G-Man, page 96
Hoover lent his professional imprimatur to this narrative, not only by citing alarming statistics, but by publicizing gruesome stories of street crime committed by Black men. When Washington police shot and killed a Black man for snatching a white woman’s purse in 1963, Hoover blamed the parole system for setting the man free in the first place, calling for “an aroused public, determined no longer to tolerate consideration for the hardened criminal in preference to the rights of the law abiding citizen.” On other occasions, he cast aspersions on the “young hoodlums” who preyed upon middle-class residents. Though he rarely spoke directly of race, he often deployed racialized stereotypes in his depiction of juvenile offenders, describing them as hardened “gang” members wielding guns and switchblades, with a “callous contempt” for all “acceptable standards of behavior.” “Marauding teen-age thugs are degrading many American communities with brutal sidewalk muggings and assaults on defenseless and elderly citizens,” he wrote in 1962, blasting the juvenile courts for going easy on the “beastly punks” who preyed on the rest of society.[12]
He included himself among the ranks of the vulnerable, a lifelong district native who no longer felt free to stroll around his own city. “You can’t safely walk the streets of Washington, D.C., even in the daylight,” he lamented in late 1964, during the same press conference where he denounced King. The wooded expanse of Rock Creek Park, just a few blocks from Hoover’s home, offered little reprieve. “I used to walk there,” Hoover complained. “I can’t do it now because of conditions in the city.” By his own description, Hoover was just another elderly white district resident, worried about the changes taking place in their midst.[13]
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But of course Hoover was not just another Washington resident. He had the ear of the White House, and on this issue, as on so many others, Johnson was inclined to listen. On March 8, five days after meeting with Hoover and just twenty-four hours after Selma’s Bloody Sunday, Johnson took up the crime problem in a special message to Congress. His chief concern was slightly different from Hoover’s: Johnson worried that the crime issue might disrupt the momentum behind his Great Society programs. His statement nonetheless bore Hoover’s imprint. Though Johnson emphasized the elimination of poverty as a “long-run solution” to crime, most of his speech focused on policing and on the need to revive a culture of respect for law enforcement. He picked up on Hoover’s language to describe the immediate crisis. “Crime has become a malignant enemy in America’s midst,” Johnson declared, asserting that Americans no longer felt safe in their homes or places of business, much less out along city streets. He cited FBI statistics to justify their sense of unease. “Since 1940 the crime rate in this country has doubled,” he said. “It has increased five times as fast as our population since 1958.” In order to reverse the trend, he called on Congress “to give new recognition to the fact that crime is a national problem”—and that the federal government would have to play a greater role in supplying and supporting local police. He also singled out Hoover as a visionary who long ago recognized the “need” for the federal government to assume leadership on the issue.[14]
Johnson labeled his initiative the War on Crime, borrowing from the 1930s formulation and from his own recent declaration of a War on Poverty. In July, he expressed a renewed “hope that 1965 will be regarded as the year this country began in earnest a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime.” Over the next several months, his proposed Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) sailed through Congress. On August 2, the House approved the law 326–0. In early September, the Senate passed it along without dissent. On September 22, Johnson signed it into law with a characteristically ambitious promise: “I will not be satisfied until every woman and child in this Nation can walk any street, enjoy any park, drive on any highway, and live in any community at any time of the day or night without fear of being harmed.”
The chief purpose of the LEAA was to offer federal money to law enforcement agencies seeking to modernize their operations, whether through professional training or through the acquisition of the latest police technology. In the first War on Crime, such advances had helped to produce the FBI National Academy, as well as the Bureau’s early experiments with tommy guns, bulletproof vests, and armored cars. Now the technology differed but the impulse both to militarize and to professionalize the world of law enforcement remained the same. In addition to paying for training in areas such as forensic detection, the LEAA set aside money for heavy equipment such as tanks and military-grade rifles and (as in the 1930s) bulletproof vests. The Washington police received $1.2 million to hire 350 additional officers and detectives, to build up its fleets of station wagons, scout cars, patrol wagons, and motor scooters, and to provide the force with walkie-talkies and more advanced communications systems.[15]
Hoover recognized the political power inherent in the disbursal of funds under the LEAA and sought to exercise what influence he could. Johnson made that task easier with his selection of former FBI official Courtney Evans, Hoover’s liaison to the Kennedy White House, as the man in charge of doling out the federal money. “Evans is in a position where he is giving out a lot of money to groups and individuals around the country in this Law Enforcement Assistance Act and it could be a powerful instrument in the political field,” Hoover noted. Evans was smart enough to offer Hoover some of the money. “He indicated that if the FBI were to need funds around the first part of 1966, he would be most receptive to a request from us in the amount of several hundred thousand dollars,” a friendly inside source reported.[16]
Hoover soon launched the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), his latest experiment in “scientific policing” and file-management innovation. The NCIC adapted these concepts for the age of computers, setting up the first nationwide system for recording and retrieving local crime records. The idea, as Hoover described it, was to establish a “vast communications network” that would allow every police department in the country to retrieve information in “a matter of seconds” rather than hours or days. In Hoover’s view, this system would help to counterbalance what was still the criminal’s greatest advantage: the ability to move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction while the police were forced to stop at the borders. This same logic had helped to drive the changes of the 1930s, when the FBI acquired faster cars and more powerful guns. With the NCIC, Hoover explained, a few keystrokes allowed for an “uninterrupted flow of up-to-the-minute crime data” in out and of the FBI’s Washington headquarters, “a big advancement in scientific crime detection.”[17]
Hoover’s other ambition was to expand and improve the National Academy, among his proudest achievements from the Roosevelt era. The school still operated out at Quantico, the Virginia military base where Hoover had set up shop in the 1930s, with two hundred local and international police officers in each twelve-week class. He now envisioned an academy equipped to house and teach twelve hundred students at a time, with bigger and grander dormitories, offices, classrooms, and shooting ranges. After extensive back-and-forth with the White House, Congress, and the new bureaucracy created by the LEAA, the money he wanted came through.[18]
Johnson also borrowed one more critical idea from Hoover’s past. In July 1965, he announced the members of a federal Crime Commission intended to mimic the famed Wickersham Commission of the early 1930s. Hoover had been outraged when Bobby Kennedy proposed something similar as attorney general. He offered little resistance to Johnson. In early September, Johnson invited the body’s nineteen members to the White House for a luncheon and brainstorming session. After a few introductory remarks, he turned the floor over to Hoover, one of the few men working in government who had participated in the Wickersham Commission. Hoover took the opportunity to lay out a vision strikingly similar to the one he had developed in the 1930s, describing the crime rate as a symbol of social decline and “a shocking indictment of the American way of life.”[19]
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The LEAA reflected the professionalizing, “scientific” approach that had been central to Hoover’s early G-Man image. But that image could not have come into being without another great innovation of the Roosevelt years: the buildup of the FBI’s skills in public relations. In 1965, as Johnson’s War on Crime gained momentum, that same impulse inspired Hoover to branch out into color television with a one-hour dramatic series: The FBI.
Hoover initially resisted moving into television, just as he had once resisted entreaties from the film industry. He feared its sensationalizing qualities, along with the possibility that the FBI would lose control of its own story. But after months of strategizing and wheedling, DeLoach came back with a persuasive offer: a seventy-five-thousand-dollar onetime payment, plus five hundred per week to the FBI Recreation Association in exchange for access to selected FBI files and expertise. It helped that the offer came from men Hoover knew and trusted. At Warner Bros., the show’s originating studio, Jack Warner had helped to oversee nearly every successful FBI-themed film of the past three decades, from G-Men in 1935 to The FBI Story in 1959. One of Hoover’s main contacts at ABC, the show’s network home, was James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s former press secretary and a great Bureau supporter. The show’s chief sponsor would be the Ford Motor Company, where John Bugas, one of Hoover’s original G-Men and head of the FBI’s Detroit office throughout the Roosevelt years, had long been second-in-command. The final member of the team, producer Quinn Martin, was fresh off the hit series The Untouchables, which portrayed the heroics of Roosevelt-era federal law enforcement with voice-over narration by Walter Winchell.[20]
ABC wanted less nostalgia in Hoover’s show. “It would be suicide to go back to the days of John Dillinger and stuff like that which the public has seen six times,” the vice president of programming explained. “We’re interested in the silent, behind-the-scenes work that seldom makes headlines.” Not everyone believed that the network could pull it off. Even before the first episode, skeptics registered concern that the show would distort the Bureau’s work, providing a glossy portrait with all the warts and blemishes brushed away. “No one could question Hoover’s determination to do what he feels is best for the bureau,” wrote one reporter, “but a sustained commercial television series extolling his men and his policies week after week will look strange to a world for whom the civil rights battle in the United States and the Warren Commission’s criticism of the FBI are vividly in mind.” San Francisco columnist Arthur Hoppe envisioned a hopelessly didactic pageant centered on “the story of your selfless government agents who selflessly serve you night and day. Selflessly.” He proposed to call it Hoover Knows Best, a play on the small-town comedy Father Knows Best, famous for its treacly plots and relentless moralizing.[21]
As the embodiment of the modern G-Man, Warner’s producers chose a square-jawed actor named Efrem Zimbalist Jr., best known for his recent star turn in the detective show 77 Sunset Strip. During the 1964 presidential election, Zimbalist had campaigned for Goldwater. While this might have hurt him in certain Hollywood circles, when it came to launching The FBI his involvement in law-and-order politics only enhanced his qualifications. Zimbalist played the character of FBI inspector Lewis Erskine, a jack-of-all-trades investigator ready to be dispatched across the country solving crimes. As part of his training, Zimbalist spent several weeks at the National Academy, absorbing the peculiarities and traditions of Bureau culture.
The show premiered on Sunday, September 19, 1965, the same week that Johnson signed the LEAA into law. Certain elements of the episode would have been familiar to any devotee of the 1930s G-Man genre: the agents in their dark suits and white shirts, the stolid reminders that “the FBI investigates” but does not prosecute or decide the law. Despite these gestures to the past, producer Quinn Martin sought a more nuanced, human view of the modern agent’s life. “The movies made them look like robots,” Martin complained of the G-Man oeuvre. “They came out of a file cabinet in the morning, walked around like machines, went back in a drawer at night. And I don’t want that.” To soften the FBI’s image, the first episode showed Erskine lounging in bed, bleary-eyed and annoyed when his supervisor called him in to work. It also featured a drawn-out flirtation between Erskine and a voluptuous blond businesswoman who fell for him the moment he interviewed her.[22]
Hoover worried about these sexualized touches, just as he worried about the episode’s sensational plot, in which the fugitive turned out to be a mass murderer who liked to choke women with their own hair. From retirement, Lou Nichols rushed to assure Hoover that the show was a public relations success. “I think that some of the viewers may have expected more of an institutional program presented from the documentary approach, and in this respect I think the program could have been improved upon,” Nichols told Hoover. “However, we have got to remember that prime television time is directed to the man on the street and a presentation to survive must have high entertainment value.” The first week’s numbers showed moderate success. Nielsen rated The FBI the twenty-sixth most popular show of the week—tied with The Lawrence Welk Show, and just one spot behind The Ed Sullivan Show, which ran in the same Sunday-night slot. A Star poll ranked The FBI the most popular of ABC’s eleven new shows, with more than 73 percent of viewers giving it the thumbs-up.[23]
Critical opinion proved less charitable. “One has to be surprised, after viewing this program, that the FBI would lend its proud name to this piece of melodramatic swill,” read a review in The Washington Post. “Producer Martin may have access to FBI files on closed cases, but the script was the most banal kind of shoot-em-up trash and romantic nonsense.” If Hoover agreed with certain aspects of this critique, he made no move to stop the show. Instead, he began to take a more active role in its production, dictating terms and conditions that would deliver a message more in line with his own priorities. At Hoover’s direction, the show largely dispensed with women and romance by the end of the first season. It also began to emphasize punishment, concluding episodes with an account of jail time meted out to the suspect, along with a “Wanted” poster of a real-life criminal fugitive. Over time, Hoover and Tolson added other demands, including the elimination of any portrayal of police brutality, wiretapping, “extreme acts of violence,” and civil rights cases. As these changes took hold, the same publications that once complained about the show’s “melodramatic” qualities began to lament its portrayal of the FBI agent as “a kind of one-dimensional automaton who solves crimes and rounds up criminals.” Hoover viewed the shift as a success, though, convinced that what had worked for the 1930s would now work for the War on Crime of the 1960s.[24]
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Try as he might, though, Hoover could not stop time. And there was at least one realm in which his old solutions and priorities no longer seemed to work. Since the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, liberals had been quietly raising questions about the FBI’s methods, arguing that Hoover’s insistence on secrecy and FBI autonomy did not adequately protect civil liberties—a return of the critique that had felled Palmer so long ago. In 1965, those questions acquired new urgency. To Hoover’s chagrin, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Fred Black, a Washington lobbyist recently convicted of tax fraud whose hotel room had been secretly bugged by the FBI. In Congress, Representative Edward Long launched hearings into wiretapping by federal agencies. From Justice, Katzenbach announced that all wiretaps would henceforth be approved by his office. Even Johnson felt pressured to weigh in, issuing a directive that forbid federal wiretapping except in cases of “internal security.” Hoover professed not to care about any of it. “I don’t see what all the excitement is about,” he wrote in a memo to FBI officials in February 1965. But his actions suggested otherwise.[25]
His greatest concerns focused on the Supreme Court, which had dealt such powerful blows to the FBI in recent years. The justices praised Hoover in their 1966 Miranda decision, holding up the FBI as a model for its longtime practice of informing arrested suspects about their constitutional rights. The Black case was more of a problem. Though Black himself did not know his hotel room had been bugged, higher-ups at the Justice Department—including Katzenbach and now-Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall—felt duty-bound to disclose the fact before the Supreme Court. Hoover took their decision as a personal betrayal—“the greatest crisis” in FBI history, he declared. He worried that it would not only expose the Bureau’s bugging practices, but reveal far too much about Black’s ties to former Johnson aide Bobby Baker, whose backroom dealmaking and financial shenanigans had long threatened to tarnish the Johnson presidency. He was also outraged that Bobby Kennedy, now a senator, denied knowing anything about the FBI’s bugging practices during his time as attorney general. Convinced that Katzenbach was in cahoots with Kennedy, Hoover tried to use his White House contacts—including Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a die-hard Johnson loyalist—to make an end run around the Justice Department. DeLoach acknowledged that speaking with Fortas “bordered on a violation of judicial ethics,” but went ahead with it anyway. On June 14, 1966, they met for a secret breakfast session to discuss the political machinations and implications of the Black case. When they were done, Fortas agreed “to slip in the back door and see the President” in the hopes that Johnson would put pressure on Katzenbach.[26]
