J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (21 page)

J
ohn Garibaldi Sargent, Harlan Fiske Stone’s successor, was in poor health, didn’t like Washington, and spent as little time there as possible. In an interview many years later J. Edgar Hoover recalled Sargent as one of his favorite attorneys general.

The price of Sargent’s absences, however, was that Hoover had to deal with his second in command, William J. Donovan. But Hoover found a way to turn this to his advantage.

Washington insiders believed that Stone had been appointed to the Supreme Court after less than a year as AG because he’d been doing too good a job cleaning up the Justice Department, particularly in his prosecution of antitrust cases, which had languished during the terms of his predecessors Daugherty and Palmer.
^*

Donovan, who now headed the Antitrust Division, found his unit woefully underbudgeted (Congress appropriated only $200,000 for the fiscal year 1927 and $2,000 less for 1928) and, as a result, badly understaffed. According to his chief assistant, Donovan was forced to make “an arrangement” with J. Edgar Hoover, whereby he would use BI agents—schooled in either law or accounting—in his antitrust investigations.
²

There was, for Hoover, always a quid pro quo. In this case, it was simple: Donovan let the Bureau of Investigation go its own way, with minimal supervision.

Also, Donovan had other things on his mind. Dour Calvin Coolidge having announced that he did not intend to serve another term, Herbert Hoover decided to seek the Republican presidential nomination. A close friend of the Great Engineer since World War I, Donovan became “the principal strategist of the Hoover campaign,”
³
advising the candidate on tactics, rallying support, persuading fellow Catholics not to bolt to Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic standard-bearer, even helping Hoover write his acceptance speech.

In return, Herbert Hoover gave William J. Donovan what Donovan believed to be a firm promise: if elected, he would appoint him attorney general of the United States.

During his first half dozen years as director, J. Edgar Hoover quietly, but steadily, rebuilt the Bureau of Investigation. Until the Lindbergh kidnapping, few of its cases made headlines. But they did make enemies.

While still AG, Stone had ordered the Bureau to conduct a secret investigation of conditions at Atlanta penitentiary. Posing as prisoners, the special agents found abundant evidence of graft, theft, and the selling of favored treatment to wealthy bootleggers. The Bureau also investigated the Washington, D.C., Police Department (for brutality) and the graft-ridden Cincinnati PD (for Prohibition and narcotics violations). Although all three investigations resulted in successful prosecutions, they did not make Hoover and his Bureau of Investigation especially popular in law enforcement circles. (Of the sixty-two convicted in Cincinnati, forty-eight were policemen.) According to Charles Appel, after the Washington investigation there were immediate requests for investigations of seventy-two other police departments across the nation. Hoover, who was already having trouble getting police cooperation—many of the Bureau’s white-slave cases exposed police payoffs by brothel madams—wisely chose to deny the requests, citing lack of authority.

Hoover was already learning to pick and choose which cases it would be most advantageous for the Bureau to handle.

Hoover could impose upon the Bureau a chain of command, strict discipline, rigid procedures, and, in time, a sense of mission; what he couldn’t give it—what the men themselves had to develop—was esprit de corps. It came about as a result of a killing.

Even in the “new Bureau,” the special agents continued to operate as investigators, rather than law enforcement officers. They were not empowered to make arrests. When agents apprehended a suspect, a local policeman, sheriff, or federal marshal had to be called in to make the arrest official. Nor could they carry firearms. More than a few criminals escaped while SAs vainly looked for telephones.

Contrary to regulations, some of the agents did carry their own guns. Edwin Shanahan wasn’t one of them. Shanahan was alone and unarmed when, on October 11, 1925, he approached Martin Durkin, a suspected auto thief, in a Chicago garage. Durkin, who had a gun next to him on the car seat, shot
Shanahan in the chest. Shanahan was the first special agent killed in the line of duty since the founding of the Bureau in 1908.

Informed of Shanahan’s death, Hoover told an aide, “We’ve got to get Durkin. If one of our agents is killed and the killer is permitted to get away, it will be open season on all our agents. Get him.”
⁴

During the three-month search for Shanahan’s killer, the Bureau was united as never before. Competition developed between the squads. Even those not assigned to the case volunteered their off-duty time. When Durkin was finally captured on a train outside St. Louis, it was because the Bureau had tracked him across twelve states and over thousands of miles. Nevertheless, the agents had to stand by while local police made the arrest. Equally ignominious, Durkin had to be tried in a state court, there being no federal law prohibiting the killing of a U.S. government agent. Still, the loss of one of their own and their successful capture of his killer gave the BI something it had previously lacked—a pride of outfit. No one need any longer be ashamed to say he was a special agent of the Bureau of Investigation.

For his part, Hoover promised the agents that he wouldn’t rest until Congress passed laws (1) giving them the power of arrest; (2) permitting them to carry, and use, firearms; and (3) making the murder of a special agent a federal crime.

It took nine years—and the Kansas City massacre—for Hoover to be able to fulfill his promise.

On November 6, 1928, dry Herbert Clark Hoover won a landslide victory over the decidedly wet Catholic Alfred E. Smith.

It was also a victory for the thirty-three-year-old BI director who shared his surname. Through the new president’s secretary, Lawrence Richey, J. Edgar Hoover for the first time had entrée to the White House.

In the interim between Herbert Hoover’s election and his inauguration the following March, the BI director met numerous times with Richey. Although memorandums of their conversations apparently no longer exist,
^*
it is known that one of the subjects they discussed was Assistant to the Attorney General William J. Donovan.

Shortly after the election, the president-elect called Donovan to his home in Palo Alto, California, and asked him to draw up a list of possible appointees to his Cabinet. Donovan did so, leaving only one position blank. According to Donovan’s biographer Richard Dunlop, “When Donovan returned east, he had every reason to believe Hoover would appoint him attorney general.”
⁵

While Donovan waited, “considerable pressure [was] brought against the proposed appointment,” President Hoover later admitted.
⁶
The Ku Klux Klan and various influential Protestant clergymen opposed Donovan because he was Catholic. Bishop James Cannon and the Anti-Saloon League opposed him
because, although he was a teetotaler, Donovan “lacked enthusiasm for the Volstead Act.”
⁷
Also united in its opposition to Donovan was a most unlikely trio: Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Thomas Walsh and, although less publicly, Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Finally Donovan was summoned to the president-elect’s Washington home on S Street. When he reemerged, his face was flushed.

“Did he ask you to become attorney general?” a reporter asked.

“No,” Donovan replied.

“Did he want you to be secretary of war?”

“No, we sat there rather embarrassed, and finally he asked me what I thought of the governor generalship of the Philippines. I told him I wasn’t interested. By that time it was becoming most uncomfortable, and I left.”
⁸

Donovan resigned from the Department of Justice and returned to private practice. As his attorney general, the new president appointed William D. Mitchell, who was both a Protestant and a dry.

Denied his stepping-stone to the presidency, Donovan, according to Dunlop, “always considered his treatment at Hoover’s hands the greatest disappointment of his life.”
⁹

Although at the time Donovan principally blamed Herbert Hoover, for buckling under pressure and for not being honest with him, many years and many battles later, Donovan voiced the suspicion that another Hoover, J. Edgar, had probably played a far greater role in the president-elect’s decision than he’d previously suspected.

At least one person had no doubts about the importance of J. Edgar Hoover’s role. When the former OSS boss William “Wild Bill” Donovan was being considered as possible director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952, the director of the FBI remarked, in the presence of Clyde Tolson and other top aides, “I stopped him from becoming AG in 1929 and I’ll stop him now.”
¹⁰

Hoover lived the Bureau. Nearly every night, most often accompanied by his old college chum Frank Baughman and a couple other Bureau officials—usually Vincent Hughes and Charles Appel—he had dinner at the same popular restaurant, Harvey’s, located on Connecticut Avenue just a block from the Mayflower, sitting at the same table, which was so situated as to avoid interruptions. There was usually only one topic of conversation, Appel would recall, the Bureau—how to improve it, how to defend it against its enemies. Although occasionally Hoover and his companions took in a movie after dinner, or spent an hour or two at the University Club, more often than not they returned to headquarters, then located at Vermont and K, for more work.

(Baughman, Hughes, and Appel were all married. Their families soon learned that, when you worked for Hoover, the Bureau
always
came first.)

At Hoover’s direction, a charter was obtained for the Bureau’s own Masonic lodge, the Fidelity Chapter. Membership and attendance at the Monday-night meetings were “voluntary,” but those who aspired to higher positions soon
realized that associating with the director on this one semisocial occasion was almost a prerequisite to advancement.

One result was that, for many years, few Catholics rose to top offices in the Bureau of Investigation. There were also, with the solitary exception of Hoover’s second in command, Harold “Pop” Nathan, no Jews.

Nathan rarely accompanied Hoover on his nightly excursions. The erudite assistant director preferred to go home and read a book, preferably a much thumbed classic. It was Nathan’s philosophy, expressed to many a subordinate, that if you didn’t complete your work during assigned hours, you weren’t working hard enough. By “assigned hours,” however, Nathan meant six days a week and part of Sunday.

Hoover had his own philosophy. That a man did his work well, Hoover reasoned, did not mean that he couldn’t do it better. As if intent upon enforcing Coué’s maxim, he heaped upon his assistants responsibilities that often seemed far beyond their capabilities—until they tried to handle them. “You either improve or deteriorate” was a favorite Hoover saying.
¹¹
It was also a test. Those who protested, or failed, quickly vanished down the chain of command.

Hoover asked of his aides nothing more and nothing less than he asked of himself: complete devotion to the Bureau of Investigation. (The first marriages of both Baughman and Appel ended in divorce, and Vincent Hughes died of a heart attack while running up the stairs at headquarters.)

Every night Hoover carried home a briefcase full of work. Those who failed to emulate him were chastised for lacking the “right attitude.” He also had a direct telephone line installed, linking headquarters with the house on Seward Square, and left orders that if anything occurred which merited his attention, he was to be called whatever hour of the day or night.

Such a call came shortly after 11:00
P.M.
on March 1, 1932, the night supervisor informing him that—according to the police teletype—Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., the twenty-month-old son of the famed aviator and his wife, Anne Morrow, had disappeared from the family home at Hopewell, New Jersey. It was believed he had been abducted.

Since kidnapping was not a federal offense, the Bureau had no jurisdiction in the case. Hoover, however, asked to be kept informed of any developments. He was called again, not long after 1:00
A.M.
, with the information that a ransom note, asking for $50,000 in small bills, had been found at the crime scene.

Calling his driver, Hoover returned to headquarters. By the time he arrived, most of his aides were already there. It was quickly decided that the Bureau would offer its “unofficial” assistance to the parents, and a special Lindbergh squad was set up, consisting initially of some twenty men, headed by the veteran agent Thomas Sisk.

Obtaining the safe release of the child was the Bureau’s first and foremost priority, Hoover told Sisk. Yet he couldn’t have been unmindful that if the child were safely recovered by his agents, the publicity accorded the Bureau of Investigation would be enormous. In addition, Senator Dwight Morrow, the
child’s grandfather, was one of Hoover’s foremost critics; the successful conclusion of the case would, undoubtedly, transform him into a Bureau ally.

But Sisk and his special squad immediately encountered a major obstacle. The state and local police of New Jersey and New York, already fighting among themselves over the handling of the case, refused to share any of their evidence with the “federal glory hunters.” For several weeks the Bureau was not even allowed to see facsimiles of the ransom notes, and then had to use various subterfuges to obtain them.

Three days after the kidnapping Hoover himself went to Hopewell to offer his assistance to the child’s parents. They declined to see him, and he was referred to Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the New Jersey State Police. Schwarzkopf politely thanked Hoover for his offer but said his men could manage quite well by themselves.
^*