G-Man, page 43
And so it was back to room 5235, and to the final stretch of commission proceedings. As they mounted their closing arguments and began to address the issue of a possible death penalty, both sides turned to Hoover and the FBI to justify their positions. The defense maintained that “the very excellent preventive work which has been done by the Federal Bureau of Investigation” made the death penalty unnecessary, since the saboteurs had failed and no future schemers could outwit Hoover’s G-Men. The prosecution argued that the saboteurs should hardly get credit for failing to carry out their mission, since “the only reason they did not do it was because they were caught by the FBI before they could get to the place of the crime.” And when the verdict and sentences came down, it was the FBI’s relationship with each man that determined whether he would live or die. On August 3, the commission closed its proceedings and sent along sentencing recommendations to be reviewed by the president.[20]
Dasch later said that he viewed Hoover’s actions during those final moments as an unconscionable form of betrayal. In the closing days of the commission hearings, he allegedly ran into Hoover in the corridor outside room 5235 and demanded an audience: “Please Mr. Hoover, just one more question!” According to Dasch, his plea was met with a slap from a nearby FBI agent, at which point he crumpled to the ground in pain and despair. FBI files tell a more subdued (and more plausible) version of the encounter, in which Dasch asked to meet with Hoover but was turned away. All agreed that Hoover refused to speak with Dasch, turning his back on the man who had helped to make the FBI’s greatest wartime case. “I saw the Chief disappear down the hall seemingly surrounded by an impregnable wall of justice and strength,” Dasch later wrote.[21]
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Dasch’s image of Hoover—the cold, heartless man who betrayed the FBI’s best source—would influence later histories of the case. But records suggest that Hoover tried, at least half-heartedly, to come through for both Dasch and Burger. On the afternoon of August 4, the day after the commission’s conclusion, Roosevelt met with Hoover and several Justice officials to discuss how to move forward with a presidential review. Hoover recommended that the president go easy on Dasch and Burger, since “neither of these two men intended to carry out the purposes of the sabotage mission.” Though they would have to be sentenced to long prison terms, given the heightened emotions of the moment, Hoover urged the president to consider “further commutation” once the war was over.
Roosevelt accepted Hoover’s recommendations, ordering a thirty-year sentence for Dasch and life in prison for Burger. All the other prisoners were to be executed as quickly as possible. Then he presented Hoover with one last grim query: Would the Washington, D.C., jail be equipped to carry out the executions? Hoover answered in the affirmative, having already surveyed alternative sites before concluding that the jail where the men were already being held presented the most efficient scenario. Roosevelt provisionally approved the choice, and Hoover spent the next several days helping to refine the execution plan, deploying his administrative skills to orchestrate the deaths of six men with utmost efficiency. With most of the logistics complete, on Friday night, August 7, Roosevelt finally issued the order condemning the six men to “suffer death by electrocution,” along with a life sentence for Burger and thirty years for Dasch. Still fearful of public outcry or even vigilante action, he notified the relevant government officials but not the press.[22]
The task of delivering the news to the prisoners fell to General Cox, under the logic that the executions, like the commission itself, would occur under military authority. On the morning of August 8, he made the rounds of the prisoners’ cells, informing each man of his sentence along with the startling news that the executions would be carried out immediately. Most of the men “showed no sign of emotion” upon learning of their fates, according to a guard who accompanied Cox, though one “seemed to freeze” while another “dropped his head and closed his eyes.” Their last meals consisted of bacon, eggs, and toast, plus wine for those who needed it. After breakfast, the guards bathed them, shaved their heads, and escorted them to the death-row cells.[23]
The execution chamber itself was a study in institutional banality, its walls painted a sickly off-yellow, chairs for the witnesses lined up in front of one-way glass. At least one historical account has placed Hoover in the witness section, but FBI documents suggest that when the moment finally came, he did not have the stomach to attend. Instead, he learned what had happened from a military guard on site, secretly tasked with observing and reporting back to the FBI. “It took approximately ten minutes to strap a man in the chair, electrocute him, take him out of the chair, place him on an Army cot, at which time a sheet was placed over his body, and then strap another man into the chair,” the guard recounted. The prisoners were electrocuted in alphabetical order, just as they had been organized in Hoover’s files.[24]
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It was not until the end of October, eighty-two days after the executions, that the Supreme Court finally delivered its full decision affirming the legitimacy of Roosevelt’s military commission. As several observers noted, there was something perverse about ruling on the justice of the saboteurs’ deaths long after they were dead. But nobody was especially surprised about what the court had to say. As unlawful enemy combatants, the court ruled, the German saboteurs were subject to the laws of war, not to the due process of the United States courts, and could claim no right to a trial by jury.
For the two living defendants, the decision made little difference. Both Dasch and Burger had been shocked by the swiftness of the executions, permitted to leave their cells for a fifteen-minute walk only to return and find all their friends gone missing. With the executions completed, they were transferred to Danbury federal penitentiary and then to Atlanta.[25]
The sabotage case would ultimately be remembered for its legal significance, establishing a precedent for the use of military tribunals in ambiguous theaters of war. For Hoover, though, its meaning had less to do with any constitutional implications than with what he had been able to accomplish through the mechanisms of the administrative state: the ways that he had managed the case from start to finish, through its early investigative challenges, on into the tricky arena of press revelation and secrecy, and finally into the commission, the executions, and the disposal of the bodies. Over the course of two months, the saboteurs case had tested nearly every aspect of Hoover’s bureaucracy. His system had not only held up, but delivered one of the most widely hailed federal triumphs of the home front.
With the cooperation of the White House and the military, Hoover packaged and sold a story of the FBI as a ruthless and hyper-competent counterespionage force—a tale exaggerated and massaged for public consumption, but with enough truth behind it to make it stick. In the process, he completed the FBI’s transformation into a hybrid institution—one part law enforcement agency, one part intelligence bureau. He also secured his place in the first ranks of Roosevelt’s affections and won over some surprising wartime allies.
Chapter 25
American Dilemmas
(1942–1945)
During World War II, the FBI more than quadrupled in size and took on a vast range of new duties, including investigations of home-front espionage and sabotage. Hoover’s celebrity increased accordingly.
National Archives and Records Administration
In late July 1942, with the commission proceedings winding down, Hoover celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary at the Justice Department. Roosevelt sent a note of congratulations. “Your leadership, foresight and direction brought the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the forefront among all law enforcement agencies of the world,” he wrote, singling out Hoover’s work against saboteurs and enemy aliens as a special source of pride. The president had no intention of letting Hoover rest on his laurels, however. With Hoover now a hero of the wartime administration, Roosevelt allowed the FBI to expand into still more areas of investigation, relying on Hoover to police forms of personal conduct and social conflict only loosely related to either law enforcement or national security.[1]
“Not infrequently he would call Edgar Hoover about something that he wanted done quietly, usually in a hurry,” Biddle recalled, “and Hoover would promptly report it to me, knowing the President’s habit of sometimes saying afterward, ‘By the way, Francis, not wishing to disturb you, I called Edgar Hoover the other day.’ ” In 1943, Roosevelt asked the Bureau to produce a comprehensive report on “racial conditions” in response to an alarming uptick in home-front violence. He also asked the FBI to look into the sexual practices of government officials, reflecting a budding concern that certain forms of sexual behavior—especially homosexuality—made government employees vulnerable to blackmail and intimidation. Like the counterintelligence apparatus reborn in the anxieties of conflict, the mandate to weigh in on such matters became an ongoing feature of Hoover’s FBI, the final piece of its wartime legacy.[2]
No clear pattern defined Hoover’s approach to his new portfolio. In some areas, he welcomed the opportunity to rethink how the Bureau worked, reaching out to former critics with offers to collaborate and establish agreed-upon protocols. In other cases, he turned back to the very methods that had led so many civil libertarians to warn about the perils of wartime surveillance. In some cases, he did both at once. Having recovered from the “smear campaign,” Hoover began to forge unlikely alliances with both the ACLU and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the same time, he continued to approve surveillance operations against both organizations. After years of locking horns with liberals and progressives, during the final years of the war Hoover acquired a short-lived reputation as something of a “liberal” himself, devoted to civil liberties and some measure of racial progress. But he also held fast to his older loyalties, working closely with groups such as the American Legion to resist the rapid social changes that home-front mobilization seemed to produce.
For Hoover as for many Americans, the waning years of the war turned out to be a time of improvisation, when old ways of doing things could be tested and discarded if necessary. That Hoover handled it as well as he did can be attributed not only to adaptability and experience, but to the support of longtime employees like Tolson and Helen Gandy, who celebrated her own twenty-fifth Bureau anniversary in 1944. Despite his ad hoc approach, Hoover left the war with more friends than he’d had going in, and with considerably more power.
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Even before the war, the New Deal had produced a population boom in Washington, with the number of city residents rising by almost 100,000 during each of Roosevelt’s first two terms. After Pearl Harbor, the pace accelerated, yielding more than 100,000 new residents in 1942 alone. As during World War I, the government pushed its new army of workers into “tempos,” hastily (and often shoddily) constructed office buildings intended to last only as long as the emergency itself. But there were exceptions to that rule. In Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Capitol Hill, the War Department authorized construction on a building meant to last for the ages: a squat five-sided structure known as the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world.[3]
At the FBI, wartime expansion had begun back in 1940, but the early start did little to insulate Hoover from Washington’s growing office-space crisis. The number of Bureau employees continued to explode: from 4,370 in January 1941 to 7,910 in January 1942 to 12,600 by the spring of 1943. To house his growing number of employees, Hoover won appropriations for a quick-construction wing to the training barracks at Quantico. With the National Guard retreating for the Pentagon, he also laid claim to the Washington armory as a home for the Identification Division, transferring its hundreds of filing cabinets into the vast domed space. Hoover took pride in the sight of his human war machine. “It cannot be visualized,” he told a reporter from The Atlanta Constitution. “To appreciate it you’ll have to visit.” In 1943, when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor came to town, FBI guides escorted them to the armory, showing off its eighty thousand square feet of floor space and ninety-foot ceilings. Defense factories displayed one side of home-front work, with their shining parades of bullets and tanks and planes. The identification division revealed another: the paperwork army required to track and process the millions of people now drawn into the federal orbit.[4]
One striking feature of the armory scene was the presence of women—more than half of all Bureau employees by the middle of 1943. Before the war, the Bureau had employed just 600 women, mostly clerks and typists. By 1943, it employed a whopping 7,800, an increase of more than 1,000 percent in just four years. There were still no female agents, but women occupied nearly every other available position, from stenographers and fingerprint clerks to statisticians, cryptographers, chemists, and accountants. “Today a new chapter in the history of women is being written behind the scenes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Hoover wrote in mid-1943, lauding the “tireless spirit” of his new employees. At the Identification Division, the filing staff—once 90 percent male—became 90 percent female. The code room, where skilled analysts translated top-secret messages, had no men at all. Where once G-Men had dominated the headlines, reporters now paid homage to the hardworking wartime staff of “G-Girls” and “G-Women.”[5]
Other wartime changes at the Bureau were less visible but no less significant. Since its initial missteps, the Special Intelligence Service had settled onto firmer ground in Latin America, with 350 agents and other specialists plus an equal number of support staff—a division of some 700 employees by 1943. Those agents now received a bit of training before they shipped out, crash courses in Spanish or Portuguese, and in communicating with secret inks and codes. Once on the ground, they had figured out how to do other things: running informants and double agents, maintaining cover as golfers and lawyers and businessmen. The work mostly entailed listening, one agent recalled—just “pick up whatever you hear and let us know”—but SIS assignments could be dangerous, too. In January 1943, a military plane carrying SIS chief Percy Foxworth and another agent went down over Dutch Guiana, where they had been dispatched on “secret missions” related to the FBI’s growing international scope.[6]
Hoover used the war to expand his reach at home as well, moving beyond the FBI to enhance his influence over especially useful and powerful domestic constituents. Foremost among them were local law enforcement agencies, long Hoover’s greatest supporters, now a massive auxiliary pool of manpower available to be adapted and shaped to federal priorities. By 1942, all fifty-six FBI field offices were holding quarterly conferences with local police, instructing them in how to coordinate espionage and sabotage investigations, how to process alien enemies and keep an eye on social conditions. Added to this was the Bureau’s ever-expanding force of industrial and political informants, recruited not as employees but as volunteers or contract workers, paid for specific services or (in some cases) not paid at all. By July 1942, Hoover counted 20,718 informants affiliated with the FBI in the area of defense plant protection alone.[7]
That number did not include the estimated thirty-three thousand members of the American Legion Contact Program, created in 1940 to give the FBI eyes and ears on the ground—and to give members of the Legion something productive to do. Despite the Legion’s cooperation with his anti-crime and anti-delinquency drives in the late 1930s, Hoover had worried that the organization might devolve into a vigilante force, as it had after World War I. To prevent this, he decided to build upon those existing institutional ties to bring the Legion’s members under direct FBI influence. Through the contact program, Legion members agreed to report allegations of potential disloyalty among friends and neighbors. Once they sent information to the FBI, however, members were supposed to hang back and let federal agents sort out what to do. “They have sensibly recognized the great difference between reporting information and acting upon information,” Hoover noted in early 1941. “They are reporting it and leaving it to us to act.” The arrangement both expanded and consolidated Hoover’s reach, placing an energetic new grassroots army under his personal command.[8]
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In 1943, a year after marking his twenty-fifth anniversary at Justice, Hoover celebrated another milestone: Tolson’s fifteenth anniversary as his employee at the Bureau. Despite the distractions of war work, Hoover attempted to put in writing what the occasion meant to him, using the same elliptical but heartfelt prose that once characterized his letters to Purvis. “Words are mere man-given symbols for thoughts and feelings,” he began, “and they are grossly insufficient to express the thoughts in my mind and feelings in my heart that I have for you.” He tried anyway, reflecting upon Tolson’s “decided influence” at the Bureau, and the ways in which the “invaluable assistance you have been to the Bureau and to me personally” had made so many triumphs possible over the years. Hoover recognized Tolson’s loyalty to the institution they had built together: “just as its life has been your life, so is its success your success.” He also expressed the dream that they might continue this work together long into the future. “I hope I will always have you beside me,” he wrote, offering “every thought of deepest appreciation, gratitude, and thanks” to the man who had stood beside him through so much: the War on Crime, the G-Man craze, the Purvis conflict, the counterintelligence buildup, the smear campaign, Pearl Harbor, the saboteurs case—and now the challenges of evolving wartime duties.[9]
