G-Man, page 40
Within minutes of Roosevelt’s signature, Hoover put out word to start the roundup. At 7:33, he called Shivers in Honolulu to make sure that the operation was indeed underway. Hoover expressed confidence in the FBI’s index; he instructed Shivers to follow the A, B, and C classifications, then to wire lists of arrests directly to Washington to be filed in both alphabetical and numerical order. But he also allowed for end runs around the policy where needed. “If there are any of these fellows who are bad boys and who haven’t been cleared A, B, or C, don’t stand on any ceremony but bring them in too,” Hoover said. “We’re at war, now, and there’s no use of a lot of fooling around as to who to arrest.” His words reflected a certain amount of the vigilante spirit that he so often purported to despise. “You take those who should be taken in and we’ll ask questions afterwards,” he instructed.[7]
Over the next several hours, Hoover carried on similar conversations with officials scattered throughout the intelligence bureaucracy. Between eight and nine p.m., he held four emergency meetings with various Bureau and Justice officials, and took another call from Honolulu. By nine thirty, he had canceled all Bureau leaves, and ordered field offices and radio operations converted to a twenty-four-hour basis. Following White House instructions, he put an immediate halt on overseas phone communication, and requested that commercial airlines initiate a ban on Japanese freight and passengers. Most important, he issued instructions “to take into custody all Japanese who have been recommended by the FBI to the Departmental attorneys for custodial detention.” Hoover estimated that at least 770 Japanese aliens would be in custody by morning, bound for internment hearings and then, most likely, detention camps.[8]
At the White House, the president’s cabinet assembled to lay out its larger war plan and move toward an official declaration of hostilities. Attorney General Biddle returned to the Justice Department offices that evening “stunned and troubled” about what he had heard at the cabinet meeting, but confident that Hoover at least seemed to know what he was doing. Some of that confidence proved justified; in coming days, the FBI rounded up thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian noncitizen residents. Within a few weeks, however, Hoover’s commitment to his own plan put him at odds with the Roosevelt administration, which came to embrace a Japanese internment policy far more sweeping and punitive than anything Hoover had in mind. If the war provided a test of Hoover’s planning abilities, it also offered a measure of whether he meant what he said about limits, constitutional liberties, and the need to avoid vigilante hysteria.[9]
* * *
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Congress declared war against Japan on December 8. Outside, the Capitol’s wartime transformation was already underway, with marine sentries guarding all doorways. Inside, Roosevelt gathered with Congress in an emergency session. He had agonized over a speech that would convey the urgency of the hour, first declaring December 7 “a date which will live in world history,” then editing the phrase to a punchier “date which will live in infamy.” The cautionary example of the previous war remained on everyone’s mind. Roosevelt was joined at the Capitol by Edith Wilson, widow of the late president, who had delivered his own stem-winder rousing the nation to war more than two decades earlier. Roosevelt’s speech was shorter than Wilson’s, just six minutes with applause included. And the vote was almost unanimous—388 to 1. The lone holdout was Jeannette Rankin, the only woman in Congress and a committed pacifist, who had also voted against war in 1917.[10]
Back at the Justice Department, Hoover was engaged in his own reckoning with the legacies of 1917. He had spent more than two years preparing for the moment when the U.S. would finally enter the war. Along the way, he made countless promises to different constituencies: that his internment program would be efficient; that it would target the right people; that his men would follow due process and respect civil liberties while containing any domestic security threat. Most of all, he had vowed to avoid the mess he had seen two decades earlier. That effort had been slow, sloppy, and insufficient, months of confusion and inaction that had allowed a vigilante mindset to take hold. This time, Hoover promised “vigil but no vigilantes.”[11]
By the time he arrived back at the office on Monday morning, the first arrest reports were coming in, documenting 733 “Category A” noncitizens of Japanese ancestry taken into custody on Hawaii and the mainland, not far off from Hoover’s initial prediction of 770 arrests. Shivers later boasted that the most important suspects had been rounded up within three hours, and that the FBI’s index had been an impeccable guide. “The apprehension plan had previously been worked out in detail to such an extent that there were only 16 persons whom we failed to apprehend.” The same held true, he claimed, once Roosevelt extended the detention program to include Germans and Italians. Hitler would not declare war on the United States for another three days, and only then would the U.S. officially enter a state of war with Germany and Italy. At home, though, hostilities began sooner. Over the course of two hours on the afternoon of December 8, agents in Hawaii arrested more than three dozen Germans and Italians identified by the detention index as actually or potentially “dangerous,” holding them along with hundreds of Japanese aliens.[12]
Over the next few days, similar roundups took place across the U.S., with special attention paid to cities like San Francisco and New York, with their large Japanese and German populations, respectively. Nationwide, approximately 1,200 Japanese aliens entered government custody within the first 48 hours after Pearl Harbor, most of them in Hawaii or along the West Coast. In New York, Ellis Island alone held 126 aliens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. At Hoover’s January 1942 appropriations testimony, he announced that the FBI had arrested a total of 1,314 Germans, 252 Italians, and 1,601 Japanese “enemy aliens” during the first month of war. By June, he reported that “apprehensions have been effected of 2,860 Germans, 1,356 Italians and 4,611 Japanese,” for 8,827 arrests in total.[13]
The swiftness of these initial arrests fulfilled at least one of Hoover’s stated goals: efficiency. At the same time, he knew that the arrests were only the beginning of a perilous multistep process. Now that thousands had been arrested, they would have to be processed for detention, involving hearings, evidence, lawyers, and visitors. They would have to be held somewhere, fed, housed, and treated for medical conditions. There would have to be an appeals process, some way for the prisoners to object to their internment and have their cases reexamined. For those released from custody, the FBI would have to figure out a way to track them and pick them up again if needed. The goal, as the Justice Department had agreed back in July, was to avoid “over-internment,” including the detention of noncitizens “solely for careless statements made prior to the outbreak of war.” But the Bureau also had to ensure that potential spies or saboteurs did not walk free. At any point, a miscalculation could result in public outcry, and perhaps even in the discrediting of the entire program.[14]
On the ground, events did not quite conform to Hoover’s vision of a perfectly coordinated bureaucracy, bloodlessly distinguishing between the “dangerous” alien and the loyal resident. The arrests themselves were often terrifying; homes were ransacked, children plucked from their parents’ arms. Agents sometimes arrested American citizens. “I was worried about my wife and sore as hell about what I considered an infringement on my constitutional rights,” one of those citizens recalled. Noncitizens were often similarly bewildered and frightened, unsure of why they were being arrested. A German-born teenage girl later described FBI agents dragging her father from his bed, then taking the whole family into custody, with the exception of their German shepherd dog. “They did not say, ‘We arrest you for being pro-German,’ or anything like that,” she recalled. “They just took us.”[15]
Some of the confusion stemmed from the FBI’s nebulous criteria for inclusion on the detention index. Despite its appearance of clinical accuracy, Hoover’s system could be highly subjective, a matter of assessing for loyalty and potential danger in the absence of any overt act. Among Germans, mere membership in the Bund or a similar organization could be grounds for arrest. Among the Japanese, special attention was paid to community leaders such as newspaper publishers and religious leaders, on Hoover’s theory that someone like “the Shinto priest who preaches in America that one’s body and soul belong to the Emperor of Japan should be incarcerated as a dangerous alien enemy.” In some cases, what gave the Bureau grounds for arrest was simply an inconsistency on a government registration form, or the failure to register altogether. One CIO organizer and Communist Party member made the mistake of lying on his wartime registration form, claiming to be an American citizen though he had been born in Germany and had never naturalized. The FBI arrested him as a disloyal alien, despite the fact that he had spent most of the late 1930s speaking out against the fascist threat.
Once arrested, detainees were taken to processing stations scattered throughout the country, from well-established sites such as Ellis Island to makeshift local centers. One German woman spent several months with her toddler son at a Catholic cloister near Milwaukee, under the care of nuns, while she awaited a final determination of loyalty. When FBI agents interviewed her, they asked why she had a photo of Hitler hanging in her house, why she spent so much time in and around a Bund camp, and why she had named her son Horst (supposedly after the Nazi martyr Horst Wessel). In the end, they determined that she was not a danger and sent her home to her husband, who in the meantime had burned the Hitler portrait.
Those who did end up at internment camps found wide variations in conditions, from the former Civilian Conservation Corps facility at Fort Lincoln, outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, to the chaotic family camp in Seagoville, Texas. Detainees registered a range of complaints: overcrowding, lack of communication with families, roaches and bedbugs, shortages of blankets and butter. Among the daily challenges was boredom. “Father said Sand Island was just a barbed wire fence around some barracks,” the son of a German internee in Hawaii recalled. “To keep busy, most of the men sat around and talked or raked the sand. They weren’t mistreated, but they couldn’t imagine what was going on.”[16]
Outside the fences, though, the FBI’s internment program met with just the response that Hoover had anticipated. “The fact that most of the enemy aliens, most of the crackpot dupes, most of the saboteurs seem to be arrested or in hiding, is a very real tribute to Edgar Hoover and his men at the FBI,” Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill wrote in early January 1942. From that point on, Hoover’s program received little attention, eclipsed by another internment plan that proved far more controversial.[17]
* * *
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First, though, there was an urgent question to be settled: “How did they catch us with our pants down?” Texas senator Tom Connally demanded to know during an emergency gathering at the White House on the evening of December 7. One obvious answer was that the army and navy had failed in their jobs, anticipating action in the Philippines or Guam but not Hawaii. But there was a case to be made that the FBI did something wrong, too, that for all Hoover’s attention to “fifth column” activities, agents might have missed something that would have provided advance notice of the Pearl Harbor attack. “Maybe if it spent less time tapping wires in an effort to get Harry Bridges,” scoffed the left-wing columnist I. F. Stone, “it would have more time left for the kind of detective operations we needed on Oahu.”[18]
Hoover objected to the second-guessing. “Japan held out the olive branch of peace to official Washington while her bombers and navy slunk into Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and committed one of the most outrageous stabs-in-the-back of contemporary times,” he wrote in his January message to law enforcement officers, insisting that nobody could have seen the attack coming. At the same time, he recognized the need to explain what the FBI had been doing in Hawaii during the months before the attack, and to take credit for the information it had in fact managed to gather. With the emergency meeting underway, Hoover wrote to the White House to describe an alarming phone conversation that the FBI had intercepted two days earlier. During that call, a Japanese-born professor—“Dr. Mori”—had spent several minutes describing to a “close relative” (probably a Japanese admiral) the naval fleet positions and weather conditions around the Hawaiian Islands. The professor had ticked off the types of flowers blooming in December (poinsettia and hibiscus), polite chitchat that the Bureau now believed might have some coded significance. According to Hoover, the Hawaii FBI office had notified military intelligence of the odd conversation, but the army and navy had dismissed it as insignificant.[19]
Hoover may have been concerned about another strange incident as well. In late August, the New York office had started working with an erratic German operative turned British double agent named Dusko Popov, who had arrived in the U.S. equipped with instructions from the Nazi government but (like Sebold before him) with no intention of following through. Among the secret documents Popov shared with the FBI was a German questionnaire about conditions in Hawaii. Hoover had passed that information along to naval intelligence, but there had been little apparent follow-up. Over the next few months, the Bureau had grown less and less enchanted with Popov, who seemed more interested in spending FBI money and enjoying the New York nightlife than in delivering serious intelligence. In November, he left for Brazil to hook up with German intelligence there.[20]
Roosevelt himself seemed to care more about keeping a lid on rumors and calming public fears than learning every detail of who had done what. On December 8, he appointed Hoover as temporary head of wartime censorship, assigned to supervise the publication of war-related information until the president figured out a long-term plan. In that post, Hoover was in a position to curry Roosevelt’s favor—and protect the FBI’s reputation—by controlling press coverage of the attack. On December 12, he agreed to run interference between the White House and the influential Washington columnists Robert Allen and Drew Pearson, authors of a series on alleged intelligence failures. “The President says you may say to Pearson and Allen that if they continue to print such inaccurate and unpatriotic statements that the Government will be compelled to appeal directly to their subscribers and to bar them from all privileges that go with the relationships between the Press and Government,” the White House instructed. Hoover delivered the message, thus earning Roosevelt’s gratitude as well as the advantage of muting a critical column.[21]
It was impossible to shut down all dissenting voices, though, especially once the immediate shock of the attack began to wear off. “Hoover’s performance will bear watching,” warned The New Republic, “and is one of the things which censorship must not be permitted to hide from public scrutiny as we adjust ourselves to war.” The potentially dire consequences of such scrutiny became clear on December 17, when Roosevelt removed two high-ranking military officers from their commands at Pearl Harbor. At the same time, the White House announced the creation of a commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts to apportion further blame. Washington columnist John O’Donnell predicted bad times ahead for Hoover. “The nation’s super Dick Tracy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, is directly under the guns as the result of Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and as much on the spot as the already ousted Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii,” he wrote in late December. “Long-time Capitol Hill foes of FBI Chief Hoover have been whetting up their snickersnees, itching to take a crack at the detective hero.” Of the three institutions arguably responsible for intelligence at Pearl Harbor, by the end of December only the Bureau had escaped punishment.[22]
Hoover rushed to his own defense, issuing a rare public rejoinder identifying a member of the press by name. “The statement of the columnist, John O’Donnell, is without a scintilla of foundation,” he announced. “Jurisdiction over Japanese matters in Hawaii was vested principally in the naval authorities and not in the FBI.” From the White House, Roosevelt’s press secretary Stephen Early called to reassure Hoover, who composed a note back in thanks. “You do not know how much I appreciate your call today and the message you gave me,” he wrote. “So far as O’Donnell’s article is concerned it did make me burn because of its utter falseness.” To Hoover’s relief, other Democrats on the Hill hurried to follow the White House lead, speaking out in support of the FBI’s “duly diligent” ways in the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor.[23]
This position was affirmed on January 24 when the Roberts Commission released its report. The conclusions were critical of military leaders, accusing them of ignorance, lack of preparation, and “dereliction of duty.” Toward Hoover the report was far gentler, noting that “efforts were made by the Bureau to uncover espionage activities in Hawaii,” even if the Bureau failed to comprehend the full scope of “enemy activities.” To soften even that blow, Roosevelt invited Hoover to the White House on January 29 to discuss how best to use—and perhaps expand—the FBI’s surveillance powers. “The President’s feeling is that the handcuffs ought to be taken off the FBI and put somewhere else,” Early explained, brushing off any further worries about Hoover’s role at Pearl Harbor.[24]
Roosevelt’s stance should have been a balm to Hoover, exoneration for what could easily have been construed as the greatest failure in Bureau history. But Hoover found it hard to let the criticism go. “The effort to burden me with the Pearl Harbor attack would have been ridiculous had it not been that it emanates from the same sinister sources that are always willing to take up a smear of the F.B.I.,” he fumed to New York columnist Louis Sobol in late January. The energy he devoted to his Washington critics, along with his other war duties, may help to explain why he initially missed another important development. Rather than calming public fears, the Roberts report inspired a new wave of enthusiasm for an idea Hoover had dismissed back in December: mass Japanese internment.[25]
