G-Man, page 77
One of those men was Gary Rowe, the Bureau’s prize informant. “The Old Man’s going to shit,” Rowe’s handler supposedly declared upon seeing the photograph, terrified at the prospect that Hoover would learn about Rowe’s participation in the beating. The field office decided not to send that particular piece of news on to Washington. In the process, they preserved Rowe’s reputation as “the most alert, intelligent, productive, and reliable informant on Klan and racial matters currently being operated by the Birmingham office,” leaving Hoover none the wiser.[15]
Elsewhere, though, Hoover found plenty to worry about. On May 12, he had sent a message to the Justice Department “to the effect that 30 Klansmen were to be stationed at the Birmingham bus terminal on 5/14/61,” with another thirty waiting in the wings if needed. Despite the detailed advance warning, neither the FBI nor the Justice Department made any effort to step in directly as the mobs assembled and the buses rolled along. Instead, when the appointed day came, FBI agents observed Hoover’s carefully prescribed limits: they let the violence play out at the Birmingham bus station, insisting that it was up to the local police—whether Jamie Moore or Bull Connor or Thomas Cook—to contain the conflict. Only after the attacks were over did they mobilize to investigate, beginning with interrogations of the Anniston victims at the hospital. At that point the Justice Department jumped into action as well. Unlike Hoover, Bobby Kennedy would claim he “never knew [the Freedom Riders] were traveling down there . . . before the bus was burned in Anniston,” implying that if he had only known, he surely would have done something. In truth, he just wasn’t paying attention.[16]
But the crisis was not over yet—and the question of who, if anyone, would protect the riders soon became a major point of tension between Hoover and the attorney general. On Monday, May 15, after being treated at the hospital, the Freedom Riders returned to the Birmingham bus terminal, determined to move on to their next stop. They soon discovered that no bus driver would take them to Montgomery—indeed, that it was too dangerous even to wait out negotiations at the terminal, as a new crowd amassed outside. When they finally conceded the inevitable and headed for the airport, the situation was no better, with a restive mob assembling and bomb threats coming in.
At this point, the strategies of the FBI and the Justice Department began to diverge. They never quite came back together. Hoover wanted to stay out of it all, aside from conducting investigations after the fact. Bobby Kennedy saw a major problem looming for the White House and tried to head it off through cajoling and political pressure. From Washington, the Justice Department’s John Seigenthaler made his way to Birmingham, huddling with the Freedom Riders at the airport as he tried to arrange an escort out. Hoover’s men on the ground watched but did little. Despite the obvious issues, Hoover remained adamant about working through the local police department: FBI agents would not serve as guards or soldiers for anyone, he insisted. He finally extracted a half-hearted promise from Jamie Moore that the police would protect the Freedom Riders from further assault, if they could. When Bobby asked how many agents the FBI had on the ground, Hoover refused to say—just enough, he maintained, to carry out the FBI’s properly delimited duties. That night, with negotiations still underway, Hoover left the office at 6:09 p.m., more or less the usual time. Bobby stayed behind to help secure the Freedom Riders’ safety.[17]
The airport standoff continued until 10:38 p.m., when the plane carrying the Freedom Riders finally took off from Birmingham. But even that did not bring the crisis to a close. Two days later, a group of students out of Nashville decided to carry on where their injured comrades had left off, arriving in Birmingham in hopes of continuing the previously scheduled journey. This next round of Freedom Riders made it only as far as Montgomery before another organized mob set upon them at the bus station. Following Birmingham’s lead, the Montgomery police held back for several minutes before even attempting to intervene. It was enough time to inflict severe injuries on several Freedom Riders and bystanders. To celebrate their victory, the Montgomery rioters built a bonfire outside the bus station and burned the clothing, suitcases, and other personal items they had snatched from their victims. Hoover’s agents watched and took notes as it happened.[18]
The next night things got still worse. Determined not to cower in the face of assault, more than a thousand Black residents gathered at Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, one of the sites where the famed Montgomery bus boycott had been dreamed up and carried out five years earlier. The roster of speakers featured several of the injured Freedom Riders as well as leading figures from the local and national movements, who spoke not only about the power of nonviolence but also about the need for federal intervention. Even as they made their case, yet another mob was gathering outside, some two thousand white residents bearing torches, rocks, and chains, threatening to set the church ablaze and to attack anyone who tried to escape.
Hoover offered them little help. Desperate to stave off a full-blown riot, the Justice Department attempted to mobilize a makeshift band of federal “marshals”—mainly tax collectors and border agents—to contain the violence in Montgomery. But when Bobby asked the FBI for extra cars to help shuttle the marshals, Hoover said no, insisting that the FBI needed all its men and equipment. As the crisis accelerated, he avoided Bobby’s calls and provided only half of the hundred agents requested to fill out the marshals’ ranks. Only after receiving a message forwarded by the president himself did Hoover grudgingly throw in his lot with the rescue effort. That evening, after hours of delay, an agent arrived at Maxwell Air Force Base, where the marshals were amassing, to volunteer the FBI’s services.[19]
Even the president’s intervention induced no long-term change of heart, however. When the Freedom Rides picked up once again, Hoover refused to entertain the idea of an FBI escort for the buses as they moved through Alabama and into Mississippi. “As long as I am Director of this Bureau I do not intend to allow it to be misused by pressure groups,” he informed Bobby, casting the bus riders not as innocent victims but as the people who had instigated the whole conflict.[20]
Coming on top of their personal differences and the tension over organized crime, the Freedom Rides episode confirmed what was already becoming clear in the Hoover-Kennedy relationship: Hoover would do what he wanted and no more. And yet in those areas where Hoover was willing to act—gathering intelligence and conducting investigations—he moved quickly and professionally. On May 20, he sent assistant director Al Rosen to Alabama to oversee an expanded investigation of the violence. He also transferred at least sixty-five agents into Montgomery to start working the case. The following day, the FBI renamed the investigation FREEBUS, a catchall title that swept up the attacks in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery, plus the ongoing Freedom Rides still cruising into the South, into a single file. Less than twenty-four hours after that, Hoover was able to inform an exhausted Bobby that the FBI had arrested four Klansmen in the Anniston bus burning, with more soon to come.
For the Freedom Riders themselves, all the pain and risk ultimately yielded some measure of progress. Under pressure from the attorney general’s office, the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in interstate transit facilities, an overdue affirmation of the Supreme Court’s decisions. By Hoover’s standard, though, the entire Freedom Rides episode looked like just one more pointless loss. Throughout May, FBI agents continued to sweep through Alabama’s big cities and small towns, gathering information and thoroughly spooking the Klan, which began to talk of the need to “go underground and meet in small groups in private homes,” according to Rowe, just as the communists had once done. Agents also began looking for “any action by the police which might be indicative of a failure to afford protection to members of the freedom ride,” in hopes that local law enforcement officials, including Jamie Moore, would be held responsible for their betrayal at the bus depots. By early June, the Bureau had expended some forty-eight hundred agent hours on the Anniston bus burning alone. Hoover later boasted that six men were convicted in that episode. But in Birmingham itself—just as in Georgia in 1946 and Poplarville in 1959—local juries refused to convict anyone for the bus station attacks.[21]
When it was all over, many observers—including the attorney general—viewed Hoover’s efforts as too little too late, a cleanup inquiry undertaken only after he had failed to prevent repeated acts of violence. From Hoover’s perspective, though, even this limited involvement came with real costs for the FBI’s reputation. In early September, white supremacist leader J. B. Stoner held a rally in Anniston and hanged in effigy his five most hated people: Robert Kennedy, CORE leader James Farmer, two Alabama FBI agents, and Hoover himself. Stoner referred to the FBI as the Federal Bureau of Integration, a derisive but popular nickname in the white South.[22]
The name reflected a partial truth: compared to most local law enforcement, the FBI was the more progressive force, at least willing to investigate and hold Klansmen to account. But Hoover never wanted that particular badge of honor and did not deserve it. In response to the great moral challenge of the new decade, he fought to maintain limits rather than to push boundaries, to indulge his own prejudices rather than challenge them.
Chapter 42
Patron Saint of the Far Right
(1961–1962)
Hoover (center) with Senator Thomas Dodd (left), a former FBI agent, at the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, February 1962. The Foundation was one of many conservative groups that revered Hoover in the 1960s.
National Archives and Records Administration
In the spring of 1961, as the Freedom Riders were just beginning to flirt with the idea of a bus trip, Time magazine noted another form of activism taking hold across the land. This one came from the right—part of a “wave of conservatism,” in the words of its standard-bearer, the iron-jawed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, “that could easily become the phenomenon of our time.” As Time described it, by 1961 the wave had spread from the secretive anticommunist cells of the John Birch Society to the mass meetings of Young Americans for Freedom, where thousands of white boys and girls gathered to demonstrate their opposition to liberalism, atheism, civil rights, and communism—and their support of the conservative values Hoover had long espoused. “Nobody knows for sure its present strength or its future potential,” Goldwater declared during YAF’s first rally in New York’s Manhattan Center. “But every politician, newspaperman, analyst and civic leader knows that something is afoot that could drastically alter our course as a nation.”[1]
Hoover was among those who realized that something was indeed afoot. Even as he struggled to address the challenges of civil rights, organized crime, and an all-too-casual attorney general, he was also watching the rise of the “New Right,” a movement with ideas close to his heart but methods not always to his liking. The new conservatives revered Hoover as a “patron saint,” in the words of one journalist, the most prominent federal appointee willing to speak out in favor of their values. Hoover did not view them with equal admiration. He never investigated the burgeoning New Right with the same fervor he applied to the left or the civil rights movement. Nor, however, did he let his conservative admirers off scot-free. Instead, he tried to have it both ways: to encourage the movement while warning against its conspiracies and excess.[2]
That approach had worked well during the McCarthy years, when Hoover positioned himself as the responsible anticommunist alternative to far-right demagogues and vigilantes. It had held during massive resistance as well, when he managed to both investigate and sympathize with the white South. But this was the 1960s, not the 1950s. He found it harder than ever to strike the right balance between his conservative outlook and his professional identity as a federal bureaucrat.[3]
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Hoover had a soft spot for the conservative movement’s enfant terrible, a Yale man and oil-fortune heir named William F. Buckley Jr. Despite a life of privilege, Buckley had grown up thinking of himself as a Hoover-style outsider: a Catholic within WASP society, a member of a proud conservative “remnant” surrounded by preening liberals. In 1951, fresh out of college, he published God and Man at Yale, a passionate indictment of the socialist ideas and collectivist mindset that supposedly infected his alma mater. Three years later, he followed up with a rousing book-length defense of McCarthy and McCarthyism. Like Hoover, Buckley saved his greatest ire not for communists, but for the eggheads, pinks, fellow travelers, and dupes who aided and abetted their cause. In 1955, expanding on these ideas, he founded National Review, a weekly magazine intended to give members of the emerging conservative movement a place to hash out their differences.
National Review was to Buckley what Masters of Deceit had been to Hoover: an effort to sound the alarm about the communist threat, and especially about the need to maintain vigilance in the wake of McCarthy’s downfall. Buckley also adopted some of Hoover’s have-it-both-ways attitude toward his fellow anticommunists and conservatives. A self-admitted elitist, Buckley aimed to make the right more modern and therefore more respectable, to jettison some of the embarrassing anti-Semitism and isolationism that had been so prominent before the war. He also aimed to separate his style of conservatism from the likes of the Ku Klux Klan, though there the line could be harder to draw. Buckley argued that the federal government had no right to mandate school integration and that “the white community in the South” was justified in excluding Black voters “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”[4]
Hoover admired Buckley’s ability to promote conservative ideas while separating himself from the most extreme elements within the growing right-wing surge. Buckley in turn promoted Hoover as one of the few federal officials who seemed to understand the urgency of what the conservative movement was doing. While a student at Yale in 1949, Buckley had invited Lou Nichols, Hoover’s PR chief, to visit campus and defend the FBI’s record on civil liberties. The following year, in recognition of that assistance, Nichols invited Buckley and his wife on a “special tour” of Bureau facilities in Washington. The FBI pulled out all the stops: an hour-and-forty-five-minute private escort through the exhibit rooms, lab, communications center, and traffic diorama, culminating in the chance to shoot a tommy gun at the firing range. Along the way, Buckley spoke of his admiration for Hoover’s “ability to withstand political, subversive and academic attacks.” The highlight, of course, was meeting Hoover himself.[5]
In the years since, Buckley had maintained a loose but friendly relationship with Hoover and the Bureau, meeting occasionally with Nichols and offering to send along relevant writing for prepublication review. Conservative intellectuals could be a difficult audience for Hoover; they tended to dismiss his disquisitions on Sunday school and juvenile delinquency as unsophisticated pandering. Through National Review, Buckley gave Hoover’s ideas unstinting praise as well as a patina of intellectual respectability. The only notes of discord came from Hoover’s position as a member of the vast administrative state, seemingly at odds with the magazine’s libertarian sensibility. Even there, however, National Review tended to allow him the benefit of the doubt. “That an organization with such inherently dangerous powers has functioned at all times strictly within the limits of the Constitution is a triumph of the men who make up that organization,” editor Frank Meyer wrote of the FBI in 1957. With Buckley at the helm, National Review depicted Hoover as Hoover liked to depict himself: as a federal bureaucrat who respected states’ rights and the limits of his own power even while going toe-to-toe with his ideological enemies.[6]
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National Review represented one side of the new conservative activism: intellectual, self-regarding, ambitious to be respectable and respected within elite conversation. But there was another side to the movement, a sprawling set of grassroots organizations that embraced Hoover’s anticommunist message as their first principle. Beginning in the late 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Americans had taken the anticommunist battle into their own hands, founding a network of civic groups, media outlets, bookstores, philanthropic efforts, propaganda outlets, and publishers dedicated to “educating” the American public about the ongoing threat. By all appearances, this was just what Hoover had asked for in Masters of Deceit—a bona fide “conservative revival,” in the words of one historian, with the communist question front and center. But Hoover viewed their arrival as at best a mixed blessing.[7]
The grassroots right treated Masters of Deceit as a foundational text, one of the few books that every movement member was expected to read and digest. As early as 1958, the budding Midwestern activist Phyllis Schlafly put Masters of Deceit at the top of her Reading List for Americans, a compilation of favored anticommunist and free-market treatises. The John Birch Society similarly included Masters of Deceit on its list of “approved books,” alongside founder Robert Welch’s The Life of John Birch and Buckley’s McCarthy and His Enemies. Other Hoover acolytes took more direct action, not just recommending his book, but purchasing it in bulk to be distributed as an essential guide for fellow citizens. In Miami, a local exterminator spent his own money to paint ads for the book on benches at city bus stops. “Learn How to fight Communism! Read: Masters of Deceit,” the copy instructed, accompanied by a cartoon of Fidel Castro on his knees. In 1961, the American Legion helped to sponsor Operation Alert, an effort to put the book into the hands of high school students with the goal of “disseminating maximum authentic information on the nature and methods of the communist threat.”[8]
What they all appreciated about Masters of Deceit was not simply its anticommunist message. Hoover’s book also brought the movement a certain gravitas, the reassurance that even the most paranoid anticommunist need not be relegated, as liberals often suggested, to the “lunatic fringe.” When Hoover spoke about communism, his admirers assumed that he was drawing upon his store of expert knowledge, acquired over almost four decades at the helm of the Bureau. He exercised a public authority almost unheard of among far-right heroes. “You, I feel, are the only one that can tell me what I would like to know,” one self-proclaimed “housewife” from Tyler, Texas, wrote to Hoover in 1961, pleading for information about how to be “a patriotic American and inform myself as a good citizen should.” Hoover received similar letters from many other conservative admirers, wondering what they should do to fight communism and which organizations they should join.[9]
