance of the law gave him a passionate grassroots base all but unheard-of among bureaucrats. It was this combination of factors—openness and secrecy, liberalism and conservatism, hard and soft power—that gave Hoover his extraordinary staying power.
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One challenge of writing about a figure like Hoover is the sheer wealth of material: nearly every chapter in this biography could be a book. Indeed, the most famous episodes in the pages that follow—the Palmer Raids, the capture of John Dillinger, Pearl Harbor, the Hiss case, the Rosenberg trial, COINTELPRO, the Kennedy assassination, the Mississippi Burning murders, the FBI’s surveillance of King and the Black Panthers (just to name a few)—have been the subjects of entire literatures in their own right. The FBI produced paper and then more paper, Hoover’s favorite measure of bureaucratic productivity. And Hoover was an obsessive chronicler of his own history, amassing more than two hundred archival boxes of press clippings over his forty-eight years as director.
In researching Hoover’s life, I have examined hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages of records, ranging from FBI case files to Hoover’s childhood diaries to his correspondence with presidents, celebrities, and friends. Along the way, I have benefited enormously from the work of other scholars and journalists, whose research and writing are discussed in a Note on Sources section at the back of the book. G-Man contains a vast array of new archival material; one thrill of working on a subject like the FBI is that never-before-seen archives and files open on a regular basis. Over the past decade, I have filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, yielding thousands of pages of documents never before studied by historians. I have also taken advantage of important files released by the FBI and other government agencies since the early 1990s, when the last major Hoover biographies were published.[5]
Out of these releases have come many discoveries, archival and interpretive alike. Some pertain to Hoover’s childhood; though he often described an idyllic upbringing, newly available documents show that he grappled with a family legacy of suicide, scandal, mental illness, even violent crime. Others reveal the forces that shaped his early consciousness—most notably, his college membership in Kappa Alpha, a reactionary Southern fraternity that championed racial segregation and Lost Cause culture. Still others offer glimpses into Hoover’s internal life. Understanding his sexuality poses daunting challenges for a biographer—but here, too, new sources (and older sources, now reinterpreted) have helped to make a hidden story more visible. A guarded and secretive man, Hoover could be surprisingly open in correspondence with friends and family. Through these materials, G-Man presents glimpses of his emotional reactions to events ranging from the Kennedy assassination to his own mother’s death. It also offers a reassessment of his relationship with Tolson, by far the most important of his adult life.
When it comes to Hoover’s leadership of the FBI, the new material released, acquired, requested, and discovered since the last major Hoover biographies is nothing short of staggering. Some of it tends to vindicate Hoover, or at least to provide a more accurate understanding of why he behaved as he did. Other new documents show Hoover at his worst, fueled by a toxic blend of defensiveness, racism, and personal rage. Many of my own Freedom of Information Act requests have focused on far-right and white supremacist groups, an area of FBI work far less studied than its repression of the American left. There, it turns out that Hoover did more than he has been given credit for, though not nearly as much as the situation often warranted.
The bulk of Hoover’s energies went into crime fighting, law enforcement, and domestic intelligence, and here there is much new to reveal as well. Chapter 40 takes up one of most oft-cited myths about Hoover—the idea that he denied the existence of organized crime and the Mafia—and shows how the FBI initiated its own secret campaigns against organized crime in the 1950s. Other chapters describe how he developed the FBI’s political surveillance capacities, looking to World War II as well as the postwar Red Scare as crucial years of growth and experimentation.
For better or worse, Hoover had a hand in nearly every event of national significance from the moment he became FBI director in 1924 to the day he died in that post in 1972. His career was made possible not only by his political and bureaucratic genius, but by a transformation in American governance that concentrated power and attention and money at the federal level, and that gave unelected officials like Hoover a critical new role to play. The pages that follow tell that story through the life of a single—and singular—political figure, the twentieth century’s quintessential Government Man. To look at him is also to look at ourselves, at what Americans valued and fought over during those years, what we tolerated and what we refused to see.
Part I
The Federal City
(1895–1924)
Chapter 1
The Oldest Inhabitants
(1800–1895)
Hoover with his parents Annie and Dickerson around 1900. He was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He lived there for the rest of his life.
National Archives and Records Administration
When J. Edgar Hoover told the story of his life, he began with a childhood parable. Even as a little boy, he sought out lessons and morals: “1. Eat slowly. 2. Eat regularly. 3. Do not eat between meals,” he wrote in a childhood newspaper, composed at age eleven. As an adult, he tended to describe his early years as a series of edifying adventures, each building upon the last to make him a decent, God-fearing man. He particularly liked the story of his first job, delivering groceries at Washington’s Eastern Market, when he discovered that running faster and working harder than all the other boys meant bigger tips.[1]
Hoover did work hard as a boy, earning near-perfect grades and a spotless record as a Sunday school teacher. All the same, his childhood—even more than most—was messy and uncertain, shaped by family tragedies that began well before his birth. In 1880, fifteen years before Hoover was born, his maternal grandfather drowned himself in the Anacostia River, leaving behind a note despairing of the “hypocritical and false-swearing people” who had driven him to the act. Four decades later, Hoover’s own father died of “melancholia” and “inanition” (what we today might describe as severe depression), disappearing first into sadness and rage and, later, losing the desire to eat or live. In between, there were other births and deaths, and even a murder scandalous enough to make the front page.[2]
As an adult, Hoover never spoke publicly of these difficulties. It would have been anathema for him to do so, a confession of pain and weakness from a man who valued certitude and control. There are connections nonetheless: between the emotional chaos of childhood and the emotional challenges of adulthood; between the teenager forced to keep secrets about his father and the government servant for whom secrets became a way of life. As a young man, Hoover was driven to succeed, first as high school valedictorian, then as a law-school standout, and finally in the Justice Department, where he went to work at the age of twenty-two. Some of these early accomplishments flowed from genuine talent and ambition. Even in high school, students knew him as a boy on his way up. But fear and necessity drove him during those years as well, a pressure to earn money and to do all that his father (and his grandfathers before that) had failed to do. By the time he reached his late twenties, he had acquired the two essential elements of his professional outlook: first, a passionate commitment to the idea of nonpartisan, expert-driven career government service; second, a deep-seated conservatism on matters of race, religion, and left-wing threats to the political status quo. These themes would define his career, but as a boy he was still learning, absorbing stern lessons and cautionary tales from his family, schools, and hometown.
The closest Hoover ever came to acknowledging a less than perfect childhood was in 1938, a few months after his mother’s death, when he published an unusually personal article speculating about what might happen “If I Had a Son.” In that article, he noted that boys want to worship their fathers “as head of the house, a repository of all knowledge, the universal provider, the righteous Judge.” Such admiration became impossible when parents relied on “half-truths” to lull their children into a false sense of security. “If I had a son, I’d swear to do one thing: I’d tell him the truth,” Hoover wrote. “No matter how difficult it might be, I’d tell my boy the truth.” The advice is surprising, coming from a man who spent his adult life avoiding the exposure of uncomfortable truths about himself and the institution he created. As a guiding principle for telling his story, though, it seems like a fine place to begin.[3]
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From his grandparents and great-grandparents, men and women he mostly never knew, Hoover inherited two important legacies. The first was a set of roots in the federal city of Washington, D.C., where traditions of government service and social hierarchy existed side by side. The second was a history of violence and breakdown among the family’s men, including the premature deaths of his grandfathers more than a decade before his birth. From his Washington roots he gained both his professional mission and his political worldview. From his family’s difficulties he took a merciless anxiety about the world, and a desire to control what happened around him.
As a clan, the Hoovers seem to have hailed from German stock, but so far back that it hardly mattered. During the eighteenth century, the family lived in Pennsylvania before migrating south to Washington in the early nineteenth century. The city was brand-new in those years, an artificial creation carved from muck and swamp after the states failed to settle on Philadelphia or New York for their national capital. The initial vision had been grandiose: wide avenues and breathtaking public buildings testifying to the promise of the American republic. It lost something in the execution. When the federal government arrived to set up shop in 1800, one congressman pronounced Washington “a city in ruins,” its grand avenues thick with mud and its public buildings little more than clapboard planks nailed up against the cold. Fourteen years later, the British burned the city and local residents started over again. Hoover’s ancestors arrived in the midst of this rebuilding, forever linking the Hoover family to the ups and downs of the federal government.[4]
