G-Man, page 52
As a committee of the American Political Science Association noted in 1945, the relative decline in congressional power had been accompanied by rising public anxiety about the institution, with Americans wondering whether their creaky eighteenth-century legislature was really suited for the problems of the modern age. While the executive branch had embraced white-collar professionalism, recruiting thousands of lawyers, economists, and policy experts, Congress stuck with old patronage systems, doling out jobs to the sons of local party favorites. Compared to the thriving New Deal bureaucracies, there were not even many jobs to go around. As of 1945, many congressmen employed few or no professional staff. At the same time, they were expected to master an increasingly complex set of policy and appropriations issues. To many political observers, this status quo seemed not only undesirable, but unsustainable.
The APSA laid out some solutions: reduce the number of congressional committees, increase the powers accorded those committees, and provide appropriations to hire professional committee staff. Congress debated these ideas throughout the final months of the war, the urgency of the situation heightened by Roosevelt’s death and the ascendance of a man considered by many of his Senate peers to be a deeply unworthy successor. Hearings on the matter concluded in June 1945, with the final congressional report recommending many of the same ideas promulgated by the APSA: Congress could regain power and respect by streamlining and strengthening its structures—in other words, by becoming more like the executive branch.
In the late summer of 1946, just before the midterm elections, the House and Senate passed a Legislative Reorganization Act intended to put these ideas into effect. The reforms laid out in the bill had several important implications for an agency like the FBI. Reducing the number of committees meant concentrating congressional power in fewer hands. At the House, the number of committees shrank from forty-eight to nineteen—and thus so did the number of committee chairmen. Because of seniority rules (especially in the Senate), this change meant that power would flow upward toward the longest-serving members, who would take charge of the newly empowered committees. During the New Deal, the most senior members had often been conservative Democrats from the South, where the system of racially exclusive voting and one-party rule tended to send the same white men back to Congress year after year. Among Republicans, the most senior members tended to be more varied, ideologically and regionally speaking, but shared the distinction of being longtime Washington power brokers. Under the new system, these men would now have the power of subpoena, able to compel witnesses to appear before their committees without receiving the approval of either the executive branch or the full Congress.[4]
These were precisely the sort of politicians who tended to like Hoover, and whom he had long ago set out to charm. Though he relied on Roosevelt’s patronage and flirted with wartime liberalism, Hoover had never quite fit in with the New Deal’s most progressive wing. He felt more comfortable among the conservative Democrats and partisan Republicans now empowered by the reorganization law. Despite their opposition to the FBI’s civil rights and lynching work, Southern Democrats continued to support Hoover on other matters. Georgia senators Richard Russell and Walter George prodded Truman to recognize Hoover with the Medal of Merit. As Truman debated what to do about the global intelligence system, Mississippi congressman John E. Rankin, a twenty-five-year veteran of Congress and a famous reactionary, had called upon Congress to make the FBI “an independent federal agency” under Hoover’s sole discretion. House majority leader John McCormack, a staunch anticommunist Democrat from Massachusetts, sponsored a bill to raise Hoover’s salary from $10,000 to $12,500, a measure quickly taken up by the House Judiciary Committee, which advocated for $15,000. In a nod to economy, the House finally settled on a compromise measure of $14,000, a 40 percent raise for Hoover, approved in May 1946 by unanimous voice vote.[5]
The Republicans, too, signaled their eagerness to work with Hoover as Congress prepared to switch hands. Indeed, many analysts predicted that Hoover would now be better supported than ever on Capitol Hill. “Hoover will have no trouble in getting all the money he wants from Congress,” predicted Washington columnist Marquis Childs. “The FBI chief has always been more popular with Republicans than with the Democrats.” To his friends in Congress, Hoover had the one thing they could never acquire: the public trust that came from being a nonpartisan, unelected government man. He also had forms of power and expertise that they could only hope to emulate.[6]
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Of all the congressional committees, none mattered more to the FBI than House Appropriations. So it was there that Hoover started to figure out how to build closer relationships with Congress. The judiciary committees dealt with matters closest to Hoover’s heart: crime, federal law, domestic security. But appropriations held the purse strings and therefore much of the power. Congress exercised no formal oversight of FBI activities. There was no intelligence committee empowered to demand disclosures. Its leaders knew only what Hoover told them, and those disclosures came out in greatest detail during his annual appearances before the Appropriations Committees. By 1946, Hoover’s testimony had acquired a ritual quality: he arrived, usually with Tolson, offered up charts and statistics displaying the FBI’s efficiency and ever-growing workload, answered a few questions, and left with the praise of everyone involved. The proceedings took place in executive session, sealed off from public view, with Hoover’s words transcribed, cleaned up, and released a few months later. Each year, the Bureau’s budget grew, sometimes more than Hoover demanded.
Based on this history, in 1942 House Appropriations chairman Clarence Cannon approached Hoover for help in setting up a professional investigative staff. Cannon initially proposed that Hoover assign FBI agents to do the work themselves, performing whatever investigative tasks the committee might need. Hoover offered instead to loan out a few of his “best men” to get an independent investigative staff up and running. The proposal was more than a favor to a friendly politician. From the beginning, Hoover saw real advantages for himself, too. Staffing the Appropriations Committee would allow him to keep tabs on information going into the committee, thus providing access to nearly everything being weighed and measured for congressional funding. And with an investigative staff composed of FBI agents, as one internal report noted, the committee might be “somewhat influenced” to conduct those inquiries that would best serve the Bureau. Perhaps most obviously, there was little to be lost and much to be gained by staying on the good side of the men who controlled the purse strings, and by knowing what they were up to.[7]
That Hoover took the task seriously can been seen in his selection of personnel. In January 1943, he dispatched Assistant Director Hugh Clegg—one of his first and most dependable Kappa Alpha recruits, now the head of Bureau inspection and training—to supervise the creation of the new appropriations staff. He also sent R. H. Laughlin, the Bureau’s chief clerk and one of its most prized office men, as the staff’s ongoing supervisor. In a phone call with the committee’s clerk, Hoover emphasized, “These were two of our best men and they would be able to do full justice to the important task of organizing such a unit for the House Appropriations Committee.” During his months on loan to the committee, Clegg worked closely not just with Cannon, but with the committee’s leading Republicans, including Illinois congressman (and future Senate minority leader) Everett Dirksen.[8]
Hoover and Cannon soon concluded that their little adventure was working out marvelously well. “As you know, this was an experiment and there was considerable doubt in some quarters as to its success,” Cannon wrote to Hoover in July 1943. “But with our cooperation and especially with the excellent work of Mr. Clegg [it] has succeeded beyond all expectation.” And so the “experiment” continued, with Hoover dispatching agents at regular intervals to staff the committee. In July 1946, with the reorganization bill under debate, he sent an agent named Robert E. Lee to take over the committee’s investigative staff.[9]
Hoover’s approach did not change when the Republicans came to power in 1947, with New York’s John Taber as the new committee chair. Lee assured Hoover that “Mr. Taber has repeatedly indicated that he prefers the FBI type of personnel on our Staff work.” So Hoover continued to cater to the chair’s preferences—and he got most of what he wanted in return. As one headline noted, by May 1947 he was the “Envy of Colleagues” for his ability to sail through Appropriations despite the Republicans’ desire to rein in wartime spending. In a year when other agencies seemed to be “running into the sharp edge of the Republican double-bladed economy sword,” Hoover walked away as the one federal administrator immune to postwar budget cuts, granted every penny of the record $35 million he asked for.[10]
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Hoover had intended for the Appropriations experiment to stand alone, a quiet arrangement with an unusually powerful committee. With the passage of the Legislative Reorganization Act, however, more congressmen came calling. Hoover knew that the FBI could not provide staff for all of them. And yet he also did not want to sidestep this momentous change in governance; the stakes were too high, and the potential advantages too significant. Even before 1946, congressional committees had begun to wade into areas of critical importance to the Bureau—most notably, communism, espionage, and internal security. Now those committees were empowered to conduct more widespread investigations. Under the circumstances, Hoover decided to expand his committee relationships to focus on those closest to the FBI’s purview. He began with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
HUAC had gotten its start back in 1938, during the surge of prewar anxieties over fascist and communist activity. These were the years when Roosevelt’s secret directive had first pushed the FBI back into political surveillance, aimed at groups ranging from the Bund to the Communist Party to the CIO. HUAC targeted many of the same organizations and individuals, but far more publicly and to much greater controversy. Chaired by Texas congressman Martin Dies, the committee of the late 1930s had sought to create headline-grabbing spectacles. It hauled in major Communist and Nazi leaders to be interrogated. The committee even conducted its own raids on suspect organizations. Hoover viewed their tactics with skepticism, concerned that such showboating would disrupt—or, worse yet, compete with—the FBI’s revived surveillance activities. “The menace of the situation” was “a lot of loose talk and charges and allegations creating a hysterical public viewpoint which breaks down confidence in the constituted law enforcement agencies,” he complained of HUAC in 1940. Even so, he and Dies managed to forge a working relationship, especially on the communist issue. Like his counterpart at Appropriations, Dies also took advantage of FBI expertise, hiring the former head of the Bureau’s New York office as committee counsel.[11]
When Dies announced he was leaving Congress in 1944, everyone assumed that his committee would fade with him. Instead, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi stepped in to save it, engineering a close vote to turn what had been an ad hoc venture into a permanent standing committee. HUAC also managed to survive the consolidations of 1946. After the midterm elections, New Jersey’s J. Parnell Thomas, the senior Republican, took over as chairman. To Hoover, the great appeal of a reconstituted HUAC lay in the committee’s ability to draw public attention to issues he deemed important—and to do so with tools off-limits to the FBI. As law enforcement officers, FBI agents were bound by a host of restrictions. They could ask questions of espionage suspects, for instance, but they could not compel them to talk. The committee, by contrast, had the power of subpoena. HUAC also had the ability to hold public hearings, where alleged communists and spies could be exposed and humiliated without the need to meet any burden of legal proof. “With such staffs they can go out and seek and obtain information,” Hoover explained to the attorney general in early 1947, “and they have powers broader than those of this Bureau in that they can compel witnesses to appear and testify and can also compel the production of records and documents which this Bureau cannot do.” Recognizing this serendipity, HUAC had already hired an ex-Bureau man named Louis Russell to help run its investigative staff. As their work intensified, several more ex-agents joined him.[12]
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Truman’s actions pushed Hoover further into HUAC’s embrace. By certain measures, 1947 was the year that Truman came to take the threat of communism and Soviet power seriously, just as Hoover had been urging him to do. In other ways, their antagonism only deepened. In March 1947, alarmed at Soviet expansionism and growing crises in Greece and Turkey, the president announced the Truman Doctrine, his signature foreign-policy vision. The doctrine committed the United States to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”—code words for resistance to communist revolution and Soviet rule. That same month, he initiated a loyalty program mandating background checks on all two million federal employees, plus anyone hired thereafter. Under Truman’s order, the government committed itself to investigating citizens’ political activities and ideological leanings on a staggering new scale.
In doing so, he seemed to go out of his way to antagonize Hoover. When Truman introduced the loyalty program, he proposed far more funding for the Civil Service Commission, which would run the loyalty hearings, than for the FBI, which would have to conduct the investigations. Worse still, from Hoover’s perspective, was the president’s proposed bill outlining a new military and intelligence structure within the executive branch. Truman’s National Security Act had many moving parts, including the creation of a National Security Council and a permanent Department of Defense. Of greatest consequence for the FBI was section 102, which proposed transforming the Central Intelligence Group, whose creation had been such an affront to Hoover, into a greatly strengthened Central Intelligence Agency. That action made permanent the divide that Truman had established early on: the FBI controlled domestic intelligence; the CIA worked everywhere else. It also reinforced Hoover’s impression that the president did not appreciate or respect him.[13]
The Republicans in Congress, by contrast, went out of their way to praise and support Hoover during the first months of 1947, as they settled in for a long battle of wills with the White House. Though Truman had hoped to avoid FBI control of the loyalty program, the Republican Congress redirected most of the money to Hoover, authorizing him to launch investigations of every current and prospective government employee. In the debate over Truman’s National Security Act, Republican Congressman Walter Judd (among others) stepped in to protect Hoover’s prerogatives and autonomy. The so-called Judd amendment proposed to prevent the CIA “from being allowed to go in and inspect J. Edgar Hoover’s activities and work.” The final language of the bill ensured that the FBI would not be forced to share information with the CIA unless “essential to national security.” Even then, the CIA director would have to make the request in writing. The amendment put the FBI in a class of its own, the only wing of the intelligence establishment afforded such privileges.
Like other Republicans in Congress, HUAC chairman Thomas staged a grand show of respect for Hoover to contrast with Truman’s dismissiveness, repeatedly invoking the director’s wisdom on questions of communism, espionage, and the national soul. HUAC supported Hoover in his battle with CIA, arguing that the Judd amendment, which proposed to protect the FBI’s files and methods, did not go nearly far enough. And in March 1947, six months after Hoover’s speech before the American Legion, the committee announced hearings on an issue that mattered deeply to Hoover: the legal status of the Communist Party. Thomas begged Hoover to testify before the committee, promising to “watch the questioning very carefully” and put a stop to any line of inquiry that Hoover didn’t like. As he envisioned it, the hearings would present “a full-dressed public denunciation of Communism,” with Hoover as the star witness. Though Hoover usually declined such requests, for HUAC—now staffed by his own men and highly responsive to his priorities—he made an exception. “I want to go on this week,” Hoover concluded in late March. With that decision, he cemented an alliance that would shape the Bureau’s relationship to Congress—and the nation’s debate over communism—for the next two decades.[14]
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Hoover appeared at a hearing room in the Old House Office Building on the afternoon of March 26, his suit neatly pressed, Tolson by his side, testimony typed and ready. His Appropriations appearances had usually occurred in executive session, a private conversation later transcribed and edited for public release. This time, in what the press billed as “a rare public appearance,” he agreed to testify under the full glare of newsreel lights, his words captured on radio and film for immediate broadcast.[15]
His testimony began with an affirmation of common purpose with HUAC. “The aims and responsibilities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are the same,” he declared. While “the methods whereby this goal may be accomplished differ,” he went on, the two institutions worked well together, with HUAC deploying the tools of exposure and publicity while the FBI maintained its obligation “to obtain information and to protect confidence.” As in his Legion speech, Hoover sidestepped most explicit discussions of espionage. Though he referred obliquely to Gouzenko’s defection, there was no mention of Bentley, Chambers, White, or Hiss—all still largely unknown to the public in 1947. His vision of communism nonetheless reflected what he had learned from those investigations. “This Committee renders a distinct service when it publicly reveals the diabolical machinations of sinister figures engaged in un-American activities,” he explained, hinting at dark and secret activities that could now see the light thanks to HUAC.
