J. Edgar Hoover may be among the most misunderstood of figures in American history. A far cry from the one-dimensional, indefensible caricature passed down by editorialists, Beverly Gage presents him in her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography as an anxious, yet complicated man. For my part, I read him as praise-worthy anticommunist who dedicated his bloodline, with great achievement, to the advancement of the FBI. Further, I read him as someone who broke from his own past to willingly take up the mantle of progressivism in the 1960’s, in direct opposition to many critics and much of Gage’s portrayal.
Rarely celebrated for their secrecy, his headline achievements alone were enormous. Take only the top four, in my view: In 1941, he successfully thwarted Nazi bomb plots on American soil, months before the United States would enter the war; in the mid-to-late 1940’s, he helped the army intelligence match Soviet code names from decrypted transmissions in a project called “Venona” that showed undeniable evidence of the Rothenberg’s role in leaking atomic secrets among others, only made public in the 1990’s; in the late 1950’s, he planted a double agent at the top of the American Communist Party who oversaw $28 million of transfers from the Soviet Union to America over thirty years and informed the FBI about nearly all American communist operations for that time in an operation called “SOLO”; and last, in the mid 1960’s, Hoover’s FBI infiltrated and destabilized the Klu Klux Klan to the point of non-function. Many of these, like Venona and SOLO, were so secret that the sitting President was not even briefed, let alone the public. In 1938, Hoover oversaw an FBI with no espionage or counterespionage efforts; by 1955, he had led an American response to decades of Soviet espionage that had an FBI double agent, as a part of SOLO, deep within the Kremlin. For these four achievements alone, it’s hard to describe his contribution to American life as anything other than seismic.
Unfortunately, his record is blemished by misperception about his contributions to the civil rights movement. To his critics, Hoover is portrayed as a lifetime white supremacist, whose indoctrinated Kappa Alpha racism went unreformed his entire life and put Black Americans back at least 20 years. Largely, these critiques found a readerbase in those who were frustrating with the shortcomings of with local law enforcement, and they stayed obscure during most of his life. However, when Hoover made headlines by calling Martin Luther King Jr. a liar and degenerate, both of which seem fair with the now publicly released FBI files that Hoover referenced, he became a lightning rod and scapegoat in a way that he would be unable to shake for the rest of his life and recent history. Yet, as the record shows, Hoover was not as characterized. On local law enforcement, it was he who had the idea, before LBJ, of opening a Jackson field office to protect the civil rights of Mississippi’s famously disenfranchised black community. It was Hoover who found that the FBI could investigate lynching on the grounds that the killings violated federal “civil rights,” even when there was no federal legislation specifically granting the FBI jurisdiction. On MLK, the evidence is even more overwhelming:
For the year 1956, according to Bureau files, Levison and his brother channeled up to $41,000 to the Communist Party (the equivalent of about $425,000 in today’s money … Later that year, Levison sat down with Baker and Rustin at his Upper West Side apartment to hash out a plan for a national organization under King’s leadership, a vehicle to channel the nascent energies of the Montgomery boycott into a larger Southern movement. It would be known as the SCLC…. By the end of the year, he was also doing King’s taxes and helping to ghostwrite his first book, Stride Toward Freedom. He helped to shore up King’s personal finances, passing along two gifts of five thousand dollars each in 1957 and 1958.
(After Hoover’s death, a court order placed the tapes under embargo for fifty years, set to expire in 2027.) … According to the document… the dozen or so people gathered in the room that night engaged in a fantastical “sex orgy,” complete with “excessive consumption of alcohol and the use of the vilest language imaginable.” King allegedly participated in and even joked about the full range of activity, declaring himself a proud founding member of the “International Association for the Advancement of Pussy Eaters.” … “When one of the women protested that she did not approve” of the group’s sexual practices, the report alleged, a Baptist minister from Baltimore “immediately and forcibly…her.” A handwritten note, presumably added by Sullivan or another Bureau official, claimed that “King looked on, laughed and offered advice” while the [event] took place.
Indeed, the counterargument is that does not make a difference who funded the civil rights movement; it only matters that it happened. In either case, the upshot is that Hoover should not be caught in the crossfire, discredited as a racist for remarks that were wholly based on the best available, yet often non-public, facts. Lastly, Hoover attracted long posthumous criticism for his attempts to destabilize the Black Power movement. Yet from Hoover’s perspective, the movement was chiefly a security concern: many of their leaders had been charged with shooting police, and the group openly advocated violence. So whether on law enforcement, his tension with MLK, or his opposition to the Black Power movement, his critiques fail to hold up under scrutiny.
If anything, a more measured reading of Hoover’s civil rights record suggests he was largely a faithful executor of the President’s will, consistent with his job description. While during JFK’s presidency he did not jump on investigating the Freedom Summer incidents, since JFK did not want to alienate his Southern base, Hoover’s penchant for action changed under LBJ: It was Hoover who dismantled the KKK, found the loophole that allowed the FBI to investigate lynchings, and opened the Jackson field office. Arguably, without Hoover, LBJ’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 might have had the same flailing results as Brown. An apt comparison for the role that Hoover’s FBI played during the 1960’s, then, might be Jackson’s army during the Nullification Crisis of 1832, with the primary difference being that the effectiveness of Hoover’s FBI was why no further mobilization was necessary, not that decade or in the three decades hence. The complication, though, is that Hoover did not stay flexible to every President he served. Nixon, after campaigning on “law and order” in Hoover’s image in 1968, ran into friction with Hoover soon after arriving in the White House. In the spring of 1969, Nixon wanted Hoover to wiretap White House staffers and reporters, concerned about Vietnam War-related leaks. Hoover resisted at first on grounds that the public, if they found out, might view it as political spying or suppression of a free press, but he gave in when Kissinger stopped by the FBI to express his “personal appreciation.” By summer, they had another conflict: Nixon had assigned a White House staffer, Thomas Huston, to bring the FBI under Nixon’s control, and Huston had furnished a report that recommended “relaxing restrictions” on “covert mail opening” and “intensification of electronic surveillance.” Hoover disapproved, sayings the mail openings were “clearly illegal” and likely to result in “serious damage… if revealed to the public.” When Nixon told Huston to go ahead with the recommendations anyway, Hoover gave Nixon an ultimatum: the FBI needed a written order from the President or the attorney general, he said, or they would not implement them. Nixon eventually backed down, but the tension between them was anything but cleared. The event is more remarkable, even, when compared to how Hoover had acquiesced to carrying out Roosevelt’s wiretapping requests soon after they had been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but that by Nixon he would not budge. Resisting the caricatures of being either only a prejudiced, spineless, or even law-abiding bureaucrat, Hoover seemed to mostly align himself with the interests of his Presidents, yet, like Roosevelt, with his own FBI-minded sense of right and wrong.
Beyond race and the law, though, much of that sense of “right and wrong” was informed by anticommunism, of which Hoover’s flavor seems widely misunderstood. Today, Hoover is often taught alongside McCarthy and the Second Red Scare: all three, according to AP US History, associated with witch-hunts that trampled on Americans’ foremost birthright—civil liberty. The problem, however, is that this reductive impression misses so much. In reality, Hoover and McCarthy were largely distinct. Not only was Hoover was a fierce critic of McCarthy, who he saw privately as “a demagogue and a fool,” but, by 1954, when McCarthy claimed to have a letter that reflected FBI information, Hoover rejected McCarthy’s claims, “stunning” McCarthy and finishing what little credibility McCarthy had left. In contrast to the “McCarthyism” of the era, Hoover’s approach to communism was more measured, itself dubbed “Hooverism.” Hooverism’s difference was that it deal in facts first and fear second, not vice versa. For example, by McCarthy’s first election, Hoover’s anticommunsim had been guided by decades of communist organizing: In 1919, he had seen Lenin create “comintern,” an institution dedicated to fomenting global revolution and send a letter to Americans. In 1924, one of his FBI raids found a direct line to Moscow. In early 1945, the FBI started to hear wind of a decades-old underground espionage network within American borders. In June of 1945, an FBI raid of a left-leaning Amerasia publication in California found dozens of classified government files. In 1948, the army’s discovery of the Venona cables helped find hundreds of Soviet informants on American soil, including those who leaked the Manhattan Project, many government officials, someone within the Venona project itself, and the top British intelligence agent in the United States at the time. In contrast, McCarthy’s anticommunism was informed by its perceived ability to welcome hyperbole, attract press, and win elections. By 1954, though, McCarthy’s indecency was judged by Hoover and Eisenhower to be causing more harm than good, and McCarthy lost the support of the establishment. By 1957, Hoover would start operation SOLO, giving the US a near perfect understanding of Soviet activity. The press, unlike during McCarthy’s years, did not hear a whisper. So while it may be tempting to bucket Hoover into the same category as McCarthy and the Red Scare, all for how anticommunism was a guiding philosophy, their approaches to the issue should be clarified as distinct. Hoover was staunchly facts-first, and he should be credited as such in history.
Beyond race and anticommunism, though, J Edgar Hoover’s personal drive also seems more straight-forward than perceived. In the simplest terms, I read him as a lifelong technocrat and closeted homosexual who dedicated his life to the FBI. In a post-WW2 writeup, British intelligence described Hoover as “a man of great singleness of purpose… and his purpose is the welfare of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He had only worked one job before joining the Justice Department—as an organizer at the Library of Congress during college—and he applied what he had learned there to keep the bureau organized for more than forty years. Under his tenure, beyond adopting the Library of Congress’s “index” system for storing information, the FBI pushed the envelope on “scientific policing” with a forensics laboratory, centralized crime statistics, a central fingerprint repository for the country, a training school for the nation’s police, a computer system in the late 1960’s that offered instant access to crime records. To the outside world, Hoover was described as a “technocrat,” and deservedly so. With his close confidants, however, he was far more guarded. He was a man who “could not” marry a woman, he said, and he went through life with his closest male friend, Clyde Tolson. As outsiders attempted to make sense of it during a less tolerant era, they would sometimes quip he “married the Bureau.” In such a world, then, where Hoover knew he would likely never be able to cultivate a family life, he dedicated himself fully to the Bureau. To his staff, his caution was that the most critical offense they could commit was to endanger the “prestige of the Bureau.” When the Supreme Court ruled wiretaps illegal for a second time in the late 1950’s, Hoover took the surprising prerogative, in the interests of the Bureau’s reputation, to reduce the number of non-national security-related wiretaps to zero. Indeed, Hoover had spent his formative college years in the lap of Kappa Alpha, the Southern fraternity that claims to been the founding influence of the Klu Klux Klan. Yet by the later part of his life, Hoover was the man who led the efforts that put an end to that same organization. All told, during his lifetime, he found great support for his service: LBJ would say he was “the only man in Washington” that he could trust at times, he served under eight Presidents, and 1949 and 1970 Gallup polls measured his FBI’s approval rating at 71 and 73%. An advocate for “Americanism”, “tolerance,” and “facts,” if J Edgar Hoover was one-dimensional in any way during his lifetime, it was that he put the FBI first, for reasons that may have prohibited him from putting his personal life anywhere near the top.
With that singleness of purpose, the central question he faced at the FBI for much of his life was that of jurisdiction. In other words, what he was allowed to investigate, and whether it was legal. In the South, Hoover was often the standard-bearer of federal progressivism, since federal law was more progressive than local lawmakers and law enforcement would have liked. And yet: the dominant reading of Hoover, including by Gage, is that he never reformed from his Kappa Alpha days, and that he was a lifelong white supremacist. In some ways, this seems true: he developed hiring practices for the FBI that fit the Kappa Alpha mold, and the darker skinned people in his life always filled supportive roles, either as chauffer or some form of secretary. In other ways, though, he was a voice of change. During speaking events, he advocated to police chiefs that “every victory for intolerance in America is a menace to democracy for all of us.” During the McCarthy-instigated Lavender Scare, he declined to provide Congressional testimony, and the agent he sent in his place defended homosexuality, albeit with little left explicit. After the Kinsey report, he purchased books that tried to make sense of sexuality. His entire career, Hoover walked on eggshells with respect to his personal relationships, and he was sensitive to any criticism about that part of his behavior. As a result, then, I read a Hoover as someone whose lifelong experience discovering and then making sense of a personal secret shattered his faith in Kappa Alpha scripture and converted him to LBJ idealism. He was a man of “facts,” and the facts, for him, as he found out throughout his life, were that Kappa Alpha was wrong about sexuality. Indeed, Tolson burned much of Hoover’s personal correspondences after his death, so the historical record will never know exactly how his personal views shifted throughout his life. Yet, when considering both Hoover’s words and actions during the later part of his life, Hoover was not only the executor of LBJ’s civil rights agenda, but—before communism and anarchy got mixed in—he was also often a voice of it. From that lens, it does not seem farfetched to believe that not only was he an agent of progressivism, but, in the final analysis, he seemed happy to be it.
Admittedly, the existence of a federal police force that surveils the populace in the interest of defense raises questions about the effectiveness and sustainability of democracy. Most saliently, in the 1930’s, the Nazi and Italian police states gave ammunition to those who saw democracy as dated institution, ill-equipped to compete in a fast-moving world. Helped by intelligence services, fascist leaders were simply far better informed, advocates would say, than the public to make major decisions. Yet, at the same time, federal police seem to add little new to a theory of government: elected officials have always made decisions with more information than electors have had, so the addition of intelligence information should not change all that much. The problem seems to arise when federal police are abused to enforce majority or authoritarian opinion, as it was in Italy and Germany. For that problem, though, an effective response in the self-correcting ethos of democracy would seem to be oversight, independence, and public education. While Hoover’s FBI may have lacked oversight, understandably, since the 1975 Church commission and establishment of the permanent Intelligence Committees in the House, that problem seems resolved. With respect to independence, the heads of the FBI and CIA may have partisan influences, and more work could be done, but the impression from the end of Gage’s book is that Hoover built an organization so non-partisan that when Nixon tried to bend it to his will the FBI leaked Watergate materials that pushed him out of office. Lastly, on education, if the misperception and miseducation about Hoover is any guide, self-correction might simply take decades, as the truth behind FBI operations slowly comes out. The high task for historians, then, as they integrate new evidence into the record, might require what Gage called for Hoover: to challenge, not indulge, one’s prejudice.
By any measure, the biography was nothing short of incredible, for everything from its riveting detail to how it entirely recast my understanding of a period I had already spent an entire semester studying. Any fledgling student of history or American history would likely find themselves unable to put it down, like me, in only the best of ways.
Selections (for my future reference):
Four decades later, Hoover’s own father died of “melancholia” and “inanition” (what we today might describe as severe depression), disappearing first into sadness and rage and, later, losing the desire to eat or live.
“If I had a son, I’d swear to do one thing: I’d tell him the truth,” Hoover wrote. “No matter how difficult it might be, I’d tell my boy the truth.”
For decades after his appointment as FBI director, there were rumors that Hoover came from a “passing” family—that he was, under the one-drop rule governing racial classifications, actually Black.
Hoover’s mother, Annie, descended from the Hitz line—the most prominent family of nineteenth-century Swiss Washington, several rungs up from the Hoovers on the city’s class ladder.
For decades to come, he would warn about the dangers of women who drank and violated the sanctity of the home, and about the weak men who allowed such activities to occur.
According to the era’s conventional wisdom, American men were fast abandoning the Victorian attributes of discipline, duty, and self-restraint in favor of debauchery and self-indulgence…. Reformers agonized over the rise of desk jobs, the temptations of city life, the decline of frontier conquest—all alleged sources of enervation among American men… The Boy Scouts, founded in 1910, promised to end “degeneracy” by transforming American boys from “flat-chested cigarette-smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” into “robust, manly, self-reliant” men… He liked to cite Benjamin Franklin: “Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.” “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”
Instead, he seems to have overcome the challenge by experimenting with various speech patterns, then practicing hour after hour in front of a mirror… Hoover never spoke publicly about his stutter. But his style of speech earned him the nickname “Speed.”
“John Edgar would enter Miss (or is it Mrs.?) Farr’s math class, speak no word to anyone, circle the back of the class, and seat himself directly in front of that most excellent teacher and drink in every word she uttered.”
Hoover had been the best among them—valedictorian, debate star, cadet captain—yet he was forced to stay home.
Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since the Civil War, sanctioned the segregation of federal employment.
Under the Wilson administration, many government departments built walls between their Black and white employees, forcing Black clerks into separate bathrooms and out of government cafeterias. Others fired their Black employees rather than bother with the effort of segregation. The result of Wilson’s initiatives was a sudden reordering of Washington’s social geography, the drawing of clear racial lines where things had been blurry before.
Kappa Alpha dedicated itself to carrying on the legacy of the “incomparable flower of Southern knighthood” known as Robert E. Lee. According to fraternity legend, its early members also helped to create the first Ku Klux Klan, founded around the same time. Both Kappa Alpha and the Klan traced certain origins to Kuklos Adelphon, a defunct prewar Southern fraternal order known as “old Kappa Alpha.”
They took as their motto “Dieu et les Dames” (“God and the Ladies”), a phrase intended to evoke a tradition of white masculine chivalry tarnished by Confederate defeat. To those in the know, the phrase was shorthand for all the values of the Old South, including the idea that white women needed to be protected from the supposedly dire threat of Black sexual violence. The Mississippi legislature inscribed “Dieu et les Dames” on the ceiling of its new statehouse, built in 1903—a sign of Kappa Alpha’s political reach and regional influence.
Dixon was best known as a fiction author and playwright—in effect, the nation’s bard of white supremacy. His novels portrayed the Klan as an avenging, godly force, sent to save Southern white women (and civilization itself) from rape and pillage at the hands of debauched former slaves.
Dixon began collaborating with director D. W. Griffith on The Birth of a Nation, a three-hour silent-film adaptation of Dixon’s novel The Clansman. In February 1915, during Hoover’s second year of law school, Woodrow Wilson screened the film at the White House, a major public relations triumph for the filmmakers. He purportedly loved its heroic depiction of Klansmen riding to the rescue of a beleaguered white South. Elsewhere, the film met with a more mixed response, as millions of white citizens thrilled to its racial demagoguery while Black organizations and their sympathizers fought to have the film banned. Among the film’s greatest admirers was a Southern preacher named William Simmons, who chose Stone Mountain as the site for a midnight ceremony reestablishing the Klan, thus blending the visions of Dixon and Graves.
When Hoover arrived at law school, domestic issues like women’s suffrage and socialism had dominated political talk on campus. Slowly, though, the war had begun to crowd out everything else, to become the issue rather than one of many. Events drove that shift: the 1915 sinking of the British merchant boat Lusitania, with more than a hundred Americans aboard; the stalemated battles at the Somme and Verdun in 1916, with their unspeakable death tolls; the calls in many sectors of American society—finance, especially—for more active aid to suffering Britain; the insistence by others that the war was a capitalist conspiracy and a soulless charnel house, with nothing to offer the American people. Hoover did not play much of a role in these campus debates. He focused on grades, fraternity affairs, and his day job ordering books.
Theodore Roosevelt described as the “Great Adventure” of war. Wilson himself came around to that position in early 1917, as the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and made a secret bid to bring Mexico into a war against the United States. On April 2, 1917, in the hours before his war message, thousands of protesters had descended on the Capitol, begging him not to lead the nation’s men into the European carnage. But Congress ultimately agreed with Wilson, declaring war in an overwhelming if not unanimous vote.
Countless “firsts” were rushed into being during those early months of war: the first mass draft, the first widespread use of the income tax, the first significant experiments in federal propaganda and surveillance. The swiftness and scale of these changes have led historians to identify 1917 as the moment the American state began to acquire its truly modern form.
In 1917, though, very little about the Justice Department seemed especially promising. Created by Congress during Reconstruction, the department had spent the past half century dealing mostly with issues of trade and taxation and cleaning up after botched elections. Until 1917, the department was insignificant enough to fit into a limestone mansion that had once been a stand-alone private residence. Hoover’s arrival coincided with the move to an eight-story office building.
During his war address in April, Wilson had delivered a warning to foreign-born residents who had neglected to become American citizens, vowing to use the “firm hand of stern repression” in all cases of “disloyalty.” Millions of Americans had responded to his call by purging their communities of all things German: no more Beethoven or Wagner, no more German-language instruction, no more “sauerkraut” or “hamburgers” (instead, Americans ate “liberty cabbage” and “liberty sandwiches”).”
As early as 1915, military authorities had begun to warn that German agents were behind mysterious explosions of ships and defense facilities along the East Coast. The worst episode occurred at Black Tom Island, just off the tip of Manhattan. There, saboteurs blew up a federal munitions depot and produced a massive explosion that killed several people and rattled the entire city. It would take two decades for the government to prove definitively that Black Tom was, indeed, an act of German sabotage.
These were subjective decisions, often made in haste. “I have a feeling of suspicion about this fellow and recommend permanent detention as the safest course,” wrote one Justice Department lawyer, reviewing the case of a Southern Pacific railroad employee whose route took him near wartime facilities. Hoover relied on similarly vague instincts to render his decisions. In one case, he recommended internment for a man who had denounced President Wilson as a “cock-sucker and a thief.”… “In yet another case, he identified a man’s “lying about his social standing and connections” as a reason for internment, despite the fact that allegations of spying and direct contact with German agents “have not been able to be substantiated by evidence.”[19]But Hoover could also show compassion and a willingness to give accused men a second chance. In one case, he reviewed the arrest of German citizen Max Schachman, accused of selling whiskey to men in uniform and “soliciting men for immoral women.”… By the attorney general’s estimate, more than six thousand “suspected enemy aliens” were interned or detained under presidential warrants for the duration of the war, along with “several thousand” more held for shorter periods… The summary character and severe penalty of internment has acted throughout the country as a powerful deterrent against alien-enemy activity,” Gregory wrote in 1918. What mattered, in this view, was not that the program doled out perfect justice, but that it taught a lesson about the power and reach of the wartime government.
Elected treasurer of the local alumni association, in early 1919 he helped to lead the hunt for a headquarters worthy of the fraternity’s self-image: “a big national club in Washington City, with a big n—— at the front door in long coat and brass buttons to greet you with ‘Yassah, Boss,’ ” as the KA journal put it, using openly racist language.
That same month, North Carolina senator Lee Overman announced that his Senate subcommittee, originally convened to combat German propaganda, would now investigate labor unrest and Soviet-inspired revolutionary activity.He found plenty to go on. In March 1919, Lenin announced the creation of the Third International, or Comintern, a central organizing body intended to foment global revolution. He acknowledged in a public letter to American workers that “it may take a long time before help can come from you.” But for many Americans, including Hoover, the possibility of revolution did not look so remote. Ultimately, 1919 turned out to be one of the most strike-prone years in U.S. history; more than four million workers—20 percent of the workforce—walked off their jobs.
Palmer has come to symbolize the first Red Scare… When he rushed back to the central post office, he found sixteen bombs sitting in the postage-due area, addressed to some of the most prominent men in American life. All told, the authorities uncovered thirty bombs scattered throughout the postal system, most likely “an anarchist plot to spread terror throughout the country,” in the words of the Associated Press.
Yet what finally brought him into Palmer’s inner circle may have had less to do with particular skills than with his Kappa Alpha connections—specifically, his connection to John Abercrombie, the former Alabama congressman and stalwart KA who was now serving as the solicitor of labor. In order to carry out large-scale deportation, Palmer needed the cooperation of the Labor Department, which maintained jurisdiction over all immigration matters.
Hoover thus set out to do for the Radical Division what Putnam had done for the Library of Congress: to make its vast stores of information accessible at a moment’s notice.He called his process the Editorial File System, placing himself at its core. All reports coming from the field were to be routed directly through his office, marked “Attn. Mr. Hoover.” From there, he passed the documents on to an editorial room, where his small staff drew up separate index cards classifying each report by subject name, state, city, organization, ideological orientation, periodical, and event.
The raids would target not a small, obscure anarchist organization but two of the country’s newest and most audacious left-wing groups: the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party. The decision to pursue the communist parties marked a major shift in Bureau priorities. From now on, communists—not anarchists—would be the focus of the deportation effort. It also launched a new period in Hoover’s career, in which he came face-to-face with the “communist menace” that would ultimately consume so much of his professional energy.
He initially assumed the Justice Department would have an easy rout—a repeat of the November raids, only bigger and better. As it turned out, the 1920 raids did not call forth the same near-universal praise. Instead, they produced Hoover’s first major embarrassment in the national arena. Some of his critics came from within the federal government itself, administrators and bureaucrats well positioned to weigh in on new plans for arrests, deportations, and raids. Others came from outside, lawyers and professors from such rarefied environs as the Harvard Liberal Club. What they shared was a sense that something dangerous was afoot in the Justice Department’s effort to suppress radical groups, that the United States had abandoned essential principles of due process and free speech. Today, we would refer to them as “civil libertarians,” but in 1920 that phrase—and the worldview it evoked—was just beginning to take shape.
Their membership numbers were small: a total of about forty thousand, many of them Russian-speaking immigrants. But as the parties themselves were eager to point out, numbers alone did not measure influence. Seizing upon Lenin’s example, each party positioned itself as the one true American vanguard, a small, highly mobilized band of militants destined to lead the working class into revolution. Though this was more fantasy than reality, Hoover took them at their word. From the first, he shared with the communists an interest in exaggerating their influence, and thus positioning himself as an indispensable public servant who might hold them at bay.
Hoover sought to persuade his superiors that communists actually embraced violence, however cagey their writings might be. By virtue of joining one of the two parties, he argued, members committed themselves to the armed overthrow of the government and the capitalist system.
The raids of January 2 are one of the most mythologized events of their age—a symbol of government abuse and lawless policing.
In mid-January, when Labor Secretary Wilson decided to review the Communist Party’s status under deportation laws, it was Hoover who represented the Justice Department. At the hearing, Hoover denounced the party as “an integral part of an international conspiracy,” firing off quotes from Communist Party publications calling for “destruction,” “annihilation,” and “violence.” The communists sent four lawyers to defend them, all experienced men from big cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston. The debate came down to the meaning of words, with the communists’ attorneys contending that references to “force” were simply metaphors, while Hoover insisted that the words meant just what they said. Within forty-eight hours, Labor Secretary Wilson sided with Hoover.
Thanks to postwar budget cuts, Hoover spent the summer of 1920 pruning back rather than expanding his work for the first time since taking over the Radical Division.
During the Harding years, Hoover was forced to rebuild his political network almost from scratch, ingratiating himself with a new generation of Republican politicians and officials. These friends, in turn, produced their own scandals and problems. By all accounts—Hoover’s included—the period between 1921 and 1924 ranked as the most chaotic, dishonest, and disgraceful in the history of the Justice Department. During these years, as the focus on radicalism receded, Justice became known as the “Department of Easy Virtue,” where poker games, whiskey peddling, and the baldest forms of graft prevailed.
Like many Harding appointees, Daugherty was a product of the Ohio Republican machine at its most formidable. Including Harding, five of the previous ten presidents had been Ohio Republicans. Daugherty was also a “boss” in the least flattering and most corruptible sense, a man who viewed politics as a game and government as a chance to get his hands on the public till. It was he who had put Harding over the top at the 1920 Republican convention. In the standard formulation, he took a “dark horse” candidate and made him president by twisting arms in the convention’s “smoke-filled” back rooms. His appointment as attorney general occasioned cries of outrage, but Harding never wavered. When they arrived in Washington, Harding gave special orders to install a direct phone line between the White House and Justice Department. The two men spoke several times a day… “When I met him, he was a like a turtle sitting on a log,” Daugherty liked to say. “I pushed him in the water.”
Where fingerprints did exist they were often compiled and contained at the local level. Burns’s idea was to bring all the prints to Washington, centralizing them in a single filing and identification system accessible to police throughout the country.
After the war the Bureau’s scope increased still further—not only into antiradical activities but also into interstate car theft, designated by Congress in 1919 as a federal crime. Hoover became assistant director without ever working directly in such areas of criminal investigation, the Bureau’s true bread and butter.
As director, Hoover would coin his own name for this impersonal approach: He would call the FBI a “we” organization rather than an “I” organization. No press.
Instead, as a newly minted law enforcement official, he was starting to see the Klan as a force of lawlessness, the sort of group that fomented violence, social disorder, and contempt for law enforcement if left unchecked. On March 10, 1924, the imperial Kleagle pleaded guilty in federal court to violating the Mann Act, Hoover’s first victory in what would become a lifetime of trying to contain an organization he had once been taught to revere.
**After a mad dash through the woods, agents netted some two dozen top party officials, along with a cache of manifestos, membership lists, and direct communications with Moscow. When the time came to use these materials in court, however, the case collapsed. In the run-up to the trial of party leader William Z. Foster, an undercover operative came forth to testify that Burns had instructed him to lie in order to frame Foster as a dangerous subversive. The trial ended with a hung jury, yet another sputtering, inconclusive finish to another major communist case.
Hoover rebuilt the Bureau of Investigation as the organization he wanted it to be, sloughing off the controversies of the Palmer and Burns years, refashioning it into a model government agency under the acronym FBI. The letters stood for Federal Bureau of Investigation, but Hoover liked to say they really meant “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity,” the supposed hallmarks of an FBI culture crafted in his exacting image. Between 1924 and 1945, he created many of the initiatives that would become synonymous with the FBI: its forensic lab and crime statistics, its training school at Quantico, its public relations division, its National Academy.
Between 1924 and 1945, the number of FBI agents grew from 381 to 4,900, part of an unprecedented expansion of federal employment that began with the New Deal and exploded during World War II.
“I’ll take the job, Mr. Stone, on certain conditions,” he replied, according to his own version of the encounter. “The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not be a catch-all for political hacks. Appointments must be based on merit. Second, promotions will be made on proved ability and the Bureau will be responsible only to the attorney general.” Stone uttered a few gruff words in response. “I wouldn’t give it to you under any other conditions. That’s all. Good day.”[1]This tale—of youth meeting experience, of merit winning out over connections—would become Hoover’s founding myth, separating his Bureau from the iniquity and incompetence that had come before.”
Stone assured reporters that the Bureau rejected all forms of political and personal surveillance. “There is always a possibility that a secret police may be a menace to free government and free institutions,” he noted in what would turn out to be an oft-cited interview, “because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly apprehended or understood.”
Just weeks after his appointment, Hoover spoke with Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the nation’s most outspoken opponents of wartime internment, speech laws, and deportation raids. In the summer and fall of 1924, Hoover and Baldwin met in a series of one-on-one conferences, instigated by Stone, to reach an accord about the proper limits and uses of Bureau power.
A thin-lipped Massachusetts native, Coolidge was most often described in the negative: dour, silent, inaccessible. His political outlook, too, tended toward a single word: no. A proud conservative even in the prewar heyday of progressivism, Coolidge viewed his role as president to restrain the federal government, to spend taxpayer dollars as infrequently and efficiently as possible. He boasted, in an unusual but successful campaign speech, that the American people would hardly notice “if the Federal Government should go out of existence.” Coolidge admired the creative power and stern realism of American industry, promising to ape corporate efficiency while keeping the government out of the business of business.
A variety of police practices came in for special criticism, each said to embody the underhanded and unscientific approach that dominated the law enforcement profession. One was the so-called third degree, in which police relied on beatings, threats, and torture to extract confessions from unwilling suspects.
Hoover vowed to fire any agent caught drinking—not because he was “a fanatic” on the question, he insisted, but because “when a man becomes a part of this Bureau he must so conduct himself, both officially and unofficially, as to eliminate the slightest possibility of criticism.
In Savannah, Georgia, evidence gathered by Bureau agents helped to convict 142 people on charges of corruption and bribery. In Cleveland, the Bureau exposed a corrupt federal prohibition director and his multiyear record of government fraud. In Cincinnati, Bureau efforts resulted in the indictment of seventy-one individuals as part of a “conspiracy” between local police and Prohibition agents, in Hoover’s words, “to defeat the enforcement of the prohibition law.”[18]In that sense, Prohibition was actually a gift to Hoover, a chance to prove that his agents were different from the dissolute, cynical, and easily bribed local police.
Before Hoover’s appointment, the Bureau had regularly hired Black agents, if not in great numbers. Hoover put an end to that practice, and instead placed Black men in servant roles such as chauffeur and greeter. Jewish employees fared slightly better, though they, too, came in for extra scrutiny under Hoover.
“It is my belief that it is better to pay large salaries to a comparatively small group of efficient men than to have on the job a lot of poor men who are likely to blunder,” Hoover explained to The Evening Star.
Hoover came to expect and receive voluntary overtime, in which “voluntary” meant “unpaid.” He also expected agents to transfer offices without complaint, packing up on short notice and often paying for the moves themselves… “Our poor wives!” one agent later reflected. “Theirs was a lonely and narrow world.”… Nor did they know in advance when they might run up against the most fearsome of all Bureau procedures: the field office inspection. At least twice a year, a team of inspectors from the Washington headquarters descended upon each field office.
In Oklahoma, agents broke a brazen murder-and-theft ring on the Osage Indian reservation. In Pittsburgh, Bureau experts identified the fingerprints of a would-be bank robber who had blown himself up—along with “quite a number of people”—when the teller refused to hand over cash. Hoover recited these triumphs in his annual appearances before the House Appropriations Committee. In a ritual that would be repeated for decades, he deployed a dizzying array of charts and statistics to prove that while the Bureau’s work was increasing, its efficiency and cost savings were growing even faster.
Hoover mostly said no to new duties in the early 1930s: no to Prohibition enforcement; no to investigating organized crime; no to wiretapping, raiding communists, and intervening in violent clashes on the street. He said yes only in areas where he believed his white-collar agents could excel, such as collecting crime statistics and performing scientific lab work.
While Hoover was busy refining his internal policies, the American murder rate had risen sharply, with Prohibition providing the soil in which violent organized crime syndicates could take root and grow. That trend continued between 1929 and 1933; while the nation’s economy slumped, the murder rate rose to new peaks.
Outside certain limited areas of jurisdiction—auto theft, white slavery, crime on Indian reservations, antitrust work—the federal government was among the least important players in the criminal justice system. The new president, Hoover, wanted to change that.
As Hoover and the IACP pointed out to the commission, police officials wanted to work with the Bureau and would resist sharing their numbers with any rival agency.
Washington had two things going for it. The first and most important was a stable government payroll of some $175 million, ladled out annually. The second, as one local columnist delicately phrased it, was its status as “a place of personal wealth,” populated by men and women willing to fund their own way to live near the seat of power. These attributes meant that the city got along nicely in the first years of the Depression; it saw no major real estate bust, no wave of bank closings, no sharp spike in unemployment. If anything, the Depression brought good times to Washington. As the rest of the nation’s economy shrank, the government payroll grew, from 59,800 employees in 1927 to 71,252 by the dawn of 1932.
In 1932, during the worst months of the Great Depression, Hoover set out to create the world’s most spectacular forensic laboratory, and despite his limited budget he invested heavily. The equipment alone necessitated a major appropriation. The lab needed ultraviolet lamps, specialized cameras, and at least three different kinds of microscope. It also required moulage facilities, where agents could reconstruct “parts of the human body,” especially wounds and missing limbs, in cast form. Hoover aspired to build the nation’s most extensive collection of bullets, guns, cartridges, typewriters, tire treads, and paper watermarks, to assist local police in identifying scattered bits of evidence. He approved equipment for hair and fiber analysis, as well as a “chemical apparatus for the examination of blood stains.” He provided these high-skill services free of charge to local police departments.
Roosevelt’s “War on Crime” made the modern FBI, but it also made the Bureau into something Hoover never intended it to be. The high-minded principles he had stood for in the 1920s—restraint and integrity, brains over brawn—proved hard to maintain under the pressures of solving violent, heavily publicized crimes. Bowing to the exigencies of the moment, Hoover’s gentleman agents began to act more like ordinary cops: paying off informants, setting up wiretaps, intimidating suspects to obtain dubious confessions—in short, doing many things that Hoover had promised they would never do.They also became killers. The shootings of arch-criminals such as Dillinger have often been described in heroic terms: a face-off between good and evil, between the law and the outlaw. But for Hoover these moments of triumph came with a difficult and fundamental shift in identity. By the middle of 1934, he was running an organization of lawyers and accountants who had become gunmen. Some of them shot to kill.
A son of wealth and a former governor of New York, Roosevelt came to office not as an ideologue with fixed ideas but as a man of “direct, vigorous action,” as he promised the country in his inaugural address.
Within the legal profession, Stone, still at the Supreme Court, wrote to Felix Frankfurter, now a key Roosevelt adviser, to certify Hoover’s good works and respect for civil liberties. From Congress, Southern Democrats (the key constituency of Kappa Alpha) sent letters of support to the president as well.
Roosevelt had heard the “many rumors of Hoover’s homosexuality,” according to his son Elliott, but didn’t give them much thought. “These were not grounds for removing him, as Father saw it, so long as his abilities were not impaired.”
On July 29, building on what Herbert Hoover had done with the Wickersham Commission, Cummings declared a federal “war” on crime and called for the empowerment of a federal army to fight it. Lest local police chiefs complain of a power grab, he also announced the reappointment of the man so many of them had written in to support, the thirty-eight-year-old Bureau of Investigation chief, J. Edgar Hoover.
According to legend, upon seeing the armed agents Kelly raised his hands in alarm and shouted, “Don’t shoot, G-men!”—supposedly the first time any Bureau agent had heard the slang term for themselves as the New Deal’s “Government Men.”
On December 10, 1934, two weeks after Sam Cowley’s death, Franklin Roosevelt laid out another task for Hoover and the law enforcement profession. “I ask you . . . to do all in your power to interpret the problem of crime to the people of this country,” the president urged at a conference of criminal justice officials, and to “build up a body of public opinion.”
Herbert Hoover had held the press at arm’s length, viewing reporters as little more than reprobates out to undermine the national morale. Beginning in March 1933, Roosevelt invited the press back into the White House, holding regular conferences in which he identified reporters by name and encouraged them to ask questions. In situations where the press could not be cajoled and flattered into reflecting his message, Roosevelt took his case straight to the people. His first “fireside chat,” delivered by radio on March 12, 1933, asked Americans to “unite in banishing fear” while Washington reorganized the banking system.
Since the first commercial release of a talking film in 1927, sun-dappled Hollywood had come to represent everything that Hoover disliked about the nation’s “melodramatic” approach to crime. Where Hoover sought to project institutional integrity, Hollywood loved the rule-breaking, lone-wolf policeman… In 1934, Roosevelt began to push for more concerted action. Early in the year, he sent a representative out to Hollywood to discuss creating a government censorship board, charged with regulating films just as the New Deal government had begun to regulate so many other industries. A few days later, the Motion Picture Producers suddenly announced a revival of the voluntary code they had devised years earlier—a last-ditch attempt to avoid federal censorship by censoring themselves. This time, the film industry empowered Hays not only to review major-studio scripts but to censor them accordingly…. “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld”; “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden”; “Miscegenation (sex relationship between the white and black races) is forbidden.”
Hoover also displayed a copy of the poem “If—”, Rudyard Kipling’s ode to the glories and challenges of manhood. Like the statue of Hercules, the poem portrayed a figure burdened by impossible tasks, but with the strength to “never breathe a word about your loss.
“When the G-Men picture came out it was the biggest propaganda help we ever had in our lives: We just didn’t know it was going to be.” Over the next five months, Hollywood released several more “G-Man” films, under such dukes-up titles as Show Them No Mercy! and Let ’Em Have It. In the process, they transformed the crime-fighting federal agent into a staple of popular culture—and turned “J. Edgar Hoover” into a household name.
Toward the end of 1935, he ordered the establishment of an FBI public relations unit, soon to be known as the Crime Records Section. To lead it, he designated the one man he had come to rely upon above all others, Clyde Tolson.
The Stork maintained certain limits: no Black patrons, no women unaccompanied by a man after six p.m. Within those limits, however, the club catered to experimentation and excess. On one New Year’s Eve, Hoover and Tolson joined fashion model Luisa Stuart and heavyweight boxer James Braddock for an all-night bacchanal.
In August 1936, even as Hoover barnstormed the country denouncing New Deal social workers and softhearted liberals, Roosevelt secretly handed over a third significant gift, one that would allow Hoover’s power to expand and flourish long after the president left office. In a confidential meeting, he asked Hoover to begin investigating “Fascism and Communism,” the two great ideological forces threatening to upend the global order of the 1930s and to challenge the status quo at home. And he wanted it all done quietly, without the speeches, editorials, and public relations he had encouraged in the crime arena… Roosevelt also believed that staying on top of the domestic situation would be crucial to his reelection campaign. So he reached out to Hoover for help. On the morning of August 24, Hoover arrived at the White House, where he found the president “desirous of discussing the question of the subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” as he noted in a “confidential memorandum” about the meeting. Roosevelt confessed that “he had been considerably concerned” about both phenomena, and about what they might mean for the stability of American society. He wanted Hoover’s help not in investigating particular crimes, but in “obtaining a broad picture of the general movement and its activities as may affect the economic and political life of the country as a whole.” In other words, he wanted Hoover to start spying on political dissidents again.
In response to Roosevelt’s query, Hoover raised the possibility of reviving the “general intelligence” function that Harlan Stone had banned in 1924—in essence, moving the FBI back into political surveillance work. The proposal implied a historical analogy: With the return of the social conflicts that had plagued the country in 1919, the FBI would reengage in the political work it had performed in that earlier era…. Roosevelt had entertained the idea of a written order, to be kept secure in a White House safe. The president decided against it, though, and the entire exchange—Hoover’s official reentry into the world of “general intelligence”—took place quietly… nobody would know the full scale of what Hoover had initiated for many years to come. “It has been kept very secret and has not been generally known as being in existence,” he explained to Roosevelt in 1938, “for obvious reasons.
In 1933, Roosevelt formally recognized the Soviet Union, establishing diplomatic relations after a decade and a half of stalemate. Two years later, Stalin called for the creation of an international anti-facist front.
As in steel, several of the chief organizers at Flint were Communist Party members. So were some of the officials at the United Auto Workers, the confident new union empowered in the wake of the strike.
Under federal labor law, retaliatory firing for labor organizing was now supposed to be illegal; employers could not get rid of workers who wanted to unionize any more than politicians could ban voters who liked the other candidate—a principle of workplace democracy.
*In mid-February 1938, amid fears about a coming German invasion of Austria, the FBI took custody of a German immigrant and former U.S. Army enlistee named Guenther Rumrich, arrested by New York police in a bumbling passport theft scheme. Hoover did not want the case, especially because his agents had not made the initial arrest. But Rumrich had done something that made Hoover’s wishes all but impossible to fulfill. Under questioning by the New York police, he confessed to being a German spy and ardent Nazi, stealing passports in order to facilitate the movement of Hitler’s spies around the world. At the time there was no federal agency specifically tasked with handling foreign espionage on American soil. So the case fell to the FBI, under the logic that its recent involvement in the Bund investigations made it best equipped to handle such a situation. Hoover was not at all ready, however—just as he had not been ready when the War on Crime fell in his lap. Things started reasonably well, with Rumrich naming names, identifying locations, and describing the elaborate espionage ring he had helped to run. FBI agents then rounded up the suspects and proceeded to gather further evidence. Hoover approached it all as he had approached big cases like Dillinger and the Barker gang: suspects would be identified, evidence scientifically gathered, and a grand jury convened. He failed to recognize that these were spies, not ordinary criminals. The German government had a powerful interest in making sure that they did not testify or rot in American prisons. After being released in advance of grand jury proceedings, most of the key plotters slipped out of the country one by one. To Hoover’s horror, when agents went back to find them, only four of the eighteen original suspects were still in the United States.
Questioned about the spy case during an October 1938 press conference, Roosevelt emphasized a “very definite responsibility” on the part of the federal government to get a handle on the situation, and even suggested he might consider the creation of a new espionage agency. Initial reports assured the public that any “central spy-control bureau” would not fall under FBI auspices. “There is no intention to enhance the power—and publicity—of F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover,” wrote one columnist. But Roosevelt had a long history of turning to Hoover in such situations, and despite the FBI’s missteps, he did so once again. During a cabinet meeting in mid-October, Roosevelt raised the idea of assembling a committee to survey the state of intelligence operations and “make definite recommendations as to how to proceed…. In early November, Hoover received a request to join Roosevelt aboard a secure presidential train when it stopped in New York en route to the family estate in Hyde Park. The two men sat inside the train car for several minutes, as the president’s advisers and security detail milled about. When he emerged, Hoover had most of what he wanted. Though Roosevelt did not approve the full $300,000, he gave the FBI $150,000, apportioned from a discretionary fund, to build up its counterespionage ranks. Another $100,000 went to naval and military intelligence, to be divided between them.
Hoover’s possession came accompanied by a poem titled “A Song of Men.” It told the painful story of “that rare, quiet friendship of men”: “Something strange there. Beautiful, but a little terrible too.” It interpreted the statue as a display of anguish but also of love and solidarity—two men at once “linked” but forever apart.
Roosevelt agreed. In June 1939, he had issued yet another secret directive, this time authorizing the FBI to take charge of all federal home-front investigations involving “espionage, counter-espionage, and sabotage in anticipation of the coming war.” Since that moment, Hoover had been planning for hostilities in earnest. In the summer of 1939, he became chair of an intelligence committee charged with consolidating the work of other government agencies. He also began to train more agents in the tools of the intelligence trade: “document identification, electrical equipment and sound recording; methods of concealing messages; secret codes and secret writings; detection of secret inks.
It is often said that generals fight the previous war, using stories of past battles to craft strategies for the future. In the autumn of 1939, this was true of nearly everyone in Washington. Most officials had played some sort of role in the Great War. What they had concluded—indeed, what almost all Americans believed by 1939—was that the war had been a tragic mistake that led not to eternal peace and stable democracy but to the corruption and double-dealing of Versailles, and now to another disastrous war. Roosevelt acknowledged as much in his fireside chat after the invasion, vowing to maintain American neutrality. At home, he said, this generation of Americans would stick to hard-nosed facts rather than foment “rumor,” having learned their lessons from false talk of German atrocities and conspiracies. Roosevelt himself would be no Woodrow Wilson, throwing into prison everyone who disagreed with him. “I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought,” he declared, a pointed rejection of Wilson’s effort to get Americans not only to act but to think as the government desired. Yet Roosevelt believed that Americans now faced a grim task of mobilization, whether they liked it or not.
But Hoover was getting at something slightly different. He affirmed the essential spirit of the World War I home front. “America has room for only one ism—Americanism,” he declared, echoing Wilson’s slogan of “100 percent Americanism.”
On January 14, the New York field office arrested eighteen members of the pro-Nazi Christian Front, snatching up membership lists and “large quantities of arms and ammunition” in a sweep of the premises. A few weeks later, the Detroit office descended on the local Abraham Lincoln Brigade, communist sympathizers who had recruited and fought for the anti-fascist movement in Spain. Neither group had done anything especially different from what they had been doing in recent years. What changed was the drumbeat of war, and the alarmist politics that came with it… Over the next few weeks, other progressives and liberals, many of them veterans of the “Palmer days,” began to sound the alarm, urging the country to step back from such policies before it was too late. The ACLU, founded in response to the previous war’s home-front abuses, called for an end to Hoover’s “high handed” tactics. The New Republic magazine followed up with a searing article comparing Hoover’s FBI to the Russian secret police and German gestapo…. “No one outside the FBI and the Department of Justice ever knew how close they came to wrecking us,” he later recalled of early 1940.
*Hoover continued in this manner for several pages, listing a succession of noble deeds that had gone underappreciated by the public. The letter also cast blame. In his struggle to figure out what went wrong that winter, he identified two chief adversaries, both of them holdovers from the Palmer days. The first were the communists, who allegedly gathered at “a secret meeting” to plan “this ‘smear’ campaign.” The second were the weak-minded liberal dupes, “very well-meaning but misinformed persons,” who succumbed to communist manipulation.
“Then, during a few days in early May, the Nazi army blitzed into Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, and finally France, where the fabled French army crumpled at the Maginot Line. On June 14, 1940, Hitler’s troops marched triumphantly into Paris, unfurling the swastika over the Arc de Triomphe. “As the forty-first week of the war came to a close,” an American reporter wrote back to Washington, “the mighty German army appeared to be writing . . . an obituary for the France of ‘liberte, egalite, et Fraternite.’ . . . France’s only hope was the United States,” he added, reciting pleas from Parisians for the U.S. to save them from Nazi terror. But according to pollster George Gallup, a full 93 percent of Americans still felt that the war was a European problem.
Roosevelt did not try to convince them otherwise, at least not directly. Instead, he urged the nation to improve its defenses and reinitiated a national draft in case war should arrive on American shores. In an address to Congress on May 16, 1940, he urged Americans to ramp up war production, especially of airplanes, tanks, and other heavy equipment. Finally, he called for renewed effort against a “fifth column” of spies and saboteurs allegedly hidden throughout the western hemisphere, ready to rise up at Hitler’s signal. “We have seen the treacherous use of the ‘fifth column’ by which persons supposed to be peaceful visitors were actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation”
During the “phony war,” Roosevelt had been willing to allow the liberals in his party—even his Republican critics—to wring their hands about civil liberties. With the invasion of France, the president lost patience, and once again committed himself firmly on Hoover’s side. “The President had a tendency to think in terms of right and wrong, instead of terms of legal and illegal,” Robert Jackson recalled. “Because he thought that his motives were always good for the things that he wanted to do, he found difficulty in thinking there could be legal limitations on them.”
In late May 1940, Roosevelt secretly rejected the Supreme Court’s ban on wiretapping. “I am convinced that the Supreme Court never intended any dictum . . . to apply to grave matters involving the defense of the nation,” he wrote in a confidential memo authorizing Hoover to wiretap in matters of national security, a vague and open-ended category. In mid-June, Roosevelt exempted Bureau agents from civil service regulation, formally bringing an end to the battle with the hostile commission. A few weeks later, he authorized the FBI to launch intelligence operations in Latin America, where it was feared that the Germans were building an espionage network to prepare for invasion and occupation. And in late June, he signed the Smith Act (formally known as the Alien Registration Act), which required all foreign-born residents to register with the government and outlawed violent revolutionary language. The Smith Act was virtually identical to the peacetime sedition law that Hoover and Palmer had asked for in 1920, which Congress had adamantly refused. Now, in the panicked summer of 1940, it became law without much debate.
Now he suddenly had jurisdiction over the western hemisphere and carte blanche from the president to do what needed to be done. By executive authority, he could wiretap and conduct intelligence investigations anywhere in the Americas.
In January 1940, the FBI employed 2,432 men and women. By February 1941, it had 4,477 employees, with plans to reach 5,588 by June… In fiscal year 1941, his budget was more than $14 million, almost seven times what he had started out with under Harlan Stone. The following year, it leaped to $25 million, and the U.S. war effort was just getting started.
Roosevelt’s wiretapping directive allowed the FBI to launch surveillance of foreign diplomats; by early fall, taps were up and running at the German, French, Italian, Russian, and Japanese embassies. The directive also gave Hoover wide latitude to decide who else needed to be watched. Under wartime authority, he expanded such surveillance activity far beyond anything he had undertaken in 1936, with his first tentative forays into exploring “Fascism and Communism.” By 1940, the category of “subversive” included virtually anyone who expressed sympathy toward a foreign power or hostility to the war effort, including striking workers and critics of White House policy.
In a single Ohio factory, Hoover boasted, the FBI had already signed up 133 “confidential informants,” each of whom “believes that he is the bureau’s sole source of information within that organization.”
He maintained that the Communist Party—guided by the spirit of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—was fomenting industrial conflict to disrupt the American war effort.
Their observations, combined with Bridges’s discovery of a microphone inside his hotel phone, set off a national press cycle. “Harry Bridges Charges F.B.I. Men Spied on Him,” read a headline in The Baltimore Sun. When Hoover sheepishly retold the story to Roosevelt, the president offered up “one of his great grins,” then slapped Hoover on the back. “By God, Edgar, that’s the first time you’ve been caught with your pants down!” he declared, laughing.
Spies rarely take credit for their achievements; the best operations remain, by definition, secret.
**The experience would no doubt have been far more difficult if not for the help of the one group on American soil that knew a great deal about such matters: the British intelligence service. The British had reached out to Hoover as the war ramped up. Though the Battle of Britain lay months in the future, by the spring of 1940 they were growing anxious about American foot-dragging, and about the bitter isolationist sentiments of men such as Lindbergh. Prime Minister Winston Churchill made no secret of his determination to bring the U.S. into the war, and he hoped to promote this aim by setting up a British intelligence outpost in New York. From there, his proxies could agitate on behalf of Britain and help the Americans build the clandestine infrastructure that would be needed for full-scale war. Churchill’s vision was extralegal; no nation in the world openly allowed a foreign power to run an intelligence service on domestic soil. To make it happen, the British decided that they needed Hoover’s assistance and permission… Hoover did not usually entertain this sort of offer: the arrangement was untested and controversial, and it required giving up control of his men and territory. It was also top secret, a fact that meant the FBI could not take credit for any success. Hoover agreed to meet anyway with William Stephenson, the debonaire Canadian millionaire tasked with carrying out Churchill’s orders. Upon moving to New York, Stephenson made a name for himself by throwing swank cocktail parties at his Dorset Hotel penthouse. At the same time, he possessed the uncanny quality of seeming to be nowhere and nobody. The future novelist Ian Fleming, a devotee of both cocktails and spy craft, later modeled his character James Bond in part on Stephenson… Hoover was eager to work with Stephenson, though justifiably wary of the British tolerance for bending the rules. He agreed to cooperate with the British service on one key condition: he wanted the approval of the president. Roosevelt was once again happy to go along. “The President has laid down the secret ruling for the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence,” Stephenson reported in late May 1940. A few weeks later, Roosevelt directed the FBI to establish its own outposts throughout Latin America, and secretly passed along $400,000 with which to get started.
The British in turn taught the FBI how to be a spy agency. Despite his preternatural confidence, Hoover had little idea how to set up foreign outposts or run double agents or assess the cryptic messages of foreign espionage networks. As a matter of regular practice, he did not travel outside the United States. The British had been everywhere for what seemed like forever, keepers of an empire that had once spanned half the globe. Hoover dispatched Hugh Clegg to London for a round of training in espionage and counterespionage techniques. Several months later, he sent Percy Foxworth, the special agent in charge at the FBI’s New York office and now the head of operations in Latin America. Agents themselves were periodically dispatched to Camp X, a secret British-run guerrilla and spy training ground just outside Toronto.
*In a postwar assessment, British analysts expressed admiration for Hoover’s dogged approach to learning the entire spy trade in a few months’ time. “J. Edgar Hoover is a man of great singleness of purpose,” the report noted, “and his purpose is the welfare of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Congress declared war against Japan on December 8. Outside, the Capitol’s wartime transformation was already underway, with marine sentries guarding all doorways. Inside, Roosevelt gathered with Congress in an emergency session. He had agonized over a speech that would convey the urgency of the hour, first declaring December 7 “a date which will live in world history,” then editing the phrase to a punchier “date which will live in infamy.”… Roosevelt’s speech was shorter than Wilson’s, just six minutes with applause included. And the vote was almost unanimous—388 to 1. The lone holdout was Jeannette Rankin, the only woman in Congress and a committed pacifist, who had also voted against war in 1917.
*Hoover wrote to the White House to describe an alarming phone conversation that the FBI had intercepted two days earlier. During that call, a Japanese-born professor—“Dr. Mori”—had spent several minutes describing to a “close relative” (probably a Japanese admiral) the naval fleet positions and weather conditions around the Hawaiian Islands. The professor had ticked off the types of flowers blooming in December (poinsettia and hibiscus), polite chitchat that the Bureau now believed might have some coded significance. According to Hoover, the Hawaii FBI office had notified military intelligence of the odd conversation, but the army and navy had dismissed it as insignificant.
The War Department had first floated the idea of interning all people of Japanese descent—citizens and noncitizens alike—on December 10, just three days after Pearl Harbor. At the time, Hoover had dismissed the proposal as a symptom of post-attack hysteria, reactionary and unnecessary… Like many Americans, General DeWitt rejected Hoover’s view that it was possible to assess Japanese-Americans as individuals. “A Jap is a Jap!” he argued…“Hoover spoke out against thinking of the war in racial terms. “No man should be suspected simply because he is foreign-born or has a foreign name or accent,” he wrote in the summer of 1941. “Americans, unlike other nationals, are not a race. Americanism is an idea.
He spoke perfect English, though with a slight accent, and seemed amiable enough, so the guardsman invited the men to sit out the night at the nearby Coast Guard station. Before they could settle on a plan, however, one of the man’s companions began to speak in German, and the man clapped a hand over his companion’s mouth.Once the German words had been spoken, the man’s attitude changed. He said he did not have a fishing license and therefore wanted to stay away from the authorities. Then he pulled out a wad of bills and thrust $260 into the guardsman’s hands. The man “told him to take it and keep quiet otherwise he and his companions would be compelled to kill him at once,” a military intelligence report later noted. The shocked guardsman mumbled his assent and began to back away from the group, “afraid of being shot in the back.” When he was a few hundred yards away he turned around and ran back to the Coast Guard station, where he reported that a team of German agents was attempting to invade the United States of America.
Citing Roosevelt’s 1939 order granting the FBI jurisdiction over sabotage and espionage, FBI officials seized the Coast Guard’s evidence and transported it up to Foley Square.
Investigators would later determine that a German U-boat sent to deposit the saboteurs had run aground on a sandbar that night, stranded for several hours at low tide. The captain had gone so far as to order his men to prepare for blowing up the ship and turning themselves in as prisoners of war when, just before dawn, the tide came back in and allowed them to slip back beneath the ocean’s surface.
The man introduced himself as George Dasch (also known as George John Davis), a German citizen who had lived in the United States for much of his adult life. Upon returning to Germany in 1941, he had been recruited for a special mission: the Nazis wanted him to go back to America in order to blow up aluminum factories, war plants, dams, bridges, and, where possible, department stores owned by Jews… They provided a sympathetic ear for his claims that he was and had always been a loyal American, the buried explosives notwithstanding. In return, Dasch gave up the details of the sabotage plot, naming all his coconspirators and even turning over a handkerchief inscribed with invisible-ink instructions from the German government.
The work mostly entailed listening, one agent recalled—just “pick up whatever you hear and let us know”—but SIS assignments could be dangerous, too. In January 1943, a military plane carrying SIS chief Percy Foxworth and another agent went down over Dutch Guiana, where they had been dispatched on “secret missions” related to the FBI’s growing international scope.
Hoover’s suggestion failed to contain the Welles scandal. In the fall of 1942, Secretary of State Cordell Hull caught wind of the rumors and demanded a meeting with Hoover to discuss what the FBI knew. A few months later, the Republicans figured out what was happening and demanded a meeting with Hoover as well. By August 1943, Roosevelt no longer believed he could keep his enemies quiet—and so he fired Welles, despite high regard for his diplomatic abilities.
After visiting several FBI field offices during his West Coast tour, Baldwin concluded that Hoover meant what he said, and that FBI agents were far more attentive to civil liberties questions than their local police counterparts.
FBI investigations formed the basis for a “Great Sedition Trial” targeting more than two dozen leaders of fascist and other far-right organizations. (The trial collapsed after the judge died unexpectedly in 1944.) Roosevelt also brought Hoover in on the war’s most closely guarded scientific experiment: “a highly secret project for the development of an atomic explosive,” as Hoover described it in one confidential note. By late 1944, Hoover was warning of efforts by the Soviets as well as the Germans to infiltrate the project and learn what the Americans knew.
Now in his place was an unknown and untested executive, added to the Democratic presidential ticket in 1944 largely because it was hard to define or object to Truman’s muddy political views. To the degree that Truman did have a track record, it was not especially promising for Hoover. Despite the kindly speech planned for the academy graduation, as a Missouri populist Truman tended to be suspicious of professional Washington. More than once, he had aimed his objections at Hoover and the Bureau… By Rooseveltian standards, Truman was a political nobody: “the least of men—or at any rate the least likely of men” to take the helm of a great nation in the midst of a cataclysmic war, in the words of one biographer.
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.
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.
Roosevelt could not simply expand Hoover’s purview with a handshake or the stroke of the executive pen, as he had done with sabotage, espionage, and home-front intelligence. The best authority that the Justice Department could find, after scouring the federal criminal code, was a pair of weak civil rights statutes dating back to Reconstruction. Section 51 of Title 18 authorized federal action in cases where two or more people interfered with the exercise or enjoyment of a federal right. Section 52 applied to circumstances in which public servants—usually police officials “acting under color of law”—did the same.
The mere presence of federal lawmen made the Brownsville inquiry an “unprecedented move,” in the words of one historian. But as Hoover quickly learned, it was one thing to be willing to take on a lynching investigation; it was quite another to know how to do it effectively. The case fit the parameters of the Reconstruction statutes: the victim had been brought to a police station (“under color of law”) to be interrogated about his voting-rights work (federally protected activity), only to be released into the hands of a mob, then found dead three days later in a nearby river. When it came time to establish the details of what had happened, however, Hoover’s men found that few of their tried-and-true investigative techniques seemed to work. Local law enforcement refused to cooperate. Witnesses would not come forward.
On lynching, though, they found at least some area of common ground. Like Hoover, the president was no great believer in the social equality of the races; he used the n-word and found interracial marriage unacceptable.
Strom Thurmond, the man who had invited Hoover to investigate the Willie Earle case, attempted to ensure that defeat by running for president on the new Dixiecrat ticket, hoping to pull white Southerners away from the Democratic Party in retaliation for Truman’s civil rights stance. Though Thurmond failed to make much of a dent in Truman’s campaign, Southern Democrats showed their political might by blocking anti-lynching legislation, dashing hopes for clear and unequivocal federal authority.
**He nonetheless came across some disturbing information—and it was this information, in addition to his long-standing hostility toward communism, that drove him to move the communist problem up on his list of priorities. According to Hoover’s intelligence, the Soviet Union had been attempting to infiltrate the U.S. government for more than a decade, sending operatives to take up jobs and organize espionage rings throughout key federal agencies and industries. Working with them in this endeavor was the organization that Hoover had first learned to despise back in 1919: the Communist Party.
Though Hoover was not yet discussing the details in public, it is impossible to understand what came later without looking at what happened in 1944, 1945, and 1946, when Hoover secretly accelerated his surveillance efforts against the Communist Party, and when he first came to believe that he had a serious espionage problem on his hands.Nearly every major feature of the postwar Red Scare—the investigations of government workers and Hollywood communists, the Hiss case and atomic spy trials, the congressional hearings, the prosecutions of the communist leaders—can be traced back to decisions and discoveries made during and immediately after the war, as the FBI struggled to choose between competing postwar visions. By the time the rest of the country understood that it was in a domestic Cold War, Hoover had already investigated many of the key players, and could boast of a well-developed supply of informants.
In the spring of 1943, Stalin abolished the Comintern, established in 1919 to unite the world’s communist movements in global revolution. The following year, the Communist Party dissolved and reconstituted itself as the Communist Political Association, seeking mainstream acceptance as just another civic group. Fresh from the Atlanta penitentiary, Browder vowed to do away with the “old formulas and practices,” and to refashion American communism for a new era of U.S-Soviet cooperation.[2]Hoover never accepted this about-face.
In 1942, he authorized an investigation known as COMPIC (Communist Infiltration–Motion Picture Industry), intended to assess communist influence on American films. An early report estimated that “about half of the unions” in Hollywood “appear to be controlled by the Communists or follow the Communist Party line.” But Hoover’s real concern lay with the “intellectuals, particularly the writers, directors, actors and artists”—“the so-called cultural field”—who were allegedly propagating pro-Soviet ideas. The investigation produced long lists of communist sympathizers and party members in and around Hollywood.
In April 1945, as the Red Army closed in on Berlin, a French communist journal published a letter by a prominent party leader accusing Browder’s Communist Political Association of betraying essential revolutionary and ideological commitments. Back in the U.S., party members understood the letter as a signal from Moscow to change course away from their accommodationist wartime stance. In a July 1945 meeting, they voted to resume a more militant position, ousting Browder in favor of the hard-liner William Z. Foster. Looking back on that turn of events, Browder reflected that the letter from France had been “the first public declaration of the Cold War.”
Among them were a series of revelations about the existence of a “communist underground,” a network of secret party members and Soviet operatives spread throughout the government and key national industries. During the war, Hoover learned of allegations that dozens of federal employees—including several high-ranking government officials—maintained clandestine relationships with the Communist Party. He also confronted the first credible evidence of Soviet espionage operations on U.S. soil. Though he could not yet prove his allegations, Hoover came away from the war convinced that both the Communist Party and the Soviet Union were actively seeking to undermine the U.S. government from within.
**One of the earliest sketches of the party’s covert activities came from a Time magazine editor and former communist named Whittaker Chambers, who approached the government in August 1939 with an incredible tale. Within a decade, Chambers would be one of the most famous men in America, his allegations the stuff of fierce national debate. First, though, he was part of Hoover’s wartime education, one of several ex-communists who alerted the FBI to the existence of a clandestine world. Chambers had a reputation as an odd character around Time, where he often showed up at the office looking as if he had slept in his rumpled suit. What he conveyed to the government was even stranger. During the 1920s and 1930s, Chambers claimed, he had been a courier and contact for a secret network of communists within the federal government.
*According to the report, the Russians had begun to target the U.S. for espionage and infiltration as early as the Coolidge years. They stepped up their efforts considerably under Roosevelt, when the U.S. formally recognized the Soviet Union and the New Deal opened opportunities for communist sympathizers to seek out government employment. By late 1944, the FBI concluded, the Soviets appeared to have a thriving “political parallel” within American government and civic organizations, especially in groups devoted to labor, anti-fascist, and civil rights work. More ominously, they also seemed to have a robust network of men and women working inside war plants and scientific labs to steal and pass along technical secrets. The FBI’s report warned that the Soviets had likely penetrated the greatest of all U.S. war projects: the “scientific experimental program to perfect an explosive of phenomenal destructiveness utilizing atomic energy,” still underway in December 1944.
**In May 1945, as Hitler’s regime collapsed throughout Europe, Hoover sent agents back to interview Chambers at Time, reviewing the names and scenarios the ex-communist had first described some six years earlier. One conversation continued for eight hours straight and yielded twenty-two new pages of documentation, including elaboration of the charge that the State Department’s Alger Hiss had been one of Chambers’s underground contacts. The following month, Hoover approved an unrelated raid on the Washington office of Amerasia, a left-leaning journal focused on Pacific affairs. There, agents uncovered hundreds of government documents, many of them classified, all of them presumably leaked or stolen from federal offices such as the State Department and OSS. Though attempts to prosecute the magazine’s editors mostly stalled out, Hoover came away from the arrests more convinced than ever that the swirl of allegations about spies in high places—including at the State Department—was worth pursuing.
History would eventually bear out much of Bentley’s testimony. At the time, though, it looked to many insiders as if Hoover simply did not know what he was talking about. Certainly Truman thought as much, dismissing the string of urgent FBI memos as just so much hogwash, the impugning of well-respected government servants based on conjecture rather than evidence. In January 1946, just as he was launching the Central Intelligence Group, he showed Hoover what he thought of the accusations by nominating Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary supposedly at the heart of Bentley’s Treasury Department ring, to serve as the first American executive director of the new International Monetary Fund.
*While Hoover acknowledged that it had become “practically impossible” to prove Bentley’s charges, he insisted that a wealth of circumstantial evidence pointed in White’s direction. For instance, the Bureau had found a photo lab and enlarger in the basement of White’s Treasury employee and friend Silvermaster, just where Bentley had said they would be. ]Those allegations set off a brief flurry of activity at the White House. In the end, however, Truman found a stray camera insufficient evidence on which to impugn a career government servant. So he ignored Hoover’s warnings… “Because even the president could not be counted upon to take the threat of subterfuge seriously, he added, “the Bureau stands as the one bulwark against the peril of Communism.”
When the Republicans achieved a whopping victory on November 5, winning both the House and Senate for the first time since 1930, they indeed credited Hoover. “Historians who record transitions of American opinion will probably designate September 30, 1946, as the turning point in American thinking toward this thing called Communism,” Congressman Karl Mundt, Republican of South Dakota, reflected. “On that day, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of investigation, addressed the national convention of the American Legion assembled in California in one of the most courageous and completely candid speeches in the history of the American public platform.”
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… 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.
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.
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.
Thomas asked what would soon become one of the most infamous questions in American history: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” The witnesses refused to answer. Instead, they argued that HUAC’s charged inquiries—indeed, its very existence—violated constitutional protections.
**In the fall of 1947, while the public was focused on the Hollywood hearings, Hoover launched another secret program of cooperation—not with a congressional committee, but with the Army Security Agency (a precursor to the National Security Agency). During the war, the army had intercepted thousands of encoded cables bound for Moscow from Soviet trade and diplomatic officials stationed in the United States. Decryption experts had recently begun to decipher those cables, at which point they discovered that many of them had little to do with trade or diplomacy. Those messages, hundreds upon hundreds of them, appeared instead to document what Hoover had suspected since the war: the Soviets were running a substantial espionage network on U.S. soil. The army asked for his assistance in figuring out who the spies identified in the cables might be.
*The early evidence was “very fragmentary and full of gaps,” little more than a few suggestive words decrypted at great time and cost. The Soviets used code names to identify their contacts; even if a cable could be decrypted, the task of figuring out which name fit which actual person required countless additional hours of painstaking work. If and when that information was acquired, it could not be used in court or revealed to anyone beyond a handful of government officials. From an intelligence perspective, the value of the decryptions lay in their secrecy—in the fact that the Soviets did not know what U.S. officials were able to read and see. Protecting that advantage would have to be one of the program’s highest goals. It would also limit Hoover’s ability to use the information publicly, or to take credit for finding it…In the end, the FBI and the army protected their evidence so well that the decryption program—ultimately code-named “Venona”—would not be fully revealed to the world until the 1990s, long after Hoover’s death and after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, Venona has been hailed as one of the great triumphs of Cold War counterintelligence, the final proof of guilt or innocence, truth or lies, in many long-contested espionage cases. Over decades, the Venona team managed to match code names to descriptions provided by Bentley and Chambers, affirmation that these ex-communist informants were, indeed, who they claimed to be. In all, Venona identified 349 people in the United States connected in one way or another to Soviet espionage, whether as information contacts or as fully committed underground agents. Taken as a whole, the Venona decryptions lend substance to Hoover’s claims that Soviet espionage was a genuine problem in the 1940s, not just a figment of the anticommunist imagination.
Beginning in 1947, he ordered agents to detain and interview the alleged members of Bentley’s espionage ring—not with an eye toward prosecution, but just to let them know “that they haven’t fooled us.” Other than that, he planned to turn any incriminating material over to the relevant government departments and wash his hands of it. It was the attorney general who kept the inquiry going. In the spring of 1947, against Hoover’s wishes, the Justice Department began to present witnesses before a grand jury in New York. Bentley testified at length, repeating her story of life inside a Soviet espionage network. So did some of the key men and women accused in her confession.[6]The testimony in New York went on for an agonizing ten months before the grand jury concluded that it could find no grounds for indictment, despite a wealth of circumstantial evidence.
In early 1948, not long after learning of the Venona decrypts, he signed on to a proposal that the Justice Department pursue the party’s leadership under the Smith Act, the little-used sedition law passed hurriedly by Congress after the Nazi invasion of France. That law made it illegal for anyone—citizen or noncitizen—“to advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any Government in the United States by force or violence… This time, the key date was 1945, when the party had abandoned Browder’s Communist Political Association and supposedly recommitted itself to revolutionary action under the leadership of William Z. Foster, whose role as an architect of the 1919 steel strike established another point of continuity between the two historical moments.
Three days later, Whittaker Chambers shuffled into the committee room, his clothing unkempt and his gut spilling out over the top of his belt. He relayed a story much like Bentley’s: he, too, knew of communists in government because he, too, had spent years underground. Chambers named some of the same people identified by Bentley, characterizing them as part of a “secret, sinister, and enormously powerful force” dedicated to the “enslavement” of the American people.
Truman scored an upset victory over Dewey and the Democrats retook both houses of Congress. The changing of the guard in Congress meant that HUAC, like other committees, would now revert into Democratic hands. And Hoover would have four more years with an adversary in the White House.
*Among the FBI’s new contacts there was a young congressman named Richard Nixon, who would soon become one of Hoover’s closest and most important friends in Washington. Just after midnight on December 1, Nixon called the FBI to report that Chambers—after years of insisting that he possessed no corroborating evidence—was about to reveal a secret cache of documents in support of the Hiss allegations. HUAC investigators soon traipsed out to Chambers’s Maryland farm, where he led them to his pumpkin patch and handed over several rolls of microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin…. photographs of government documents Chambers had acquired during his years as a spy. Several were in Hiss’s own handwriting. Together, they became known as the Pumpkin Papers.[20]In December, based in part on this new evidence, the New York grand jury indicted Hiss on charges of perjury.
“Then, in the middle of 1948, while the rest of the country was focused on Chambers and Hiss and the Smith Act arrests, the Venona team “hit the jackpot,” Lamphere recalled. Cross-referencing the cables with background details in FBI files, they started to decipher bits and pieces of the Soviet communications, and then to match up cover names with living, breathing individuals. One of those discoveries “struck me quite forcefully,” Lamphere later wrote, since it pertained directly to the work of the FBI. In late December 1948, as Hoover fumed over the discovery of the Pumpkin Papers, the Venona team identified a Soviet operative code-named “Sima” as a political analyst in the Foreign Agents Registration Section of the Department of Justice. In that position, she had access to the FBI’s loyalty and espionage investigations.[22]Hoover relayed the news to the Washington field office on December 31, the eve of his fifty-fourth birthday. “Sima is without doubt identical with Judith Coplon, who is presently an employee in the Foreign Agents Registration Section of the Department of Justice,” he wrote. The nature of Coplon’s job complicated the situation: if she really was working for the Soviets, Lamphere explained, “the agency most compromised by her was the FBI”—hardly a fact that Hoover wanted to share with the Truman administration. Within hours of learning about the Coplon identification, he wrote to the attorney general recommending that she stay on the job for now, so that she could be watched and her contacts discovered. By way of explaining how the FBI had managed to identify her, he said merely that the Bureau had received information about her activities from “a highly confidential source.”Over the next several days, Hoover’s agents installed wiretaps at Coplon’s home and office. They also began conducting round-the-clock physical surveillance, hoping to find evidence that would corroborate the Venona identification. From these sources they learned that Coplon planned to go to New York on January 14, allegedly to visit her parents. When they followed her to the city, she turned out to be meeting with Valentin Gubitchev, a Soviet official attached to the United Nations and apparently her Russian contact. At that point, Lamphere recalled, “we had one hell of an espionage case in the making... The effort involved wiretaps and surveillance not only of Coplon but of nearly everyone in her circle, from her parents to her boyfriend, a married employee at the Justice Department. It also entailed the preparation of fake reports ostensibly identifying an FBI informant within Amtorg, the Soviet government’s trading arm in the U.S… Agents followed her from Penn Station through Upper Manhattan and back to Midtown, where she met up with her Soviet contact Gubitchev and then dashed onto a bus headed south. At 9:36 p.m., agents arrested both of them around Fifteenth Street, more than two hours into the cat-and-mouse game. When they searched Coplon’s purse, they found more than two dozen FBI data slips, short documents describing the location and content of various FBI files. They also found the notes Coplon had taken on behalf of her Soviet handler. This time, Hoover felt sure, it would be the FBI—not HUAC, not the Justice Department—that received the bulk of the credit.
Most of the documents contained hearsay rather than bona fide evidence of espionage, but Hoover had still never intended for them to see the light of day. Coplon’s second trial, at Foley Square, was even worse, with the judge demanding that Hoover disclose any and all wiretaps deployed in her case. Under duress, he admitted that the Bureau had wiretapped Coplon’s parents’ home, as well as her home and office phones. They had also captured at least fourteen conversations between Coplon and her attorney.
Asked their opinions of Hoover’s FBI, 73 percent ranked it either “good” or “excellent.” About Hoover himself, just 2 percent expressed strong disapproval, a result that Gallup characterized as “virtually without parallel in surveys that have dealt with men in public life.
In the fall of 1949, as the Hiss, Coplon, and Smith Act trials were winding down, Hoover sent an agent out to greet a ship arriving in New York Harbor. On board was a man named Harold “Kim” Philby, the latest in a string of liaisons from MI6 in London. The son of a famed scholar and diplomat, Philby had spent a lifetime being groomed for high government service: elite boarding school, then Cambridge, then knockabout experiments in journalism before recruitment into British intelligence.
Many politicians, especially Republicans, blamed Truman’s alleged softness on espionage for this dramatic turnaround in communist fortunes. “The Russians undoubtedly gained 3 to 5 years in producing the atomic bomb because our government from the White House down has been sympathetic toward the views of Communists and fellow travelers, with the result that it has been infiltrated by a network of spies,” alleged Representative Harold Velde, a former FBI agent recently elected to Congress as a Republican from Illinois. The suspicions grew darker still in June 1950, when the communist army of North Korea crossed into South Korea.
The Venona team had been sharing regular updates with British intelligence, on the logic that they might have something in their files that would help with identification. Now Philby began visiting Arlington Hall, home base of the Venona project, where the FBI stood ready to share everything it had learned.
One of the matters they discussed over the next several weeks involved a Soviet source named “Homer,” an as yet unidentified employee who had worked at the British Embassy in 1945 and 1946. They also discussed “Enormoz,” the Soviet code word for the Manhattan Project and a major focus of clandestine Russian ambitions. Hoover had realized well before the bomb became a reality that the Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project. “The most striking example of Comintern operations in this country has been uncovered in connection with the Soviet-directed espionage attempts against military research projects dealing with atomic explosives,” the San Francisco field office noted as early as 1944. But not until Venona came along was the FBI able to start making real progress in identifying likely culprits in this area. One apparently worked under the name “Liberal,” according to cables deciphered during 1948, handling contacts with “persons working on ENORMOZ and other spheres of technical science.” Then, in September 1949, just as Philby arrived in Washington, the Venona team deciphered a cable identifying a high-level scientist who had provided information to the Soviets “directly from inside the Manhattan Project.” That decryption in turn set off a series of cascading revelations that would lead Hoover and the FBI to the most famous atomic spies in American history: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Like the Hiss case, the Rosenberg trial would divide the country into warring camps. Some condemned the couple as traitors. Others insisted they were innocent, citing the suspicious coincidence between the Soviets’ detonation of the atomic bomb and the FBI’s discovery of someone to blame. In truth, it was sheer happenstance that the Venona team broke those particular cables at the moment they did. The broader geopolitical stakes nonetheless shaped how Americans made sense of the charges, with some accusing Hoover of conducting a witch hunt against innocent left-wing activists and others insisting that under the circumstances, the charges made perfect sense. At no point did Hoover attempt to clear up the confusion by revealing the Venona cables, opting to let the debate spin on without disclosing what he knew. Nor did he initially come clean about the other great secret discovered by the FBI in the midst of the Rosenberg affair. Despite Hoover’s positive first impressions, Kim Philby was not the man he appeared to be.
Finally, in late April, the British gave in. Philby delivered the good news to FBI official Mickey Ladd, who relayed it to Hoover: the FBI was at last permitted to interview the atomic spy it had helped to identify.[10]The interview with Fuchs turned out to be highly productive. Hoover sent Lamphere and Clegg to London to do the questioning—the former, for his knowledge of Venona; the latter, for his hard-and-fast loyalty to Hoover’s methods and priorities. They started off by discussing Raymond, Fuchs’s American handler, about whom Fuchs apparently remembered far more than he had previously let on. Within a few weeks, the FBI had identified Raymond as Harry Gold, a Russian-born chemist who already had a thick Bureau file… Gold confessed and provided details—many highly ambiguous—about his American and Soviet contacts. In June, the FBI arrested a former army sergeant and Los Alamos machinist named David Greenglass as part of Gold’s extended network. Like Fuchs, Greenglass confessed and named his own handler: his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg.[12]—In her 1945 confession, Elizabeth Bentley had described an encounter with a “tall, thin bespectacled” engineer named “Julius” at New York’s Knickerbocker Village apartment complex. The FBI had never managed to identify Julius—indeed, had barely tried—but now the connection was obvious, since Rosenberg, an engineer, lived at the Knickerbocker. His profile also conformed with what the Venona team had discovered about the Soviet operative named “Liberal” (also known as “Antenna”), who had recruited and managed a tight group of fellow engineers, chemists, and machinists engaged in both atomic and industrial espionage during the war. One of the Liberal cables mentioned a wife named Ethel: twenty-nine years old, married for about five years—another fit with Rosenberg’s profile. Other decryptions filled in background details: Liberal was a twenty-five-year-old Communist Party member living in New York… By the time Rosenberg went to trial, Venona had helped the FBI to identify 108 people who had worked with the Soviets in one manner or another—of whom a whopping sixty-four “were not previously known to us as involved in espionage.” Despite this mother lode of information, vanishingly few had been arrested, and even fewer had been prosecuted in court. Without other evidence to corroborate what they knew from Venona, Hoover and the federal authorities were unable to act against even the most obviously guilty parties. As a result, many of them got off scot-free. Some, like Rosenberg’s friends Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, fled the United States, eventually ending up in the Soviet Union.
Both Saypol and Kaufman were Jewish—proof, according to their supporters, that the Rosenberg prosecution was not being driven by anti-Semitism.
In the process, according to Kaufman, the Rosenbergs had subjected Americans to the threat of nuclear annihilation and enabled the start of the Korean War, with its fifty thousand U.S. casualties and counting. “I consider your crime worse than murder,” he told them. “By your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”
Venona decryptions helped to identify two more men as Soviet operatives. Both were high up in British intelligence. And both were friends with FBI liaison Kim Philby. Based on this evidence, Hoover began to suspect that Philby, too, was an active Soviet spy—and that he had been sharing everything he learned about Venona with his bosses in the Soviet Union… According to the latest breakthrough, the spy “Homer”—long known to be an employee at the wartime British Embassy—had taken a trip from Washington to New York in June 1944 to visit his pregnant wife. The details left no doubt that Homer was Donald Maclean, Philby’s long-ago Cambridge friend who had also served in Washington. In 1948, Maclean had returned to Britain and ultimately become head of the American Department in the British Foreign Office, a post that now seemed to have alarming significance. A few days after the Homer discovery, Burgess went back to Britain to confer about the matter. A few weeks after that, both men went missing, presumed to have defected to the Soviet Union… He finally came to that conclusion a few weeks later, after Philby had been called back to Britain amid questions about his own loyalty. High-ranking emissaries from British intelligence made a special trip to Washington to let FBI officials know of their “gravest suspicions” concerning Philby. At the CIA, a former FBI agent named Bill Harvey prepared a report on the available evidence. Like many CIA men, Harvey had joined Philby more than once for drinks, dinner, and gossip. Upon Philby’s departure, Harvey undertook a study of the man, looking to fact patterns and circumstantial evidence to determine whether Philby, like Maclean and Burgess, might have been working for the Soviets. He concluded that the answer was obviously yes.
*In 1950, amid the swirl of the Fuchs and Rosenberg cases, the Venona team learned that there was another spy with them inside Arlington Hall. A naturalized U.S. citizen born to Russian parents, William Weisband had none of Philby’s aristocratic finesse or high-level access. But his job as a translator and language expert meant that he could wander the facilities, consult on top-secret decryptions, and peruse documents. Hoover’s agents interviewed Weisband, hoping to elicit a confession that would lead to a prison sentence. Like the Rosenbergs, he refused to talk—and this time, there was no David Greenglass to point the finger. Weisband received a one-year sentence for contempt of court after refusing to testify before a grand jury. Then he went on with his life, albeit no longer in the employ of the U.S. government. At the FBI, he left behind a trail of shock, embarrassment, and dismay. But as the NSA later acknowledged, the Weisband disaster “was so successfully hushed” that the public and most of official Washington knew nothing about it.
In 1945 and 1946, Hoover had wondered why it was so hard to catch any of the people named in Bentley’s confession. It turned out that Philby had passed along news of her defection almost as soon as it happened, and the Soviets had sent out warnings for the members of her network to lie low. Philby’s deception also explained some of the anomalies in the Rosenberg case, including the fact that Sobell had known to flee to Mexico.
Few nameless and penniless thirtysomethings would have taken on the state’s kingmaker. McCarthy mostly stuck to personal attacks, excoriating La Follette as a Washington insider who had lost touch with the people. McCarthy won the Republican primary by just over 1 percent of the vote, the first defeat for the La Follette dynasty in decades… “I have here in my hand” a list of 205 card-carrying communists supposedly working for the State Department. Coming less than a month after Hiss’s conviction for perjury, and mere days after Klaus Fuchs’s arrest, McCarthy’s remarks appeared to be a signal that he was joining Hoover in the battle against communism. In truth, it was the beginning of a yearslong struggle between the two men, as personal friendship and common cause pulled in one direction, while institutional politics and professional ambition pulled in another.McCarthy turned out to be noisy and reckless, a talented showman and propagandist. But he never had Hoover’s political skills, or his interest in the slow, difficult work of institution building… McCarthy showed little regard for the facts. Hoover made facts and evidence his stock-in-trade. Though he appreciated McCarthy’s fervor, Hoover soon came to view the senator as a threat to the FBI… “In Salt Lake City, he lowered the number of “card-carrying” communists in the State Department to fifty-seven. On February 20, when he spoke for nearly eight hours on the floor of the Senate, he described “81 loyalty risks,” each of them “twisted mentally or physically in some way.” The press ate it up… Privately, hoover began to disparage McCarthy as a fool.
Hoover wrote. “That if one committee were permitted access to our files that there was no reason why another committee should not have access to them, and of course therewith the possibility that they might be used as a political football.”… The debate reflected the partisan split that would characterize McCarthyism for the next several years, with Democrats opposed and Republicans in support. Hoover used those years differently.
By April 1951, the Bureau was regularly notifying governors and university presidents about left-leaning faculty, administrators, and staff employed in state university systems. By May, elementary and secondary schoolteachers were included as well, on the logic, as Tolson put it, that they were in a position to “insidiously instill into the minds of children the Communist Party line.” In effect, Hoover created a shadow network in which his word alone was enough to get any of them fired.
So did Hollywood power brokers such as Walt Disney, who offered to incorporate a Bureau-themed display in the new theme park he was hoping to build.
Throughout 1951 and into 1952, Hoover continued to speak about the need for “impartiality, fairness and regard for nothing but the truth” when dealing with communists.
The hearings helped to produce what came to be known as the Lavender Scare, a cultural and political parallel to the Red Scare, with “homosexuals” rather than communists as its central anxiety. McCarthy often referred to them as a single entity: “communists and queers” lurking side by side in the government… As early as December 1945, the Civil Service Commission instituted a policy that homosexuals should not be considered “suitable” for government jobs. Two years later, the State Department conducted an internal review and purge on the grounds that homosexuals might be subject to blackmail and thereby pressured into revealing national-security secrets. Though McCarthy never quite became its standard-bearer, the Lavender Scare owed much to the methods and style of McCarthyism.
Given their tight bonds and shared secrets, Hillenkoetter, head of the CIA, warned, homosexuals had the potential to function as “a government within a government,” sealed off from scrutiny by outside parties, talking mostly with each other.When it came time for the FBI to testify, Hoover declined to appear. Instead, he sent Mickey Ladd, the number three man at the Bureau. Ladd explained the FBI’s personnel practices, insisting that the Bureau would never hire “even a suspect sex deviate.” He also affirmed the committee’s suspicion that the Soviet Union used homosexuals as bait for unsuspecting government employees, entrapping them in compromising situations. While much of Ladd’s testimony reinforced the idea of homosexuals as security risks, he also expressed a certain sympathy for their plight, pointing out that society, far more than homosexuals themselves, ought to be blamed for their hiding and lying. Ladd described homosexuality as an “affliction” rather than a choice, something innate and not easily changed.
Truman himself heard some of the rumors. “One time they brought me a lot of stuff about [Hoover’s] personal life,” he later told a biographer, “and I told them I didn’t give a damn about that. That wasn’t my business.”
Truth be told, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was not much of a Republican. Like Hoover, he made his name as a nonpartisan public servant—the chief architect of D-Day and supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Raised in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower had spent nearly his entire adult life in the army, the embodiment of a generation that encountered combat during the Great War and lived to see the peace fall apart. Before World War II catapulted him to fame, he worked in procurement and other glorified administrative positions. He had no experience in electoral politics. Indeed, he had often refused to say whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That was part of what people liked about him. He had a big smile, a trim frame, and the open but weathered face of a genial Midwestern farmer. At the 1952 Republican convention, he bested the arch-conservative insider, Senator Robert Taft, as the candidate of competence and moderation. In the general election, he trounced the brainy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, taking nearly every state outside the South. After his victory, he assured party elders that he really was their man by vowing to cast out Truman’s old guard…If 1919 had been the year that set his career in motion, 1953 became the year it all came together, with Hoover’s social, political, and institutional interests unusually well aligned.
[in 1955] Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and put “In God We Trust” on the nation’s postal stamps (and, later, its paper currency).
Nixon’s first speech in Congress, delivered in February 1947, denounced the Communist Party as a “foreign-directed conspiracy” and included long quotes from “a report by J. Edgar Hoover.” For one of his first legislative initiatives, Nixon proposed a law that would require Communist Party members and front groups to register with the federal government.[7]Far more than any other HUAC member, it was Nixon who had pushed the Hiss/Chambers confrontation forward, often (though not always) with the cooperation of the FBI. Hoover had been chagrined when Nixon, not the FBI, revealed the Pumpkin Papers. But the two men agreed all along that Chambers was the truth teller and Hiss the liar. As the case moved from Congress into the courts, Nixon attempted to mollify Hoover through acts of public tribute. During the Coplon affair, he took up Hoover’s cause as his own, expressing outrage at the attorney general’s decision to move forward with the trial over the FBI’s wishes.
While Hoover focused on domestic anticommunism, the CIA had taken on the world, encouraged by the National Security Council not simply to gather information but to “counter Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities” through a variety of covert means. By the end of 1948, the agency had manipulated its first foreign election, throwing millions of dollars around Italy in an effort to stave off communist victory. Over the next few years, it tried (and usually failed) to build up forces of anticommunist spies, guerrilla fighters, and Western-minded intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain.
The Eisenhower years would later be held up as an example of covert intelligence run amok: CIA-backed coups in Guatemala and Iran, a spy tunnel carved out beneath the city of Berlin, secret testing of LSD on unwitting subjects. Less often noticed are the ways that those years also empowered the FBI, providing Hoover not merely with cultural ballast and genial social outings, but with the institutional and political support to carry out many of his long-term aims
As Dewey’s campaign manager, he had borne much of the blame for the surprise loss in 1948. By 1952, he had set out to find a winning candidate and settled on Eisenhower far earlier than most. Brownell had helped convince Eisenhower to run, and then stayed by his side as a “wise counsellor and trusted confidant,” in the words of one profile. As Time pointed out, he had two things that Eisenhower desperately needed: a “legal mind” and a “political brain.” When Eisenhower appointed him attorney general, everyone understood that the president would be relying on Brownell for strategic advice. “The shortest half-mile in Washington after Jan. 20 will be the one running from the Justice Department to the White House,” the Washington News predicted.
Under Brownell’s leadership, the Department of Justice relaxed its oversight of “bugs” (or microphone plants), giving Hoover carte blanche to run the FBI as he saw fit. Brownell also pushed Congress to enact legislation allowing wiretap evidence to be used in espionage cases, a change Hoover had sought ever since the Coplon trials. Eisenhower supported that initiative and added to it with Executive Order 10450, which would become one of the most infamous measures of his presidency. The policy expanded Truman’s government employee loyalty program to include offenses related to the “habitual use of intoxicants to excess,” “drug addiction,” and “sexual perversion,” as well as to “sympathetic association with a saboteur, spy, traitor, seditionist, anarchist, or revolutionist.” Eisenhower made the FBI a key authority on such matters, ordering Hoover to conduct investigations into any government employee deemed suspicious. If and when the FBI found cause for concern, such employees could be fired and banished forever from federal employment. Under Eisenhower’s policy, in short, Hoover could make or break the career of almost any federal employee in Washington.
According to a Gallup survey, 78 percent of Americans came away with a favorable opinion of Hoover, while just 2 percent expressed any doubts.
McCarthy’s “blockbuster” of a speech “shook and split the Republican party,” at just the moment when the White episode had seemed to deliver such a clear and unifying punch. The story of McCarthy’s fall from grace over the year that followed has become one of the great legends of American political history, a combination of morality tale and hard-boiled combat, the symbolic end of the Red Scare. As the Republican Party split apart on the McCarthy question, Hoover found himself once again forced to choose sides against a friend. But the showdown of 1954 also turned out to be a period of pride and satisfaction, in which Hoover solidified his status as one of the Eisenhower administration’s favored sons. When it was all over, one paper asserted, there were “no clearcut winners—only losers.” But this was not quite true. By the end of 1954, Hoover was the nation’s unchallenged anticommunist authority.
The testimony created a new uproar,” the Star reported, casting McCarthy once again as a liar and dissembler. McCarthy seemed stunned by Hoover’s rejection, insisting (correctly) that the letter reflected FBI research and that the FBI should be able to confirm that. His outrage increased when Brownell notified the committee that he would not release the fifteen-page FBI report, citing the “confidential” nature of Bureau files—and thus making it impossible for McCarthy to prove or disprove his claims.
In popular memory, the Army-McCarthy hearings mark the dismal climax of the Red Scare, the moment the country definitively rejected anticommunist hysteria in favor of more restrained methods and attitudes. In truth, the months following the hearings produced some of the most draconian anticommunist legislation in American history, much of it justified as a way to support the FBI and push back against McCarthy. As early as May, Brownell had laid out a plan “to expand and intensify” the Justice Department’s anticommunist initiatives, in the words of one reporter. Over the next few months, Congress passed several bills in support of this effort, including the Communist Control Act, which stripped the Communist Party of its legal status. To accommodate Hoover’s long-standing concern that such a law would simply drive the communists underground, Eisenhower and his Republican allies in Congress eliminated criminal penalties for individual party members. But the act was still the single most significant piece of anticommunist legislation in years—and it came after, not before, the Army-McCarthy hearings. The final bill passed al but unanimously in both the House and Senate… Republicans suffered serious losses in the 1954 midterm elections, bringing an end to their brief, heady period of one-party control in Washington. Hoover’s favored congressional committees flipped back into Democratic hands… On December 2, with the elections safely out of the way, the Senate voted, 67 to 22, to censure McCarthy—a rare rebuke to one of their own.
On May 17, 1954, while much of the public was glued to the Army-McCarthy hearings, the Supreme Court issued a long-awaited decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, better known around Washington as the “schools case.” Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a sweeping reversal of the “separate but equal” doctrine that had upheld the Jim Crow system for more than half a century. In doing so, he forced the FBI back into civil rights work.Hoover knew Warren reasonably well and, for the most part, trusted his judgment. As state attorney general and then governor of California, Warren had forged an amicable relationship with the FBI, soliciting Hoover’s aid in state law enforcement and accepting tips through the Responsibilities Program… Their only significant moment of disagreement had occurred during the war, when Warren had championed Japanese internment while Hoover played the role of cautious civil libertarian.[1]With Brown, they switched positions. The decision launched Warren’s reputation as one of the century’s great liberals, the towering giant of rights-based jurisprudence.
Now they also staged Confederate dress balls (part of “Old South Week End”) and put on blackface minstrel shows (in 1950, the theme was a “Cotton Pickin’ Party”). Some fraternity chapters went beyond that, staging “secession ceremonies” and mock assassinations of Union leaders. At all such events, the Confederate battle flag occupied a place of honor as the fraternity’s unifying emblem, displayed over the front door to chapter houses as well as at dances and parades. The fraternity’s journal took credit for inspiring a new “fad of displaying the Battle Flag” as a symbol of support for Jim Crow.
It was the NAACP that had engineered Brown and the other school desegregation suits, part of a long-term strategy to dismantle the legal edifice of Jim Crow. Leading that effort was a brilliant young attorney named Thurgood Marshall, a graduate of Howard University School of Law and one of the most effective civil rights lawyers in the nation.
The report’s conclusions did not stop Hoover from approving a “COMINFIL” (“communist infiltration”) investigation of the NAACP beginning in February 1954. Under its auspices, agents were authorized to use “discreet” inquiries through “reliable sources” to track what was happening within the organization. Marshall received in-person updates from the FBI on the infiltration inquiry, even soliciting details to be incorporated into his speeches. He also publicly cited Hoover as proof that the NAACP was on the right side of the line when it came to communism. “Edgar Hoover, boss of the FBI, says we are not subversive,” he affirmed at one NAACP gathering.
In December 1954, the Justice Department wrote to Hoover recommending “that an investigation be made,” with the aim of determining whether the Citizens’ Councils should be included on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations. Despite his general sympathy with Eastland and other Southern leaders, Hoover complied immediately.
*As a May 1955 memo noted, “current Bureau policy is that we do not investigate groups that advocate and employ legal means.” Hoover made an exception, however, for groups created specifically to target “racial minorities,” on the theory that “such groups’ activities may result in civil rights violations.”
White Southerners were terrified by “the specter of racial intermarriages” and the prospect of social equality, Hoover explained. “The current tensions represent a clash of culture when the protection of racial purity is a rule of life ingrained deeply as the basic truth.” At the same time, he conceded that the federal government had a duty to enforce the law, whether the white South liked it or not. The question was how.[30]Brownell’s bill was supposed to solve this problem. Actually getting it passed, though, was another story, as Truman had learned years before. Three days after Hoover’s cabinet presentation, the Southern Democrats of Congress released a “Southern Manifesto,” declaring the Brown decision “a clear abuse of judicial power” and vowing to resist the intrusion of “outside meddlers”
That Brownell’s bill eventually passed anyway is testament to the political skills of Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, a man with whom Hoover would soon build perhaps the greatest political alliance of his career. What happened along the way, however, only heightened Hoover’s frustration with civil rights work, and accentuated the jurisdictional confusion that had existed for years. In an effort to make the bill palatable to Southern lawmakers, the Senate stripped away several provisions of Brownell’s proposal, narrowing it from a broad civil rights bill into a much more limited defense of voting rights. Senators also added a clause reaffirming the right to local jury trials in all substantial voting rights cases, a measure intended to ensure the failure of any federal prosecution under the new law… “like giving a gun without bullets.”
The result was a House bill that allowed judges to review and redact FBI informant files before turning them over to defendants—a crucial check on the process of disclosure demanded by the Court. In August, after weeks of back-channeling and a “dazzling display of [Hoover’s] finesse as a legislative operator,” in the words of a New York Post columnist, the House voted in favor of the bill 315–0.
COINTELPRO (short for “counterintelligence program”), as that initiative came to be known, would eventually expand well beyond the Communist Party, becoming by far the most notorious program of Hoover’s career… Hoover’s office recommended two techniques. The first was the anonymous letter, which could be sent to a party member or friendly press contact to highlight some unflattering aspect of communist policy… the use of informants to spread rumors and stoke division within party circles. Simply wasting the party’s time—diverting meetings into “non-productive, time-consuming channels”—was a virtue, in Hoover’s view. So was preventing resolution on contentious party issues. Hoover instructed the FBI’s informants to spend as much time as possible stirring up anger between white and Black activists; the right-wing, left-wing, and ultra-left factions; rank-and-file members and party leaders; the Stalinists and their Trotskyist rivals. If all went well, he surmised, the sheer misery of the fights might induce members to quit or to offer themselves to the FBI as collaborators… By 1958, this effort seemed to be yielding the “desired type of disruptive tangible results,” according to an internal FBI assessment. In January, the communists’ Worker newspaper suspended daily operations for the first time in thirty-four years, pleading a lack of funds. Within local chapters, “factionalism, paralysis and demoralization” were fast reaching “an advanced stage,” according to the Chicago office.”… The presentation stressed recent FBI victories, including the 1957 arrest of Colonel Rudolf Abel, an undercover Soviet espionage agent who had been posing for years as a New York photographer.
**Among the evidence that Hoover shared with the cabinet that day, hoping to persuade them of the party’s continuing strength, was the incredible tale of a “CPUSA representative” who had recently returned from a secret odyssey to Moscow. According to Hoover’s account, which was enhanced by “top secret” drawings illustrating each stage of the journey, the man flew from New York to Moscow and then on to Beijing in a daring attempt to restore relations between the American a daring attempt to restore relations between the American party and its powerful counterparts abroad. In Moscow the American met with “top-ranking” members of the presidium, as well as with the head of the Soviet party’s international department. From there, he flew to China, where he spent two weeks in conversation with the “highest-ranking Chinese officials,” including no less a personage than the revolutionary turned dictator Mao Tse-tung.[20]The dramatic story drove home one of Hoover’s central points: though the American party might look weak, it was busy preparing for a resurgence, aided and abetted by global communism’s two Great Powers. But Hoover never mentioned an aspect of events that might have cast serious doubt on that thesis. The “CPUSA Representative,” recently designated as international liaison between the American party and its friends in Moscow, was actually a Bureau informant, the central figure in a high-stakes espionage effort known as Operation SOLO… The man chosen for the mission was Morris Childs, an ailing but resilient fifty-six-year-old Chicago informant. Born near Kiev and brought to the U.S. as a child, he had converted early to communism, a charter member of the party during the wilderness years of the 1920s. In 1929, he left the United States to attend the Lenin School in Moscow, mastering a curriculum that ranged from guerrilla warfare and sabotage to the intricacies of Marxist theory.
Over the next decade and a half, Childs would undertake fifty-one more missions through SOLO, traveling not only to the Soviet Union and China but also throughout Latin America and Asia, where he met with a panoply of famous revolutionaries. His brother, Jack, would take over the financial side of the courier operation, helping to smuggle some $28 million from Moscow into the United States, incontrovertible evidence of Russian influence on the American party. Jack’s reports, like those of his brother, told amazing but true tales: of a personal meeting with Fidel Castro in Cuba, of clandestine rendezvous with Soviet contacts in the New York subway system, of a “secret service school” operated from private apartments in Moscow, where he was trained in the use of microfilm, invisible ink, codes, and ciphers.
That balance collapsed in the 1960s, as the issue of communism began to fade and other, more divisive matters took center stage. First among them were race and civil rights, areas in which Hoover had never been able to reconcile his personal views and professional obligations. Unlike communism, civil rights divided the country, and Hoover found himself caught in the middle.
The trend did continue, if just barely. Kennedy squeaked through with 49.72 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.55 percent (303 to 219 in the electoral college), one of the closest elections in presidential history.[9]Many Republicans viewed the results as a case of outright theft, accusing the Kennedy team of manipulating votes in Democratic strongholds such as Texas and Chicago.
Hoover had reached out with the news that young JFK, then a naval lieutenant, seemed to be embroiled in a sexual affair with Inga Arvad, a married Danish journalist and suspected Nazi spy. The Bureau never proved the espionage charges, but they did overhear the couple making love in a South Carolina hotel room. Acting on Hoover’s tip, Joe pressured his son to end the relationship.
Beyond his doctrinal plasticity, Kennedy’s outstanding characteristic seemed to be an attraction to the wrong kind of supporters and the wrong kind of women. “As you are aware,” the memo explained, “allegations of immoral activities on Senator Kennedy’s part have been reported to the FBI over the years.” Arvad was just the beginning. According to the report, Kennedy frequented establishments owned by “notorious hoodlums,” often accompanied by pop crooner and organized-crime favorite son Frank Sinatra. Kennedy also appeared to be engaged in almost constant sexual intrigue, despite his 1953 marriage to socialite Jacqueline Bouvier. Just three months before the Democratic convention, the Bureau received reports that Kennedy and Sinatra spent the night with “show girls from all over town” at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, a known hotbed of organized crime.
At six feet four, LBJ was an outsize presence in almost everything he did: loud and profane and unafraid to take up space. When he got what he wanted, he gushed with enthusiasm, pledging allegiance unto his dying hours. When things did not go his way, he could turn fearsome, subjecting his targets to the in-your-face technique—finger wagging, massive body planted far too close for comfort—known around Washington as the Treatment.
There was, first, the matter of shirtsleeves. Though Bobby usually showed up to work in a suit and tie, as the day wore on he often shed these encumbrances, first removing the jacket, then the neckwear, then loosening his collar and rolling up his cuffs. To Hoover, this was tantamount to reporting for work in pajamas. Bureau regulations still required agents to wear dark suits, white shirts, and ties at all times, along with hats whenever they ventured outside… Bobby could not resist rubbing it in. Justice Department lawyers recalled his glee at being able to summon the FBI director. “He hit a goddamn buzzer and within sixty seconds, the old man came in with a red face, and he and Bobby jawed at each other for about ten minutes,” one marveled years later. “Nobody had ever buzzed for Hoover!”… Hoover’s greater misjudgment, repeated well into the mid-1950s, was that organized crime itself existed only on a local rather than national level—that there was no Mafia, or national crime-boss syndicate, coordinating activities from the top down. But that idea, too, had collapsed long before Bobby came to office. In November 1957, state police in Apalachin, New York, raided a party at which several dozen crime bosses had gathered for a national confab. At that point, Hoover had conceded the need for federal action and secretly launched his own organized-crime initiative. That effort had been underway for more than three years when Bobby announced that the federal government would finally do something.
In July 1959, the Chicago office succeeded in planting a bug at a would-be tailor shop frequented by Humphreys. In truth, the building was a secret meeting place where he met with fellow “hoodlums” and spoke freely about their plans. FBI agents nicknamed their microphone “Little Al,” in honor of the late great Al Capone… Through the bugs, Hoover learned of the extensive gambling and prostitution networks maintained by Humphreys, along with his plans for retaliation against rivals.
Given the Kennedy family’s history, organized crime was a strange choice of priorities in any case. Joe Kennedy’s investment portfolio was rumored to brush up against organized crime “at a hundred points,” in the words of writer Burton Hersh. So were his social habits, which included countless hours gambling and womanizing in Las Vegas, the country’s improbable new playground for organized crime. John Kennedy inherited some of his father’s preferences and questionable contacts, despite his family-man image.
On April 17, after months of planning, the CIA dispatched fourteen hundred half-trained Cuban exiles onto the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, where the socialist turned communist Fidel Castro had led a successful revolution two years earlier. Castro’s troops made quick work of the invading force. As things fell apart, President Kennedy balked at sending air cover because the entire operation was supposed to come off without any hint of American involvement. The attempt at secrecy failed. On April 20, three days after the invasion, he tacitly acknowledged American backing, a dispiriting and embarrassing loss in “the eternal struggle of liberty against tyranny.” The Bay of Pigs debacle fit well with Hoover’s evolving assessment of the Kennedy brothers as young and arrogant and ill-prepared for the hard work of running the country.
The local field office quickly deduced that Rowan was dating girl-group singer Phyllis McGuire, who also happened to be dating none other than Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, one of Hoover’s “top hoodlums.” Tracking the surveillance equipment led to a former FBI agent named Robert Maheu, who admitted that he had been hired to orchestrate the bugging.Confronted by his former colleagues, Maheu at first maintained that an anonymous Los Angeles attorney had paid him to contract out the surveillance work, for reasons he refused to specify. Then on April 18, the day after the Bay of Pigs invasion, he suddenly changed his story. In a shocking admission that quickly made its way up to Hoover’s office, Maheu confessed that the CIA had hired him as a liaison to the Chicago underworld, in hopes that the CIA and the Mafia might join forces against Castro in Cuba. According to CIA thinking, the mob was already furious about Castro’s seizure of casinos and crackdown on illicit business in Havana—and would therefore make excellent partners for the U.S. government in its campaign to undermine Castro’s fledgling regime.
Less than a month after the Bay of Pigs, another crisis erupted. This one was not of John Kennedy’s own making but it would become the moral issue that defined much of his presidency. The story began on May 4, 1961, when a group of thirteen men and women calling themselves Freedom Riders boarded two commercial buses out of Washington, determined to test whether Black and white citizens could ride through the Deep South side by side. Their journey became major news ten days later, when white mobs in Alabama met them with all the fury of massive resistance, setting their first bus on fire and beating the Freedom Riders with pipes, clubs, and fists… By the time it was all over, his refusal to intervene in the face of serious violence would make him a target of criticism from civil rights supporters, who argued that the FBI had a duty to provide protection and keep the peace. At the FBI, Hoover would narrate the Freedom Rides differently, as a saga of trust and betrayal, in which local police deserved most of the blame.
The Brown decision, now seven years old, had little to show for itself beyond partial school desegregation in willing cities such as Washington, D.C. Another troubling example could be found in interstate transportation, where the Supreme Court had ruled as early as 1946 that segregation violated the Constitution. In December 1960, during the interregnum between Kennedy’s election and his assumption of office, it extended that ruling to bus stations and other transit facilities, declaring separate water fountains, lunch counters, restrooms, and seating areas unconstitutional as well. By the spring of 1961, however, the “Colored” and “White” signs were still hanging, and drivers were still forcing Black interstate passengers to the back of the bus. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a small civil rights group based in New York and Washington, sought to challenge that situation, and to call attention to the Kennedy administration’s lack of action.
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.
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.
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.
Even as Hoover spent his days lounging by the pool and taking in the races at Del Mar, his former agents continued to burn up the Southern California countryside with lectures on “How the West Can Win” and why “all American government foreign aid is immoral.” Their efforts peaked just after Hoover and Tolson returned to Washington, when Schwarz staged a four-day rally at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, broadcast live on television throughout Southern California. “See and hear for yourself the true nature of the Communist menace to our country,” said the ads. Some forty-five hundred people responded, returning to the stadium night after night. On three of those four evenings, the headline speakers were former agents or FBI informants—Dodd, Skousen, and Philbrick.
*Rather than learn much about King himself, Hoover quickly came to focus on two advisers close to King, both of whom maintained ties with the Communist Party. Many historians have depicted Hoover’s approach as Cold War opportunism, in which he imposed a tried-and-true anticommunist framework onto an exciting young movement. With little to go on besides his own biases and paranoia, this story suggests, Hoover seized upon the defunct communist affiliations of a few mid-level advisers to justify an extended campaign of vilification and harassment. FBI documents suggest that the story is not quite so simple. Hoover approached the King investigation with his prejudices intact, including the racism that often made him see calls for justice as a threat to national security. But he did not need to go out of his way, or dig deep into the recesses of a paranoid psychology, to come up with a link between King and communism. As FBI files show, King was indeed working closely with two men, Stanley Levison and Jack O’Dell, who were connected, both present and past, to the Communist Party’s clandestine apparatus. In Cold War Washington, Hoover was not the only one who found that news alarming.
**A white New York businessman and liberal activist, Stanley Levison did not openly acknowledge party membership, in the past or in the present, or even admit a serious interest in communism. But according to Morris and Jack Childs, the trusted and well-protected informants of SOLO, Levison had long been one of the party’s most important secret fundraisers and financiers, as well as an active participant in its underground apparatus. In the early 1960s, when the Bureau realized that Levison was one of King’s advisers, Hoover was surprised to learn that Levison was still working with the party. Hoover did not pause to consider that the situation might be relatively benign: that Levison might feel torn between old loyalties and new opportunities to support the cause of racial justice… at a moment of peak Cold War tension, the Soviet Union might be whispering in the ear of one of the civil rights movement’s emerging leaders… When he was not tending to work and family, Levison devoted his time to liberal politics as New York treasurer for the American Jewish Congress, planning rallies on behalf of the Rosenbergs and against the likes of McCarthy… Beginning in the late 1940s he solicited money from wealthy contacts, ran side businesses on the CP’s behalf, and donated tens of thousands of dollars to CP coffers. Jack knew all this because he worked directly with Levison as a point man for the party’s “reserve fund,” a secret stash of money designated for bail and other emergency expenses. Levison ran the so-called Wall Street Group, an assemblage of heiresses, bankers, and other bourgeois types willing to contribute money and expertise. By Jack’s estimate, during the mid-1940s Levison and his brother, Roy, donated at least ten thousand dollars per year to the party and helped to solicit thousands more from anonymous party “angels.”… When Morris decided to rejoin the party at the FBI’s behest in 1952, it was Levison who showed up in Chicago as an emissary from the CP leadership, assigned to vet Morris’s reliability and motivations. And when Morris made his first trip to New York in order to recontact old party friends, it was Levison who escorted him to a safe-house apartment and then to the private homes of party leaders. Levison schooled Morris in clandestine technique, instructing him to rely exclusively on public transportation and to take roundabout routes to any party engagement. He also built elaborate ownership structures for CP businesses, often serving as the front man and owner in name.
“Levison met King in 1956, just as the Montgomery bus boycott began to attract national attention. By that point, he was starting to perform many of the same tasks for civil rights groups that he had for the Communist Party: fundraising, strategizing, outreach to wealthy New Yorkers. That year, to provide a vehicle for channeling Northern money into the Southern movement, he helped to found an organization called In Friendship. The socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph played a key early role in the group, cosponsoring a benefit rally at Madison Square Garden. Levison worked behind the scenes, along with two of his closest allies: Ella Baker, the pioneering NAACP organizer and nonviolent strategist, and Bayard Rustin, who met with King in Montgomery. Together, they laid a plan for In Friendship “to connect the Negro struggle with the labor movement,” in Levison’s words, and thus build a cross-regional, race-and-class coalition.[13]The first historians to write about Levison’s activities suggested that he broke with the Communist Party around this time, as he transitioned into working with King. Now, with better access to the FBI’s files, it seems clear that this was not true. In April 1956, according to SOLO, Levison handed $4,500 in cash to the party’s head of finances, who in turn handed some of the money to Jack Childs for safekeeping. In the months that followed, the FBI spotted Levison with his party contacts all over the city: descending into subway tunnels, meeting on the steps of the public library, sipping coffee at Chock full o’ Nuts. For the year 1956, according to Bureau files, Levison and his brother channeled up to $41,000 to the Communist Party (the equivalent of about $425,000 in today’s money). Party officials gave the two brothers a joint pseudonym—“Lee”—to help cover their tracks… In reporting on the spectacle, The New York Times identified King as one of “three Southern Negroes who had been involved in recent incidents in the South,” not yet a nationally recognized figure. Like many other observers, though, Levison had seen the potential for something more in King’s powerful rhetorical abilities and skill at elevating civil rights from a regional struggle to a moral imperative. Later that year, Levison sat down with Baker and Rustin at his Upper West Side apartment to hash out a plan for a national organization under King’s leadership, a vehicle to channel the nascent energies of the Montgomery boycott into a larger Southern movement. It would be known as the SCLC…. Over the next several months, Levison showed his commitment to King by devoting hundreds of hours to getting the SCLC off the ground. By the end of the year, he was also doing King’s taxes and helping to ghostwrite his first book, Stride Toward Freedom. He helped to shore up King’s personal finances, passing along two gifts of five thousand dollars each in 1957 and 1958, courtesy of a wealthy New York family with ties to the Communist Party. Levison proved particularly valuable as an emissary to Northern white society, helping King to craft messages and speeches that would strike the right political notes. Out of these efforts emerged a close personal bond. “Levison became King’s closest white friend and the most reliable colleague of his life,” King biographer Taylor Branch wrote of their first years together.
*In October, the coordinator of the CP’s financial network complained that “he was unable to contact STANLEY LEVISON because STANLEY was ‘busy and involved’ with the Youth March on Washington,” a civil rights initiative in which King was also taking part. A few days layer, Child s reported that Dennis and Jackson had met with communist contacts high up in the civil rights hierarchy—“the most secret and guarded people, who are in touch with, consult with, and guide LUTHER KING [sic] and A. PHILLIP RANDOLPH.”
By this circular logic, even the most innocuous behavior became reason for suspicion. And yet Hoover was also sitting on some genuinely combustible facts. According to Jack Childs, the Levison brothers pledged $12,000 to the CP in 1959, a full two years after Levison helped to found King’s SCLC. In 1960, they pledged another $12,000. And in the spring of 1961, when Hoover began investigating King in earnest, CP leaders estimated that they could expect another $8,000 from the Levison brothers over the coming year.
*Unlike Levison, O’Dell had spent much of his adult life as an open party member. Raised in Detroit, he grew up working-class, witness to the local triumphs of the autoworkers’ unions but also to the sufferings of his grandfather, a janitor at the Detroit Public Library. He came to the Communist Party through the militant politics of the National Maritime Union… Bugs inside captured O’Dell advocating a “united front approach” that would put the party’s organizing energies behind the civil rights cause. He was especially excited to gather signatures for another March on Washington, where King, Randolph, and others would call once again for Eisenhower to take action.
In the summer of 1961, Jack embarked on a trip to Moscow, where he was supposed to be trained on how to handle the transfer of Soviet money. While there, he attended “secret service” schools held in unmarked apartments throughout the city, learning how to manage code names, microfilm, invisible ciphers, and other tools of the trade. One day, a Soviet official handed over a list of code names identifying the most important communists in the U.S. The list included approximately fifty names, mostly top-ranking party officials. Among them was the name “O’Dell Pitts,” to be identified in future correspondence as “Tread.” An FBI memo later corrected the roster: “O’DELL PITTS, mentioned in this list as ‘TREAD,’ is HUNTER PITTS O’DELL.” In other words, the man now running King’s SCLC New York office mattered enough to Soviet intelligence to earn a code name.
On January 4, 1962, Hoover learned that Levison had written King’s recent speech before the AFL-CIO calling for solidarity between the civil rights and labor movements. Four days later, he wrote a pointed memo informing the attorney general that Levison was “a secret member of the Communist Party” and appealing for a strategy to deal with what was fast becoming an untenable situation.
And so the information simply continued to pile up: some of it exculpatory, some of it alarming, much of it purely speculative. “Hoover’s memos were very, very persuasive,” Seigenthaler recalled, even with many of the details withheld. “You would think Levison was evil incarnate, guiding the movement on a direct line from the Kremlin.” One new discovery involved a secret meeting between Levison and Viktor Lesiovsky, a Soviet official at the United Nations secretariat, suspected by the FBI of being the head of Soviet intelligence in the U.S. Hoover’s level of alarm rose in tandem with each revelation.
One of his major concerns involved the Soviets, who made a practice of investigating the sexual transgressions of well-placed Americans. In 1960, Hoover noted at least three recent cases in which Americans visiting Russia “indulged in homosexual activities and pictures were taken and they were confronted with these pictures and threatened with exposure unless they agreed to carry out espionage in this country.”[13]Recent evidence suggests that the Soviets were also targeting Hoover himself during these years. In 1992, a retired high-ranking KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin fled the collapsing Soviet Union with thousands of pages of handwritten notes documenting the agency’s foreign intelligence operations. Contained in those notes was a passage showing how the KGB had used “active measures”—forgeries, anonymous letters, paid informants, leaks to newspapers—to spread gossip about Hoover’s sexual orientation. “To compromise E. Hoover as a homosexual, letters were sent to the main newspapers on behalf of an anonymous organization.
In July, Hoover received word that O’Dell was still “considered by the CPUSA, as being a member of its National Committee.” With that revelation in hand, he authorized the writing of an anonymous note about O’Dell’s communist past, to be distributed without attribution to friendly Southern newspapers. The goal, according to the New York office, was not only to ensure that O’Dell would be fired from the SCLC, but to “cause other Negro organizations . . . to clean out anyone who possibly could cause embarrassment”…
Under pressure to respond to the O’Dell allegations, King issued a carefully worded public statement denying any knowledge of his employee’s communist leanings, either past or present, and vowing to get to the bottom of the matter. The statement described O’Dell as a mere “technician” at the SCLC, brought in to help with “the mechanization of our mailing procedures.” Hoover believed both claims were false: that King had been briefed by the White House about O’Dell’s communist associations, and that O’Dell was in fact a key insider at SCLC. King’s statement also maintained that O’Dell had resigned pending an “exacting and fair inquiry.” But this, too, turned out to be untrue. As Hoover soon learned, O’Dell was temporarily being paid through a side channel on the assumption that SCLC would “probably rehire him,” in Levison’s words, once the furor blew over.[3]A sympathetic interpretation of King’s actions would attribute them to personal and political loyalty, the desire to protect valued colleagues from red-baiting. Hoover merely saw an example of King’s willingness to harbor communists despite being warned against it. … Upon discovering that four out of five hailed from Northern states, he told them to contact King and correct the record—at which point King made another small but fateful mistake. Though an FBI official left two messages at the SCLC, King did not call back. FBI memos concluded that he “obviously does not desire to be given the truth” and labeled him a “vicious liar.”
The one hint of action came from Levison himself, who in March 1963 arranged to meet with Lem Harris, the communists’ point man on finances and fundraising. According to Jack Childs, Levison explained over lunch that he had recently become disillusioned with the party, convinced that “the CP is ‘irrelevant’ and ineffective.” Though he and other supporters continued to contribute money to the party “out of habit and sentiment,” he explained, the time had come for a permanent break. “I was . . . tough . . . and I think I established my firm view, firm position,” Levison told his brother a few days later, in a conversation captured on the FBI’s wiretaps.Harris came away with a different impression. “The LEVISONS and O’DELL are still Party members, but do not desire to be openly ‘linked up’ with the Party,” Childs reported to the FBI, citing Harris’s interpretation of events. “Although they are ‘disenchanted’ with the Party, they are not quitting.” Jack received a similar report from Isadore Wofsy, another top party-finance official. “The LEVISONS wish to ‘run’ MARTIN LUTHER KING independently, without any interference from the Party,” he told the FBI, “however, the LEVISONS wish to ‘remain Party people.’ ”
*According to Pritchett, the Birmingham police had made a colossal mistake by allowing the Klansmen to beat the Freedom Riders—not because such violence was wrong, but because it played into the hands of the protesters. Without that spectacular violence, he argued, nobody would have noticed a bus trip by a handful of civil rights agitators. With it, they became martyrs and media darlings. In Albany, he set out to deprive the demonstrators of any such satisfaction. When they protested lawfully, the police stood by and watched. When they broke the law, officers calmly arrested them and took them to jail. Pritchett even helped to orchestrate King’s release from jail, rather than allow him to stay inside and become an object of sympathy. Borrowing Gandhian language, Pritchett described his strategy as nonviolent passive resistance—only in this case, it was a strategy for the police.
The resulting images—a high school sophomore fending off a German shepherd lunging toward his chest, children crouching in pain and terror as streams of water hit their fragile bodies—did just what the academy men had feared: they attracted national attention to King and the protesters, and thus made the Birmingham police into symbols of everything wrong with Southern law enforcement.
On King’s behalf, Jones disclosed the new plan to the Justice Department. Rather than offering a wink and a nod, Bobby was quietly horrified. In July, he proposed something that even Hoover had not fully entertained: wiretaps not merely on Levison, but on King himself. Courtney Evans claimed to have discouraged the idea, pressing the attorney general to think about “the repercussions if it should ever become known that such a surveillance had been put on King.” But Bobby insisted that he was not worried and that he wanted “as complete coverage as possible,” according to Evans.[21]The attorney general backed off from his ambitions a few days later, approving a wiretap on Jones but not one on King.
But it was Oswald’s shooting—the first murder ever broadcast live on television—that riveted the nation.
Warren recognized a problem right away. “Well, gentlemen, to be very frank about it, I have read that report two or three times,” he declared at the commission’s meeting on December 16, “and I have not seen anything in that yet that has not been in the press.” Other members ticked off obvious questions that seemed to have gone unanswered: How did Oswald become an “expert marksman”? What did the State Department have to say about Oswald’s Mexico visit?
Hoover was especially sensitive about information that might reveal the FBI’s own clandestine methods—especially in high-value operations such as SOLO and COINTELPRO. By a quirk of timing, SOLO informant Morris Childs had been in Moscow when the assassination occurred. He returned with a reassuring account of what the day had been like inside the Kremlin. According to Childs, the Soviets, too, were worried about conspiracy-mongering; they thought “some irresponsible general” might believe rumors of Soviet involvement and fire off a few missiles in revenge. Hoover shared the concern that all of the assassination rumor-mongering might spin out of control.
In order to win the Democratic nomination and then the election, Johnson believed he would have to show the country that he was not just another good-old-boy Southern Democrat. And in order to do that, he hoped to pass the civil rights bill that Kennedy had once championed. That was why he wanted Hoover’s assistance… Johnson had made it clear that he planned to run for the presidency as a new sort of a liberal—still a Texan, but one now draped with the Kennedy cloth. In his State of the Union speech, he committed to Kennedy’s dream of a civil rights law that would “abolish not some, but all racial discrimination.” He also vowed to lead an “unconditional war on poverty” and erase the blights of malnutrition, overcrowding, unemployment, and ignorance from the world’s most affluent land. Johnson justified both efforts as Cold War measures: America would show the world that capitalism could deliver equality and justice better than Soviet communism.
From those taps Hoover learned that King was still consulting Levison. He also learned something more startling: despite being married with four children, King regularly engaged in trysts with “girlfriends” scattered throughout the country… The sexual affairs told a story anyone could comprehend: here was a man of the cloth, a self-proclaimed moral arbiter, who apparently did not practice what he preached. A few days before Christmas, while Hoover was entering into negotiations with the Warren Commission, Sullivan’s office asked for permission to explore a counterintelligence campaign against King, using both the long-standing allegations of “King’s unholy alliance with the Communist Party” and the newer discoveries about his personal life. As they envisioned it, the FBI would use the same COINTELPRO techniques that it had deployed so effectively against the Communist Party. Hoover signed off immediately.
Among the most intense targets of Bureau surveillance was the Nation of Islam, characterized in FBI reports as an “all-Negro, fanatically anti-white” and “violent” organization, in contrast to King’s nonviolent, integrationist sensibility. The Bureau had been watching the NOI since at least the early 1950s, alarmed by its emphasis on Black self-empowerment and its embrace of Islam over Christianity. But it was not until the end of the decade that Hoover began to see the organization as a potential national force, rather than merely an extremist “Cult.” A combination of informants and technical surveillance provided reams of information about Elijah Muhammad, the NOI’s patriarch and guiding light. Years before initiating surveillance on King, Hoover used that information to try to discredit Muhammad and disrupt the NOI, authorizing anonymous letters about Muhammad’s extramarital affairs and surveillance of his “hideaway” apartments.In recent years, Hoover’s attention had shifted somewhat to Muhammad’s most famous disciple, Malcolm X (often identified in Bureau files by his given name, Malcolm Little). Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam but the FBI kept its surveillance going, documenting his rising influence as well as his internal disputes with his former allies. In December, he described the Kennedy assassination as “chickens coming home to roost” and said he was “glad” to see it, an inflammatory statement that raised Bureau alarm. By 1964, he was talking about “the ballot or the bullet” as the choices available to Black Americans—and unlike King, he did not necessarily recommend the former.
*** “Only Hoover and a handful of other federal officials, agents, and confidants have ever heard the recordings. (After Hoover’s death, a court order placed the tapes under embargo for fifty years, set to expire in 2027.) But they spoke a good deal to each other and to allies outside the Bureau about what they thought they heard. According to Hoover, the evening was filled with sexual activities of an “immoral + degenerate” nature, involving not only King and more than one woman but also several of his fellow ministers. One agent recalled hearing King proclaim, “I’m fucking for God!” and “I’m not a Negro tonight,” amid the many other sounds—sighs, laughter, the clink of glasses—coming from the room. A written summary of the recordings, apparently prepared by Bureau officials in early 1968, added detail to those recollections. According to the document, written in a tone of bristling outrage, the dozen or so people gathered in the room that night engaged in a fantastical “sex orgy,” complete with “excessive consumption of alcohol and the use of the vilest language imaginable.” King allegedly participated in and even joked about the full range of activity, declaring himself a proud founding member of the “International Association for the Advancement of Pussy Eaters.” As the historian David Garrow first noted in a 2019 article for the British magazine Standpoint, the summary contained a far more serious allegation as well. “When one of the women protested that she did not approve” of the group’s sexual practices, the report alleged, a Baptist minister from Baltimore “immediately and forcibly raped her.” A handwritten note, presumably added by Sullivan or another Bureau official, claimed that “King looked on, laughed and offered advice” while the rape took place.
Howard W. Smith, a passionate anticommunist who was now head of the House Rules Committee. Smith’s effort to derail the civil rights bill by adding a clause outlawing sex discrimination was backfiring spectacularly, resulting in legislative language that now included women as a protected class.
** <<This was Hoover>>: “The great cautionary example was what had happened after Brown, when delays in enforcement had allowed white Southerners to rally together in the massive-resistance campaign. This time, Hoover proposed swift action. Though the FBI had always stationed agents in small offices throughout Mississippi, the Bureau had never maintained a full field office in the state. Now, he suggested, the FBI should open a field office in the state capital of Jackson, where tensions over the missing civil rights workers and the Freedom Summer “invasion” posed an immediate threat to the law’s peaceful enactment. Johnson loved the idea.”
*When Johnson called, though, Hoover softened. “Talk to your man in Jackson and tell him that we think it would be the better part of wisdom, in the national interest, that they work out some arrangement” for protecting King, the president begged. Under pressure from Johnson, Hoover did what no other president, ally, or critic had been able to make him do: he sent a detail of FBI agents to perform guard duty for a civil rights leader.”
On November 3, less than two weeks after the Jenkins report, Johnson won the presidential election in one of the great landslides of American history, trouncing Goldwater with more than 90 percent of the electoral college and 61 percent of the popular vote.
“DeLoach advises me to tell you ladies that my calling Dr. King a notorious liar should be off the record,” he informed the room. “I won’t do this. Feel free to print my remarks as given.”[2]And so they did. Measured by the firestorm that followed, Hoover made a terrible decision that day, committing to a remark that would ultimately become one of the most “notorious” episodes of his career.
Johnson announced gravely that he would not consider dismissing Hoover, despite the very serious outcry over the director’s remarks. To his aides, he offered what would become one of the most famous phrases of his presidency. Asked why he would not, at last, get rid of the sixty-nine-year-old FBI director, Johnson allegedly explained in his most down-home, East Texas patois, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”
The results showed that “despite recent criticism, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover still has the solid backing of nearly 8 of 10 Americans for the job he is doing as the nation’s number one law man.” When asked to stack up Hoover against King in their recent confrontation, a full 50 percent of the public took Hoover’s side, while just 16 percent expressed greater sympathy with King. (The other 34 percent chose “not sure” or “neither.”)
Coretta, opened a bulky but unassuming brown-paper package with a Florida postmark. Between the Oslo trip and other business, she had allowed the package to languish for weeks, assuming it was just another of her husband’s recorded speeches. Instead, she found an alarming letter inside—“King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days”—along with a muffled tape reel of her husband’s hotel-room activities. Alerted by his stunned wife about the package’s contents, King rushed home to listen to the tape and to figure out how bad the situation was. Though they could not prove it, everyone suspected that the tape and letter had come from the FBI, an immediate threat and a long-term warning wrapped up in one. “They are out to break me,” King noted wearily in a phone conversation, all of it overheard on FBI wiretaps and duly transcribed for Hoover.
Its goal, too, was not merely to gather information, but to sow confusion and encourage the groups to destroy themselves from within. The techniques deployed in earlier operations were now fair game: writing anonymous letters, spreading rumors, using informants as provocateurs, planting false stories in the press. The governing rule, as always, would be preventing embarrassment to the Bureau.[7]If the White Hate program owed its basic structure to earlier efforts, there were also a few key differences. As one assistant director noted in a July 30 memo, the new program made no pretense of a Klan connection with espionage or international subversion “inasmuch as they are not controlled by a foreign power.” For the first time, the Bureau would be undertaking a purely domestic counterintelligence operation, aimed at native-born Americans with no known ties to another country. Even with King, there had been at least the veneer of foreign subterfuge: King was connected to Levison, who was secretly connected to the Communist Party, which was secretly allied with the Soviet Union.
When one agent proposed writing a harsh critical history of the Klan for distribution to members, Hoover vetoed the idea. Unlike the intellectually nimble communists, FBI correspondence noted, Klansmen were “emotionally unprepared to completely absorb and fully comprehend the significance” of such material. When the Bureau faked letters written by Klansmen, they made sure to include spelling and grammatical errors, and to keep the messages short… A shocking number of Klansmen, many of them poor, seemed only too happy to trade information and wreak havoc in exchange for money… In Alabama, Gary Rowe recalled being encouraged to “screw as many wives as you can; plant as much hate and dissent in the goddamn families as you can; do anything you can to discredit the Klan, period. No holds barred.”
Lynda Bird, seated just a few feet down from Hoover, reflected afterward, “It was just like that hymn, ‘Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide.’ ” And for the moment, at least, Hoover decided to throw in his lot with Johnson’s version of the civil rights cause. According to press reports, he “listened intently to the President’s address and applauded constantly.”
Johnson was gobsmacked at the FBI’s quick work. “Anybody that could have a man in that car—that’s the most unthinkable thing I ever heard of!” he spluttered to Hoover a few weeks later. “It makes me scared, by God, to even talk back to my wife! Afraid you’ll have somebody there arresting me!”
After 1967, he increasingly returned to that vision, sidelining the Klan effort in favor of what would ultimately become a far more infamous series of programs targeting the sprawling, energetic movements of the emerging New Left. For many agents on the ground, though, it was the Klan operation that would eventually become the greatest point of pride. “The best thing we did during all those years was knock down the Klan,” one agent later reflected, describing how men like Bowers and Venable went from “invincible” to marginal in a matter of months.
According to the FBI’s statistics, crime increased 12 percent between 1960 and 1961, and then kept up more or less that same pace in every year that followed. In 1964, it rose 13 percent compared to 1963, including an alarming 9 percent growth in murders. That made for an increase of more than a quarter of a million episodes of “serious crime,” in Hoover’s words, each one adding to the nation’s growing ranks of victims. And things only appeared to be getting worse. Between 1963 and 1968, the nation’s murder rate nearly doubled, by far the greatest increase in Hoover’s three-plus decades as the collector of national crime data. From these numbers Hoover constructed a portrait of a nation under siege. “Today, thousands of Americans live in fear,” he wrote. “They fear for their lives, the safety of their families, their homes, and their businesses. The cause of their fear is CRIME.” To explain how the crime spike had occurred, he turned not to structural causes such as poverty or racism but to the factors he had been lamenting for decades: moral decline, parental neglect, and lenient probation and parole policies.
In 1964, killings of police officers reached an all-time high, with a total of fifty-seven murders.
According to FBI statistics, crime in the district went up 34 percent in the first six months of 1964 alone, with rape, robbery, assault, and burglary up 47 percent. Then, in the first three months of 1965, homicide and “non-negligent manslaughter” more than doubled compared to the same period in 1964. Those numbers meant that crime in Washington was actually growing faster than in the nation at large.[10]Much of the ensuing debate concentrated on a single fact: in the 1960 census, the capital crossed a threshold, becoming the first major city in the U.S. with a majority-Black population. As many scholars have argued, the relationship between that development and the rising crime rate was far from straightforward. But many contemporary observers found it impossible to separate the two.
“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.”
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.
But from 1965 into 1966, Hoover continued to impose additional restrictions: no more “black bag jobs” (which entailed breaking and entering and were, by the FBI’s admission, “clearly illegal”), no more mail covers, no more polygraphs, no more sifting through suspects’ trash… As one FBI official later commented, these developments should have “gladdened the hearts of civil libertarians,” a stark contrast with Hoover’s approach to the War on Crime. But few people outside of the FBI knew what was happening. And there were plenty of exceptions to the rules. FBI records show a dramatic drop in the use of black bag jobs: from 80 in 1964 down to 0 in 1967. In other areas, though, the restrictions seem to have been more apparent than real. After a temporary pause, the FBI continued to break into foreign embassies. The Bureau also continued to wiretap in national security cases—albeit with a new limit of twenty domestic wiretaps and sixty related to foreign intelligence at any given moment. Perhaps most importantly, Hoover held on to the one program that would eventually make all of the others seem relatively benign. Cut off from other methods of surveillance and harassment, he quietly doubled down on COINTELPRO.
When free-speech demonstrations erupted at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, Hoover assumed they were a communist-inspired effort to influence the minds of college students. He received a fifty-five-page report on Berkeley in late October, on the cusp of the presidential election. From that report he learned that thirty-eight of the hundreds of students involved in the demonstrations had communist backgrounds or connections—enough, as he misinterpreted it, to show that the Communist Party was attempting to manipulate the students.
In 1966, SNCC added to its distinctiveness by expelling most of its white staffers on the grounds that an influx of white, college-educated activists threatened to deny Black members, especially local people in the South, the ability to set the group’s political direction. At that point, “SNCC began a radical change from a civil rights organization to a hate group preaching violence and black supremacy,” in the FBI’s alarmist interpretation. Hoover stepped up his level of scrutiny.[14]The “dominant figure” shaping SNCC’s political outlook was Stokely Carmichael, a tall and eloquent Howard University graduate and, as of 1966, the organization’s national chair.
In a 1965 Gallup poll, 84 percent of Republicans gave the FBI a “highly favorable” rating, making Hoover’s Bureau by far the most popular institution in the survey. By comparison, 50 percent of Republicans expressed “highly favorable” views of the American Medical Association, making it a distant second. Just 3 percent admired the John Birch Society and 1 percent supported the Ku Klux Klan.
Nixon needed the help. In the final tally, he barely edged out Humphrey in the popular vote, with 31.8 million to Humphrey’s 31.3 million, and an alarming 9.9 million for Wallace. The close results meant that the new president owed the men who had helped to ensure that those key votes would end up in the Republican column.
In a burst of self-pitying melodrama, Johnson confessed to Nixon that it was sometimes Hoover alone who had been there for him, “a pillar of strength in a city of weak men.” “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar,” the outgoing president warned. “He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”
With a Republican in the White House, the liberals and Democrats who had held their tongues throughout the Johnson years began to come for Hoover, decrying him as a dangerous reactionary, no longer the master state-builder and figure of bipartisan renown. To Hoover’s surprise and dismay, Nixon was not always there to defend him. As the administration began to put “law and order” into action, Hoover and Nixon discovered that they did not, in fact, always share a set of common interests, and that friendship and politics could be a volatile mix.
According to Gallup, the FBI still boasted an impressive approval rating in the summer of 1970, with 71 percent of the public reporting a “highly favorable” view. All the same, approximately half of Americans felt that Hoover needed to retire.”
Over the next several weeks, Nixon puffed himself up to nudge Hoover out of office but came away defeated again and again. “I was told five times that Hoover would be fired,” one Justice official recalled. “The last time, for sure, they told me was on October 5, 1971.” In his memoirs, Nixon maintained that he simply could not bring himself to “desert a great man, and an old and loyal friend, just because he was coming under attack.” To his aides, though, he revealed something more acute: a fear of Hoover’s skill at wielding power, and a sense that even the president was no match for the FBI director.
“There probably will never be anybody like Mr. Hoover again,” a Christian Science Monitor writer concluded. “Nor should there be.”
In late July, after months of court battles and political grandstanding, the White House was forced to turn over what would soon be known as the “smoking gun” tape, a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman recorded just a week after the Watergate burglary. In that conversation, they complained that Gray could not “control” the FBI, and that the burglary investigation was moving “in some directions we don’t want it go.” To head it off, they agreed to ask CIA leaders to call up the FBI and explain, untruthfully, that the “directions” they were following involved CIA operations and should be left alone. Upon its release, the conversation showed that Nixon had taken an active role in the cover-up after the burglary. It also fulfilled Nichols’s warning that going to battle with Hoover’s FBI—trying to bend the institution to another man’s political will—might well prove to be “a tragic mistake.” On August 8, 1974, three days after the tape’s release, Nixon resigned the presidency.
During his lifetime, Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking racial and social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.