G-Man, page 47
During the war, imperatives of discretion and censorship had often constrained Hoover’s effort to publicize the Bureau’s exploits. As the end of the war approached, he began laying plans to craft a triumphal public narrative—and thus to persuade Truman to allow the FBI to take up where the OSS left off. In the spring of 1945, Hollywood producer Louis de Rochemont had come to Hoover’s office to discuss making a movie based on the 1940 Sebold case, in which the FBI had turned Hitler’s agent to the American side.[23]
Recognizing a grand opportunity, Hoover opened the Bureau to Rochemont’s crews and actors, just as he had once opened it to a Hollywood seeking glamorous tales of the War on Crime. He also gave the filmmakers invaluable raw material from the FBI’s files, including surveillance footage of the German embassy. Agents and clerks served as extras on the film. Hoover himself appeared on screen in a brief opening shot, seated at his desk consulting stacks of papers with Tolson standing by his right side.[24]
The debut of the film, titled The House on 92nd Street, came just a few weeks after V-J Day, as Hoover was beginning to ramp up his narrative push. He invited Truman’s aide Harry Vaughan to attend the film’s New York premiere. He also invited New York governor Thomas Dewey and former president Herbert Hoover, both of them Republicans, to round out the partisan edge. The group met for a buffet dinner at 20th Century Fox’s New York offices—“a hundred or so top-names in society moviedom and politics,” in the words of one news account—before sitting down to watch the incredible tale of how the FBI ran a double agent who exposed a Nazi spy ring. The film reflected Hoover’s old emphasis on administration and scientific policing, with glamour shots of filing cabinets, microscopes, and a spick-and-span office set. At the same time, it showcased the Bureau’s developing prowess in the areas of espionage, sabotage, and counterintelligence, just the things that Hoover wanted the Truman White House to keep in view. “I was gripped every minute,” Hoover declared after the screening. “I’d forgotten how exciting it was.” He hoped that the president would be impressed, too.[25]
Despite his official mantra that “the FBI is a WE organization,” over the next few months Hoover personally accepted much of the credit for the Bureau’s success. From 1945 into 1946, awards dinners and medal ceremonies made up a substantial part of his social schedule. As early as April 1945, the country of Panama welcomed Hoover into its Order of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, one of several awards from Latin American nations thanking the FBI for its wartime efforts. A few months later, New York’s chipper mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, granted Hoover the city’s certificate of distinguished service. Even Truman found time to pin a medal on Hoover, bestowing the presidential Medal for Merit—the country’s highest award for civilian service—in a small but well-publicized ceremony.[26]
Hoover wrote to Truman with “deep appreciation of the honor.” But the vote of confidence that Hoover prized most came in a different form. In late September, around the time The House on 92nd Street made its debut, Truman issued an executive order declaring Donovan’s OSS officially null and void. The spy service went out of business for good on October 1, leaving Hoover and the FBI in an ever more promising position to take over.[27]
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Truman shut down OSS for both political and principled reasons: he distrusted Donovan as a showman and New Deal insider, and he feared giving anyone too much power in the shadowy realms of intelligence and espionage. Perhaps inadvertently, though, his attempt to limit the scope of the postwar security state only strengthened Hoover’s confidence that the Bureau was now the heir apparent. By dismantling OSS, Truman effectively made the FBI the only intelligence service with an active international network and a group of experienced men ready to carry out operations—a fact that Hoover lost no time in pointing out to the White House. On September 20, just hours after issuing his executive order disbanding OSS, Truman received a new version of Hoover’s proposal that the FBI lead the postwar intelligence system.[28]
The basic idea remained the same as what Hoover had proposed to Roosevelt: the FBI would do for the world what it had done for Latin America. Contained within that idea were arguments about civil liberties, concentrated power, and potential “Gestapo” tactics—in short, some of Truman’s major concerns. What made the FBI the best choice to lead global intelligence, Hoover claimed, was not its ambition and daring but its acknowledgment of constitutional limits, its willingness to abide by laws and rules. He pointed to the Bureau’s war record—the way it had avoided the worst abuses of World War I even while capturing Nazi spies and saboteurs. He noted the Bureau’s budding relationship with the ACLU, naming both Morris Ernst and Roger Baldwin as men of impeccable integrity willing to vouch for the FBI. Perhaps most of all, he emphasized his distaste for anything resembling a gestapo, and pointed to his decades-long record of arguing against the creation of a national police.[29]
Hoover’s presentation was at best a partial story. Like his public narrative, it failed to acknowledge the many ways that a more effective and professional administrative body could also be a more dangerous one. And it ignored the rise in wartime secrecy and surveillance, the millions upon millions of new files produced. But it constructed a plausible view of the known facts as Hoover saw them, in which he had managed to expand the Bureau’s size and reach while avoiding the abuses of the Wilson era.
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Truman soon dashed his hopes. Hoover spent the holidays in Florida, presumably with Tolson, relaxing in a hotel with a view of the sea. Not long after they returned to Washington, he received a draft proposal from the White House. Far from embracing Hoover’s narrative and his plan for postwar intelligence, Truman proposed an entirely different vision. In Truman’s scheme, global intelligence would be supervised by a coordinating committee of representatives from the State, War, and Navy Departments—with the FBI excluded. Hoover fired off a confused and indignant memo pronouncing the idea “completely unworkable” and thoroughly ill informed. Not only did the directive suggest that Hoover would never lead a global intelligence agency; it also raised the prospect that the FBI’s existing operations—in the domestic United States as well as in Latin America—might be subject to the committee’s jurisdiction. He urged the attorney general not to approve it.[30]
To Hoover’s relief, Truman’s next directive, issued on January 22, clarified that the plan did not apply to “police, law enforcement or internal security functions” or to investigations conducted within the United States. Other than that, the president ignored everything that Hoover had been seeking over the past year, establishing a Central Intelligence Group (CIG), in which the FBI played no role whatsoever. No doubt many factors drove Truman’s decision: civil libertarian principle, personal suspicion of Hoover, even a failure to take seriously the expertise involved in intelligence and counterespionage work. But Truman does not seem to have put much time or energy into reaching the decision, aside from listening to the interested parties and going with his gut. Hoover took the situation more seriously. As he recognized, Truman’s directives had far-reaching consequences for the agencies involved—and for the future of American intelligence. With the stroke of a pen, the president split peacetime intelligence into two separate spheres: with the FBI on the domestic side and the CIG on the global. He also added fuel to the animosity already simmering between the FBI and its rivals. Most immediately, he signaled that the FBI did not have his confidence, and that the cozy relationship that Hoover had maintained with the Roosevelt White House no longer existed.[31]
Hoover got the message; he just did not care to listen. He still wanted the plan that he had wanted all along, and he believed that he could get Truman’s decision reversed. In working with Hoover during the war, a British official had noted that “Hoover is the kind of man who does not bow easily to the inevitable—that is at once his strength and his weakness.” In the days after Truman’s directive, he stayed true to form. On January 23, he had lunch with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the operational hero of D-Day, now the army’s chief of staff. After discussing some of the travails of the European situation, Hoover turned the conversation to foreign intelligence and Truman’s creation of CIG. According to Hoover’s account of the meeting, Eisenhower “expressed amazement and real concern at the possibility of the FBI withdrawing from [international] operations.” The general agreed that “the elimination of the FBI from foreign intelligence was most undesirable and should be corrected” as soon as possible.
Truman felt otherwise. The next day, he officially inaugurated his new era of global intelligence with a lunchtime gathering at the White House: just the president, a few staffers, a military adviser, and Admiral Sidney Souers, the naval intelligence officer appointed to lead CIG. In a mock-solemn ceremony, the president presented his guests with wooden daggers, black cloaks, and hats, anointing Souers head of the “Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers,” under the title “Director of Centralized Snooping.” Hoover was one step ahead of him, however. That morning, he had already met with Souers, extracting a promise from the CIG director that “the FBI was not to be excluded from the foreign field, but would very likely be called upon to expand its operations therein.” In the meantime, Hoover could still angle to see the CIG brought under FBI influence.[32]
Hoover remained convinced that he would come out on top for several more months, as Souers tried and largely failed to get the CIG off the ground. “Complete confusion” was how one observer described a visit to CIG’s offices in the War Department, where understaffing and a lack of clear hierarchy, the observer assured Hoover, meant that almost nothing was getting done. He attributed the chaos to Souers, who seemed “very sincere and wanted to do a good job,” but “lacked experience” in running an office and standing up to political pressure. Hoover, by contrast, continued to oversee operations in Latin America and to keep his intelligence machine humming along. As late as April, his aides were assuring him that officials would soon “be contacting you for the purpose of obtaining an answer on how this Bureau feels about taking over the clandestine operations of worldwide intelligence.” Hoover still imagined that he would be asked to step in and take over.[33]
It was not until the summer of 1946, more than a year into Truman’s presidency, that Hoover fully realized that something very different was taking shape. In June, Truman began an overhaul of CIG, replacing Souers not with Hoover but with a general from military intelligence. The following month, in a definitive blow to Hoover’s plans, Truman instructed the CIG to assume control over “all organized Federal espionage and counterespionage abroad,” including in Latin America. Lest anyone mistake his intent, Truman ordered Hoover to do what he had instructed Donovan to do nine months earlier: disband all international operations. After two decades of constructing and expanding the FBI, Hoover was forced to dismantle something he had built.[34]
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Hoover responded to Truman’s insult as only a skilled bureaucrat could, using rules, lists, and literal-minded policies to make the process of taking apart the SIS as unpleasant as possible. The new CIG team anticipated that the FBI would work slowly and carefully to execute a transfer of its Latin American facilities. Instead, on July 15, Hoover informed them that all FBI employees would be back in the United States within thirty days. Though they did not quite make that deadline, over the next few months agents throughout Latin America set about destroying what had taken a full four years to create, thus leaving their successors to start from scratch. On Hoover’s instructions, they burned investigative files—“both pending and closed”—along with all lists of undercover contacts, years of work now up in smoke. Agent Samuel Papich, the last FBI man to leave Latin America, found the experience painful and demoralizing. “To turn over everything we had built,” he recalled, “it broke my heart.” He recognized a similar wound in Hoover—and “if you wound him,” Papich noted, “he never forgets.”[35]
The new head of CIG, War Department intelligence chief Hoyt Vandenberg, suspected Hoover of hostile intent. “There is grave danger in this situation that the excellent FBI organization in Latin America may disintegrate before it can be taken over by new personnel of the CIG,” he complained to fellow intelligence officials. “This would be a major blow to the effectiveness of our security intelligence work in the Latin American field, from which it might take us many years to recover.” When confronted with this allegation of bad faith, Hoover maintained his innocence, then explained why only a swift pullout made sense.[36]
Among confidants at the Bureau, he showed more bitterness, mulling over the injustice of being asked to assist the CIG while also being told that his men were not sophisticated enough for international intelligence work. In the margins of official memos, Hoover grumbled about CIG’s “double talk” and “sadistic” methods. He also celebrated articles “debunking” CIG and describing its fly-by-night operations. His top men shared this resentment. “I pointed out . . . that it was rather inconsistent that Bureau agents were not good enough to carry on the SIS operations in the Latin Americas but at the same time their services are so indispensable that they cannot now be withdrawn or replaced,” one official reported, describing a recent conversation with the attorney general.[37]
In the years to come, Hoover would downplay the idea that he had been interested in foreign intelligence, as if the pleading and wrangling with Roosevelt and Truman had been merely a concession to duty. This became the official line at the Bureau, an institutional strategy designed in part to preserve Hoover’s dignity and reputation. As one official explained to a puzzled U.S. ambassador, “the Director had not sought this work for the Bureau in the beginning nor was the Bureau seeking it now.” That revision of the historical record was not unlike what Hoover had accomplished in the wake of the Palmer Raids twenty-five years earlier, a cover-up of a major professional defeat.[38]
Agent Papich believed that Hoover might indeed have experienced “loser’s relief” at being forced to return to the domestic sphere, the site of his greatest passion and experience. Even so, the resentment born of the battle to control foreign intelligence lingered well beyond 1946. The following year, when the Central Intelligence Group evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency, Hoover approached his counterparts with suspicion, convinced that the incompetence and recklessness he had observed at OSS had now found its home at CIA. After 1946, he approached the Truman White House with similar hostility, increasingly certain that the president was an enemy of the Bureau.[39]
Chapter 27
Under Color of Law
(1941–1948)
The funeral of George W. Dorsey, one of four victims of a 1946 mass lynching in Monroe, Georgia. During the 1940s, the FBI expanded into anti-lynching work, to mixed success.
AP PHOTO/THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
As much as Hoover resented Truman’s actions, he could not simply pack up and go home. At the very least, he did not want to. The FBI still had plenty of work to do in its established areas of authority, from domestic surveillance to statistics and crime research to basic law enforcement. And even without the global intelligence realm, Hoover saw room for postwar expansion. One of the most promising areas was also one of the most unlikely for Hoover: the investigation of the brutal, racially motivated lynchings sweeping through the American South.
Hoover never chased lynching work with the same enthusiasm that drove his bid for global intelligence. Nor, however, did he run the other way. During the 1940s, first at the prodding of Francis Biddle and then of the Truman administration, he began to experiment with drafting a more robust role for the FBI in Southern lynching investigations—and, by implication, in the domain of civil rights enforcement. He was never driven by a vision of racial equality; there was too much Kappa Alpha in his past and in his soul to allow for that. Instead, he saw lynching as a challenge to federal law enforcement authority, yet another instance in which lawless vigilantes sought to take the law into their own hands. Hoover believed that his G-Men could shore up faith in federal power by bringing lynch mobs to justice. They could also showcase their investigative and moral prowess, extending the FBI’s jurisdiction into another potential growth area.
That things did not work out as planned had less to do with Hoover’s initial aspirations than with the obstacles placed in his way—foremost among them the opposition of white Southerners. Though they were Hoover’s allies in many other spheres, when it came to civil rights and lynching work, they attacked Hoover and the FBI as part of a federal power grab. Sometimes, they even lumped him in with the Truman administration. Faced with their opposition, Hoover soon retreated from his initial ambitions. But for a few heady years after the war, he aspired to bring lynching more fully into the repertoire of Bureau duties. Like his effort to seize control of global intelligence, it became a path not taken.
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Hoover defined lynching narrowly: as an act of mob violence in which a prisoner charged with a crime was snatched from police custody and subjected to violent retribution. By his count, between 1900 and 1944 the country had witnessed 1,963 lynchings. Broader conceptions yielded higher numbers. The Tuskegee Institute counted as many as 3,417 lynchings of Black men and women between 1882 and 1944, along with 1,291 lynchings of whites. By any definition, the salient features of lynching were its extreme cruelty—in which victims were often castrated, set on fire, or dismembered before being hanged, shot, or beaten to death—and its highly public nature, with the violence often carried out in full view of hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators. Despite this abundance of witnesses, lynchings were difficult to prosecute. Local white juries sanctioned the violence with not-guilty verdicts in those rare cases where local authorities—themselves often involved in the mob conspiracy—even saw fit to bring charges. Congress, too, refused to act. When Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) co-sponsored a federal anti-lynching bill in 1938—only the most recent attempt to increase federal authority over lynching—it met with a weeks-long filibuster from Southern Democrats and never passed.[1]
