G-Man, page 45
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There were many things that Hoover did not mention to his friends at the ACLU. He did not tell them, for instance, that Baldwin remained on the custodial detention index, identified as a dangerous person to be snatched up in case of invasion. Nor did he let them in on the full scale of the FBI’s continuing efforts to infiltrate and spy on the Communist Party, a matter that would have grave consequences after the war. A few Washington observers intuited at least some of what was what going on, however. In January 1944, The Saturday Evening Post published an exposé titled “Snooping on the Potomac,” noting a fear among federal employees that wartime investigations would lead to the purge of “anybody who has ever been faintly liberal.” The Daily Worker sounded the alarm as well, noting that Hoover seemed to be suffering from “hopeless political confusion,” claiming the mantle of liberal and civil libertarian even as he continued to fume about “muddled emotionalists, parlor pinks, fellow-travelers, and avowed Communists.”[27]
For the most part, though, Hoover surged into the final months of the war as a darling of the New Deal establishment, known as a protector of civil liberties and a vanquisher of Nazis, saboteurs, and race-baiters. With the support of the Roosevelt White House, FBI investigations formed the basis for a “Great Sedition Trial” targeting more than two dozen leaders of fascist and other far-right organizations. (The trial collapsed after the judge died unexpectedly in 1944.) Roosevelt also brought Hoover in on the war’s most closely guarded scientific experiment: “a highly secret project for the development of an atomic explosive,” as Hoover described it in one confidential note. By late 1944, Hoover was warning of efforts by the Soviets as well as the Germans to infiltrate the project and learn what the Americans knew, an issue that would only grow in significance during the months and years ahead.[28]
Most of those reports went through Harry Hopkins, one of the president’s closest advisers and, by the end of the war, one of Hoover’s own confidants and political friends. Through Hoover’s updates, Hopkins learned of marches and demonstrations, informants and industrial protection, communist and civil rights activity, the ups and downs of the sabotage case. Apparently impressed by what he saw, in late 1944 Hopkins asked for an extraordinary personal favor, requesting that the FBI begin following and wiretapping his wife. The effort uncovered little of note about her activities, but it suggested something important about Hoover’s wartime status: after years of tension and sniping, he was finally an insider among the New Dealers who mattered most.[29]
Hoover came through for the White House in one more matter of extraordinary personal sensitivity. In 1943, army intelligence operatives shadowed an Air Force recruit named Joseph Lash to a Chicago hotel room, where he met with Eleanor Roosevelt, a longtime friend and political ally. Ostensibly, the investigators were seeking evidence about Lash’s political views and national loyalties. But they came away with recordings, captured on hotel-room bugs, purporting to show that the First Lady and her young friend were engaged in a sexual affair. When she discovered the intrusion, Eleanor Roosevelt complained vociferously to her husband, who proceeded to shut down the army’s Counterintelligence Corps in response. Hoover then became the recipient of the Lash file, complete with its speculation about the First Lady’s love life and its renderings of intimate letters between her and Lash.
Hoover had no great fondness for Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he viewed as a communist sympathizer with all-too-liberal racial views. Indeed, the FBI had itself copied some of her correspondence with the radical American Youth Congress during a wartime surveillance break-in in 1942. For the moment, though, Hoover kept the Lash story quiet, just as he had helped Roosevelt to hush up the Sumner Welles affair. Hoover’s loyalties lay with the White House, and with the president who had made so many things possible in recent years.[30]
All told, his cooperation with White House—and his growing legitimacy among the nation’s liberals—put him in a formidable position as Washington began to shift away from an urgent focus on the war to the contemplation of what might come next. In June 1944, American troops finally smashed their way onto the European mainland. With Allied victory a near certainty, Hoover—like many Washington officials—turned to considerations of the postwar order. “We have already started getting ready for some of the problems that now seem inevitable after hostilities cease,” he explained. Returning to the themes that had preoccupied him before the war, Hoover predicted a rise in crime and an epidemic of juvenile delinquency, crises now exacerbated by rootless soldiers and working mothers. He also worried about a revival of revolutionary activity, and about Americans’ ongoing susceptibility to “the Fascist-minded tyrant” and “the Communist-minded corruptionist.” To handle it all, he envisioned a still bigger and better FBI, empowered not just to handle crime and subversion at home, but to take on global intelligence, where so much of the future battle over communism and fascism would be fought. In November 1944, with Roosevelt winning reelection to an astounding fourth term, Hoover had every reason to believe that the FBI would continue to receive the same White House support as it had for more than a decade.[31]
Instead, as the war drew to a close, he found himself forced to adapt once again to circumstances beyond his control. On April 12, 1945, Hoover was leaving the office for dinner with Tolson when an official stopped them at the elevator to say that Roosevelt had collapsed and died in Warm Springs, Georgia, and an effort was underway to locate the vice president, an obscure former senator from Missouri named Harry Truman. Just after seven o’clock that evening, Truman was sworn into office by Chief Justice Harlan Stone, the man who had done so much to alter Hoover’s own fate a generation earlier.[32]
Part III
Power and Politics
(1945–1959)
Preface
The last time the presidency changed hands, in 1933, Hoover had been a nobody, a middle-aged mid-level Republican appointee sweating over how to keep his job. Twelve years later, at the dawn of Harry Truman’s tenure, he was a household name and global celebrity, better recognized and more celebrated than the new president himself. Over the course of Roosevelt’s three-plus terms in office, Hoover had acquired powers unimaginable during his early days under Harlan Stone—the rights not only to arm his agents in pursuit of kidnappers and gangsters, but to conduct political surveillance and intelligence investigations throughout half of the world. In 1933, there had been no such thing as a G-Man. By 1945, the G-Man was a universally recognized type, born, bred, and popularized in Hoover’s image.
Hoover himself had changed during those years. When Roosevelt came to office, Hoover had been living at home with his mother, a dutiful if parochial son of small-city Washington. By 1945 he could walk into the finest nightclubs in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago and be guaranteed a table. He had traveled the country, taking in its vistas, its hodgepodge of people, the salty pleasures of beach and ocean. And he had entertained senators and movie stars and impresarios, the crème de la crème. He had seen pain and sorrow, too: the anguish of a kidnap victim’s family, the quieter loss of a sick and elderly parent. More than a dozen agents had died in his employ, ten from gunshot wounds, two in a plane crash, at least one from suicide. He shared all these experiences with a man who had first caught his attention as a charming young fraternity sort, but who had since matured into a steadfast life partner.
Throughout it all, Hoover held on to some of the strictures he had learned as a youth. He lectured about the failings of absentee parents and the virtues of Sunday school, about the need for self-discipline and fine habits and following the law. He maintained his faith in professionalism and apolitical expertise, and still believed that the right kind of man, carefully chosen, would do the right thing. For most of his early career, this good-governance administrative vision had held sway, the essence of Hoover’s self-conception as well as his public image. After 1945, his career turned in a different direction.
With the end of the war, Hoover began to use the state power he had acquired over the previous two decades to promote and enforce his other animating ideas: conservative beliefs in order and hierarchy, in religiosity and racial segregation, and above all in anticommunism as the bedrock of an American way of life. Beginning in the 1940s, Hoover emerged as the single most important architect of the so-called Red Scare, leading the federal effort to dismantle the Communist Party and sever its members from the vibrant and fluid Popular Front left. Much of what he did was aimed at the party itself, from searching out Soviet spies and investigating secret cells within the government to discrediting and prosecuting its national leadership. He engaged in a broader cultural initiative as well, linking the fight against communism with a sweeping conservative vision of what America was supposed to look like and how Americans were supposed to relate to one another.
Hoover’s ability to use the FBI in support of this vision depended in part upon the by-the-book credibility he had built during his first two decades as director, among liberals and conservatives alike. It also depended upon his ability to control his bureaucracy and, where needed, to act in secret—a skill that eluded anticommunist rivals such as Senator Joseph McCarthy. For a brief moment after the war, Hoover attempted to continue with the project of expanding the Bureau, experimenting with new duties in the realms of global intelligence and lynching and civil rights. But with Roosevelt no longer in office, he ran into roadblocks, and came to accept certain constraints and limits.
If the period from 1924 to 1945 had been one of institution building—and of constructing Hoover’s national reputation—the period from 1945 to 1959 was when he learned to wield power as an independent political force, no longer subordinate to other men’s agendas. Aiding him in those efforts were new allies in Congress as well as state and local governments, in the media and Hollywood and the business world, even among his own former agents. Though the late 1940s brought more uncertainty and conflict, the 1950s turned out to be years of real influence in Washington, with Hoover fully accepted as a member of the city’s elite. Though many people would later look back on the Red Scare as one of the darkest and most dangerous periods of American history, at the time Hoover’s anticommunist politics made him more popular—and more powerful—than ever.
Chapter 26
Central Intelligence
(1945–1946)
Hoover (far right) after receiving the Presidential Medal of Merit from President Harry Truman (second from right), March 8, 1946. Despite such gestures, Truman was suspicious of Hoover’s power and tried to rein in the FBI. Also pictured are medal recipients Col. John M. Johnson, director of defense transportation, and John Pelley, president of the Association of American Railroads.
International News Photos/National Archives and Records Administration
Harry Truman planned to spend April 14, 1945, delivering the graduation speech at the FBI National Academy. His draft remarks included praise of Hoover as “my good friend,” the key “moving spirit behind the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The bulk of the talk was to be devoted to social challenges as the nation transitioned from war to peace. “The dislocation of families by war work in distant plants, the growing threat of juvenile delinquency, and the psychological reactions of individuals exposed to the emotional hardships of war, all present problems of the first magnitude,” Truman would have said, echoing Hoover’s own forebodings.[1]
Instead of delivering that speech, Truman found himself attending Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral in the East Room of the White House. The former president’s body had left Warm Springs by train the day before, rolling overnight through the “black silence” of the southern countryside as thousands gathered along the tracks to weep and pay respects. At Union Station, a military guard transferred the coffin onto a caisson led by a team of white horses for a journey down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Department of Justice. Half a million mourners lined the sidewalks and hung out of windows, observing the procession in a collective hush. At 11:14 a.m., Roosevelt’s body arrived at the East Room, where the grand piano had been pushed into a corner to make room for sprays of lilies and roses around the coffin.[2]
Truman looked nervous and somewhat bewildered throughout the afternoon’s service. He was not an imposing man to begin with, short and jaunty, with a preference for bow ties and straw hats. On an ordinary day, it often seemed as if he had stumbled away from a barbershop quartet into the inner sanctum of Washington politics and remained puzzled about how it had happened. For this occasion, he wore a somber formal suit, while his wife, Bess, and twenty-one-year-old daughter, Margaret, appeared at his side in dark blue dresses, a quiet and composed First Family. The service itself was mercifully brief: two simple hymns, a few words by a Washington pastor, less than twenty-five minutes all told.[3]
Hoover spent the day consulting with confidants and Justice officials, trying to figure out what the unexpected turn of events would mean for him and the Bureau in the months ahead. Roosevelt’s death entailed the loss of a great patron and ally, the man who had empowered the modern Bureau and allowed it to flourish. Now in his place was an unknown and untested executive, added to the Democratic presidential ticket in 1944 largely because it was hard to define or object to Truman’s muddy political views. To the degree that Truman did have a track record, it was not especially promising for Hoover. Despite the kindly speech planned for the academy graduation, as a Missouri populist Truman tended to be suspicious of professional Washington. More than once, he had aimed his objections at Hoover and the Bureau.[4]
That circumstance—the first new presidential administration in more than twelve years, and one that might well be more hostile than the previous—would have been disconcerting to any appointed official. In the spring of 1945, Hoover especially worried that it imperiled the next logical step in the FBI’s evolution. During the final months of Roosevelt’s presidency, Hoover had begun to discuss the possibility of expanding the FBI yet again—this time, by placing it in charge of international espionage and intelligence gathering once the war drew to a close. Roosevelt had seemed amenable to Hoover’s plan, or at least willing to listen. Now the president’s death and Truman’s ascension meant that Hoover would be starting that conversation anew, in a political world that nobody yet understood.
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By Rooseveltian standards, Truman was a political nobody: “the least of men—or at any rate the least likely of men” to take the helm of a great nation in the midst of a cataclysmic war, in the words of one biographer. Truman had arrived in Washington from Missouri in early 1935, less than two years after the Kansas City Massacre had focused national attention on his home state. He hailed from Independence, not from Kansas City itself, a country boy and small-town haberdasher who had worked his way up from county judge to U.S. senator. Prone to romanticize his Missouri roots, he resented Hoover’s portrait of 1930s Kansas City as a hotbed of lawlessness, corruption, and bloodshed. He was also sensitive to allegations against Thomas Pendergast, the infamous, potbellied boss of the local Democratic machine, who had plucked Truman out of obscurity and installed him in political office. During his earliest years in Washington, Truman had been widely mocked as “the gentleman from Pendergast,” allegedly under the thumb of Missouri’s most corrupt politician.[5]
Those ties first brought Truman into conflict with the FBI. Less than two years into his first term in the Senate, U.S. Marshals had seized ballots from the Kansas City municipal elections and turned them over to the Bureau to investigate allegations of fraud. The lab’s testing showed widespread vote tampering and helped to produce criminal convictions against nearly 250 Pendergast operatives. A few years later, federal tax authorities went after Pendergast himself, based on evidence that he failed to report income from a massive bribe. Hoover flew to Kansas City to claim personal credit for helping to bust the ring and singled out the 1936 election fraud as “one of the most corrupt situations that has developed in that or any city for years.” By the time Truman began to prepare a second run for Senate in 1940, Pendergast was behind bars at Leavenworth federal penitentiary.[6]
Truman never explicitly objected to the FBI’s role in the Pendergast investigation. But his voting record over the next few years suggested a certain low-level grudge. In 1936, during Hoover’s showdown with McKellar, Truman had voted against increasing the Bureau’s appropriation. A few years later, he chaired a commerce subcommittee assigned to explore wiretapping legislation, with an eye toward the excesses of law enforcement. Unlike Roosevelt, he tried to take civil liberties seriously and did not suffer those who made self-serving excuses. After Pearl Harbor, he scoffed at Hoover’s claim that ignorance of the attack could be blamed on the government’s lack of wiretapping authority. He exhibited a similar sense of outrage in his work on the much-heralded Truman Committee, charged with investigating inefficiency, bribery, and profiteering in wartime contracts. By March 1943, Washington rumor suggested that Truman might be gearing up for “some investigation of the FBI,” based on the idea that “the Bureau had been running wild” in its wartime work, though Truman insisted that “he absolutely did not” have any such intention. The following year, after Truman’s election as vice president, Hoover sought to smooth things over by issuing the invitation to speak at the academy.[7]
