G-Man, page 46
With Roosevelt’s death, Hoover hastened to postpone the speech. “Of course, I deeply regret the circumstances which made it obviously necessary to cancel the plans for the formal Graduation Exercise of the FBI National Academy,” he wrote to Truman on April 13. He held out hope that Truman might yet speak at a future occasion. In the meantime, Hoover had another proposal in mind. While the rest of Washington mourned, he began to strategize about how to extend the FBI’s reach throughout the world.[8]
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It had been “Wild Bill” Donovan, not Hoover, who first prodded Roosevelt to consider the question of peacetime intelligence. In 1942, while Hoover was busy contending with Nazi saboteurs and enemy aliens, Roosevelt had appointed Donovan to lead the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime agency charged with running intelligence, espionage, and sabotage operations throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. From that position, Donovan had spent the past few years orchestrating high-stakes gambles: dropping paratroopers into France behind enemy lines, running operatives in intrigue-filled cities like Casablanca and Istanbul, sending undercover “businessmen” and “librarians” traipsing around the world as spies. To carry out these missions, he had recruited an elite corps of Ivy League and Wall Street standouts. On the whole, they had little experience in law enforcement or intelligence. In Donovan’s view, though, such men possessed the right sort of quick wit and easy manner. In November 1944, he wrote to Roosevelt to suggest that they continue their work beyond the war as part of a new global intelligence agency. To lead it, Donovan recommended the best man in the business—not Hoover, but himself.[9]
Hoover agreed that the postwar order demanded innovation and restructuring. But he found Donovan’s proposal outrageous—not least because it came from a man whose personnel and methods of management Hoover held in deep contempt. He judged the OSS chief a terrible administrator, incapable of setting up the most basic systems to track money and personnel. Hoover also distrusted Donovan’s approach to screening and hiring, convinced that Ivy League bonhomie was no substitute for clear rules and manuals of procedure. He saw Donovan as a moneyed dilettante, more confident than competent. He worried as well that Donovan was seeking to encroach on FBI territory, especially in Latin America, the one international arena where the Bureau claimed wartime jurisdiction. Finally, he thought Donovan was soft on communists, all too willing to accept them into OSS ranks if they showed the right kind of insouciance and antifascist credentials. Despite the U.S.-Soviet alliance, Hoover managed to block Donovan’s plan to begin open intelligence sharing with the Soviet Union, convincing Roosevelt that the Soviets could not be trusted.[10]
Hoover hoped to do the same with Donovan’s 1944 proposal on postwar intelligence. As Washington debated the issue, Hoover came up with his own idea for a postwar intelligence system—led, of course, by the FBI. Where Donovan proposed building upon the OSS, Hoover recommended scaling up the cooperative arrangements that the FBI and military intelligence had developed during the war, thus cutting out or even dismantling the OSS altogether. Under Hoover’s plan, the FBI would take charge of peacetime intelligence throughout the world, while military and naval intelligence would supplement those efforts in theaters of war. They would coordinate just as they had been doing since 1939, without needing to reinvent what already worked. “This plan would not call for any super-structure, but would operate with the same committee as originally set up by the President,” an internal summary of the FBI proposal explained. Thus Roosevelt had been faced with two options: Hoover or Donovan, FBI or OSS, the status quo or something new. Though he did not live to make the choice, the ensuing struggle created enough bitterness to last for generations.
Hoover’s chief claim to global intelligence leadership rested on the Bureau’s work in Latin America, where the Special Intelligence Service, created with such urgency in 1940, had grown into a substantial network of 360 special agents and employees at its peak. The operation remained largely hidden from the public. For the men and women involved, though, SIS had become a serious venture, with agents working undercover as corporate representatives or U.S. embassy employees, among other identities. From such posts, they gathered intelligence on activities similar to those being investigated within the United States—not only Nazi smuggling and espionage but also leftist movements and potentially significant rumblings of discontent. They relayed all of it back to Washington through an elaborate communications apparatus, including several FBI-run radio channels. Under Hoover’s plan, these would become the nucleus of a clandestine global communications network.
Other agencies sometimes scoffed at what came in through FBI channels: “confidential” information gleaned from top-secret sources such as the daily newspaper, in a theater of operations far from the actual war. But Hoover expressed pride in what the SIS had accomplished in a short period of time. An internal report cheered the “brilliant results” attained in Latin America as early as 1943. Hoover was particularly heartened that the FBI managed to do it all without exposing the Bureau to public scrutiny. With the end of the war looming, he proposed to Roosevelt that “the time-proven program in operation in the Western Hemisphere be extended on a world-wide basis,” as an FBI assessment later described it. In Hoover’s view, the FBI already knew how to function under peacetime conditions and had a corps of professional men in place to perform any necessary tasks, unlike the ill-trained and erratic OSS.[11]
He somewhat exaggerated their record. Though SIS had managed to get itself up and functioning, its quantifiable victories—in lives saved, plots thwarted, decisions influenced—were limited. If anything, FBI operatives turned out to be far more adept at gathering political intelligence than at steering wartime decision-making. Some countries where SIS operated, including Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, harbored bona fide German or Japanese espionage networks, worth the trouble of watching. Others, such as Ecuador, lacked much of significance to the war effort. There, FBI agents spent much of their time tracking left-leaning movements, in hopes of anticipating (or even thwarting) attempts at revolution. Compared to Donovan’s spectacular exploits at OSS, Hoover did not have much to offer in the way of adventure tales. But he could say with some accuracy that SIS carried out its mission on budget and without embarrassment, which was more than one could say about Donovan.[12]
Roosevelt had taken Hoover’s view seriously—about the outsize strengths of the FBI as well as the weaknesses of OSS. Toward the end of the war, a presidential military aide conducted a quiet investigation of Donovan’s organization, with an eye toward establishing which postwar strategy seemed most deserving. The report from that investigation turned out to reflect nearly all of Hoover’s criticisms of OSS, including the idea that Donovan tolerated “poor organization, lack of training and selection of many incompetent personnel.” The report accused OSS of being “hopelessly compromised to foreign governments,” especially the Soviet Union, and speculated that “it may easily prove to have been relatively the most expensive and wasteful agency of the government.” Investigators then offered two important conclusions, both of them beneficial to Hoover. First, they cautioned that “if the O.S.S. is permitted to continue with its present organization, it may do further serious harm to citizens.” Second, they projected that any attempt to extend OSS operations beyond the war would result in a “Gestapo system” dangerous to American liberties. In the final equation, the report recommended that Donovan’s proposal “be vetoed in favor of an organization” on Hoover’s model.[13]
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Hoover wanted to make sure that Truman understood that perspective. On April 13, as Roosevelt’s body was arriving in Washington, he summoned a young Baltimore agent named Morton Chiles to his office for a special assignment. Chiles had grown up in Independence, Missouri, and he knew the Truman family. Hoover hoped those facts might provide a point of entry for a conversation with the new president. At the director’s prompting, Chiles called his father in Independence, who went to see Vivian Truman, the president’s brother, who put in a long-distance call to the president. At that point Truman himself invited Chiles over for a chat.
Chiles had known Truman since the president was just “a dirt farmer,” wearing “overalls with a straw hat.” That day, he could see that Truman was not quite himself, “obviously still shaken up because of the awesome responsibility that he had been given.” Truman seemed all too aware that he had never really fit in at the Roosevelt White House. “He told me that Roosevelt never told him anything,” Chiles remembered. So the agent set about filling him in. Over the course of their hour-long meeting, Chiles explained to the president how Donovan was trying to seize hold of the postwar intelligence system, and how Hoover was trying to stop him. Chiles came away with the impression that Truman was “very grateful” for the information and “knew nothing” about all the backroom machinations.[14]
Chiles was probably right. As Truman would later admit, Roosevelt had not told him much about the war, up to and including details of the country’s top-secret nuclear weapons development program. (The army briefed him on those facts on April 24, more than a week after his meeting with Chiles.) By contrast, Hoover already knew all about the Manhattan Project, along with many other wartime secrets. He also knew how valuable his own intelligence gathering could be to an untested and uncertain new head of state. By sending Chiles off to greet the president, Hoover hoped not only to get in the first word on the global intelligence controversy, but to demonstrate his usefulness to the White House.
On April 16, in his maiden speech to Congress, Truman announced his intent to carry on with Roosevelt’s policies and appointees. “I want the entire world to know that this direction must and will remain—unchanged and unhampered,” he declared, pleased with the roaring applause from the floor. Columnists interpreted these remarks to mean that Hoover, among others, would stay on the job. “No matter the shifts in the Dept. of Justice,” columnist Leonard Lyons assured his audience, “J. Edgar Hoover will remain as head of the FBI.” Things did not, however, continue quite as usual. During the Roosevelt years, Hoover had spoken directly with the president in moments of crisis. Truman preferred to communicate through the attorney general. And when Hoover needed to contact the White House, he would now do so through a set of newly appointed assistants, beginning with Harry Vaughan, a gregarious, poker-playing friend now designated as a military aide to the president.[15]
Whether purposely or not, the decision put Hoover and Truman on a collision course, as Truman surrounded himself with like-minded Missouri men and Hoover seethed at the slight to his authority. But little about Hoover’s actions during the early weeks of the Truman presidency suggests any fixed enmity, or any sense that the president could not yet be won over to the FBI. To the contrary, Hoover went out of his way to ingratiate himself with Truman and to provide the same sort of political intelligence that Roosevelt had so valued. Truman faced a daunting leadership challenge: not just bringing the war to a successful close, but doing so in an atmosphere where even his own party doubted his abilities. Far from taking umbrage at what Hoover had to offer, Truman welcomed the FBI’s assistance, just as he had welcomed Chiles’s briefing on Donovan. “The President directs me to thank you for your special communication . . . , as he read it with much interest,” Vaughan wrote to Hoover a few weeks after Roosevelt’s death. “He feels that future communications along that line would be of considerable interest to him whenever, in your opinion, they are necessary.”[16]
And so Hoover proceeded much as he had with Roosevelt, providing the White House with a steady stream of political intelligence. In the summer of 1945 Truman requested through an aide that the FBI “secure all information possible on White House employees,” noting that “intercepts of the phone conversations of those employees would be of extreme value.” The president worried over leaks coming both from Roosevelt holdovers and from members of the household staff. Hoover initiated a wiretap on Edward Prichard, a young and well-connected White House aide rumored to be close with some of the president’s critics. When an aide shared logs of those conversations with Truman during a boat ride along the Potomac, the president declared them “the damnedest thing I have ever read,” and encouraged the FBI to place a wiretap not just on Prichard, but on newspaper columnist (and Truman critic) Drew Pearson.[17]
Hoover declined that request. He feared that the wiretap could earn him a permanent and vocal critic in the press should it ever come out. But he remained amenable to working with Truman on a range of other politically sensitive matters. Six weeks into his term, Truman abruptly fired Attorney General Francis Biddle, replacing him with a Justice Department lawyer and Texas power broker named Tom Clark who was closer in both spirit and geography to the president’s Missouri style. Around the same time, the FBI initiated a wiretap on New Deal insider turned lobbyist Tommy Corcoran, alleged to be at the center of a Georgetown-based anti-Truman cabal. That tap alone lasted almost three years, off and on. Along the way, it captured laments that Truman surrounded himself second-rate appointees and “mediocre Missourians,” in Corcoran’s words, and had no idea how to run the government.[18]
Privately, Truman harbored doubts about the FBI’s role as collector and purveyor of political intelligence. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” he wrote in his journal on May 12, a month after Roosevelt’s death. “F.B.I. is tending in that direction.” Historians have interpreted those private musings as his genuine views: the straight-shooting, small-town man appalled at the corruption and machinations of Washington. If so, Truman did not hasten to act upon his principles. Based on the president’s initial signals, Hoover had every reason to believe the techniques that had won over so many other powerful men, from Harlan Stone to Franklin Roosevelt, were now working their magic on Truman, too.[19]
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Mostly, Truman had more important things to do during the spring and summer of 1945 than to worry about Hoover and his agenda for postwar intelligence. In late April, the president ventured to San Francisco to preside over the opening of the United Nations. Over the next few weeks, Hitler committed suicide, American and Soviet troops met up at the Elbe River, and the German high command surrendered unconditionally. Truman read “a little statement” marking that “solemn but glorious hour,” as he described it during a press conference on May 8. Then he announced his intent to “turn the greatest war machine in the history of the world loose on the Japanese.” In July, he steamed off to Potsdam, Germany, for a meeting with Stalin and Churchill to discuss the fate of Poland and the postwar division of Germany. While there, he received word about a successful test of the country’s extraordinary new weapon in the desert of New Mexico and approved its use against the people of Japan. On August 6, while Truman journeyed back across the Atlantic, a U.S. bomber dropped the first atomic weapon ever deployed in warfare on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb obliterated Nagasaki, a few hundred miles to the south. Less than a week after that, Truman announced the Japanese surrender, bringing to a close the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history.[20]
Upon hearing of the Japanese surrender, Washington let loose with “four-plus years of pent-up emotion,” in the words of one reporter. Confetti rained down along F Street: torn-up telephone books, ripped newspapers, shredded paper no longer needed for war procurement. Drivers laid on their horns in solidarity and then abandoned their vehicles to join impromptu jitterbug contests or to take in the “seething, shouting mass of hilarious humanity.” At Lafayette Park, so many people pressed against the iron fence around the White House that military police feared it might collapse. The crowd chanted “we want Harry, we want Harry, we want Harry,” and they got what they wanted: waves and smiles from their ecstatic president as he ventured out onto the White House lawn. District old-timers declared it the greatest of Washington’s spontaneous celebrations, surpassing even the bonfires and parades of 1918’s Armistice Day.[21]
Hoover, too, greeted the end of the war in a celebratory mood. Despite all the difficulties of the past five years, he felt the FBI had accomplished what it set out to do when the war began. “In no civilized land in time of war were civil rights and personal liberties abridged less than here in the United States,” he declared in one of his first major postwar speeches. “The dragnets of World War I were unheard of in this war. The slacker raids did not recur. The lynchings and character assassins of World War I were checked. On the other hand, the sabotage which everyone said would occur did not take place.” Once again, he was somewhat exaggerating his war record. It is true that the home front of the 1940s produced less of the vigilante violence that had plagued the previous war. Instead, it produced a larger, more effective, and far more fearsome security state, with the FBI at its core. In that sense, Hoover achieved what he had envisioned years earlier; the hunting of spies and saboteurs and dissenters remained mostly in the hands of professionals, and the government found less need or desire to throw dissenters in jail. What his calculus did not acknowledge was the rise in secrecy and surveillance that occurred as an analogue to these more visible developments. Hoover saw only an upside in the fact that the FBI emerged from the war some four times larger than when it began. For the nation as a whole, the downsides would soon be evident.[22]
