The Burglary (93 page)

How was it possible that Stone, one of the most respected legal minds in the country and appointed attorney general with a mandate to reform the corrupt Department of Justice and its Bureau of Investigation, would choose as FBI director a man who planned and executed this mass raid that was a major source of the department's shame he was appointed to clean up?

Given what Stone either knew or could have known if he had asked questions, it is difficult to understand why Stone decided Hoover was the right person to lead the nation's top law enforcement agency, a position in which he would have enormous power either to protect or damage citizens' right to dissent, a right that Stone cherished and thought the government should zealously protect. Even more difficult to answer is the question of why Stone apparently did not ask basic questions about J. Edgar Hoover before he named him, on May 10, 1924, to be the acting director of the bureau and then, in December 1924, director.

This decision by Stone, which was, as he said, the most important decision he made while he was attorney general, had many far-reaching historic impacts on the nation. He placed Hoover in a position where, unquestioned, he could carry out secret programs that were—and were intended by him to be—a threat to countless Americans' efforts to express dissent. Stone, surely unintentionally, set young Hoover on the path that produced a deep scar on the country's civil liberties for more than half a century, a scar still visible.
The scar was etched over years in secrecy in the middle of a national myth in
which Americans embraced Hoover as a hero—millions of little boys wore G-man badges they retrieved from cereal boxes, dreaming of becoming FBI agents as much as they dreamed of becoming cowboys, while the secret FBI engaged in serial violations of civil liberties and worse.

The nature of much of Hoover's behavior during his early years as director remained largely unknown for years, with only his version of those years available. Even the
Church Committee, despite the depth of its research and scrutiny of the director and the bureau, did not discover in the mid-1970s much information about Hoover's earliest years as director. In fact, until the 1980s it was assumed that Hoover conducted little or no political spying during the first twelve years he was director and that such activities did not begin until the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the years leading up to World War II. The truth about Hoover's earliest years as director did not emerge until a decade after the Church Committee completed its work when scholars
Athan Theoharis, Kenneth O'Reilly, and David Williams, through Freedom of Information Act requests, gained access to extensive files about that era in the bureau.
It was learned then that the roots of the behavior revealed by the Media burglars and by the Church Committee were planted in those early years. For instance, Hoover did not dismantle the political surveillance operations he had put in place under Palmer, despite orders from Stone to do so.
The impulse to build secret files on perceived enemies was always there, and nothing—not even an order from Stone, the man he warmly recalled as his mentor when Stone died in 1946—prevented him from indulging that obsession.

Ironically, Hoover was appointed director during, and as part of, the first major effort to bring major reform to the bureau. The second such effort, much more extensive in its investigation, recommendations, and impact, was the Church Committee. Also ironically, the Church Committee investigation was needed mostly because of the most significant failure of the first reform effort—the appointment of Hoover as bureau director.

SURELY HOOVER HIMSELF
was surprised that Stone appointed him, though he indicated otherwise years later. Hoover certainly knew Stone's thinking about the Palmer Raids and their impact.
He was in the Senate hearing room on February 1, 1920, the day a committee staff member read the letter Stone had written in response to a request for his assessment of the raids. Stone had strongly condemned key injustices that had taken place during the Palmer Raids:

Hearing those words, Hoover certainly knew he was one of those unnamed administrative officers who had planned and carried out the actions Stone declared intolerable.

There has been speculation, but never definitive information, about why Stone chose Hoover—about what he knew and did not know about Hoover's prior roles and about his ideas regarding the fundamentals of law enforcement practices and intelligence operations.
New Yorker
writer
Jack Alexander wrote in 1937 that “unable to find a man who filled the bill to his liking, Stone resolved to look for a promising young man who could be trained along the line of his pet theories.” In other words, if young Hoover had followed Palmer's bad orders, he could be expected to follow Stone's good ones. This analysis suggests that Hoover's main qualification was that he could follow orders. Later, it was clear that, instead, he was someone who, in relation to his superiors, calculated how to appear to be following orders.

Stone may have been naïve. He is said to have believed it would have been impossible for someone as young as Hoover to have executed policy decisions at the time of the Palmer Raids. He openly admired Hoover's characteristic efficiency and willingness to make decisions quickly, and indicated he thought Hoover would develop the values most essential to the job. Stone seemed to have so little insight about Hoover that he assumed that through the force of his personality and his position of authority he could influence the younger man to become a strong defender of civil liberties.

At first, things seemed to go as Stone wished, at least on the surface. Stone appointed Hoover acting director the day after he fired William J. Burns as director.
Years later, Hoover told—and required all new agents to be told—his memory of the exchange he claimed took place between him and Stone the day the attorney general asked him to be acting FBI director.

According to Hoover's account, he tried to make small talk about administrative matters when he arrived in Stone's office that day in response to a request that he appear there, but the attorney general “told me brusquely to sit down, and looked at me intently over the desk. Then he said to me, ‘Young man, I want you to be acting director of the Bureau of Investigation.' ”

Given Hoover's age and what he knew about Stone's view of the Palmer Raids, it is difficult to imagine that he entered the attorney general's office that day thinking he was about to be appointed to direct the bureau.
But as he tells the story, he arrived expecting the appointment and armed with a demand about the conditions under which he would accept it. Years later, when Hoover recounted what happened in that private meeting, he said that when the job was offered, he responded, “
I'll take the job, Mr. Stone, but only on certain conditions.”

“What are they?” Stone is supposed to have asked.

“The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not be a catch-all for political hacks. Appointments must be based on merit. Promotions will be made only on proven ability. And the bureau will be responsible only to the attorney general.”

Hoover said Stone was thrilled that he had put principle first. The attorney general, he said, responded, “I wouldn't give it to you under any other conditions. That's all. Good day.”

Shortly after appointing Hoover acting director, the attorney general made an unequivocal public declaration about the peril posed to democracy by illegal surveillance. It was as though he was giving his new young director a very public order:

A few days after Stone made those remarks, Hoover testified before the Senate committee then investigating his recently disgraced boss, former
attorney general
Harry Daugherty, who had been fired by Coolidge. Hoover used the occasion to announce that he already had fired all of the political cronies of Daugherty in the bureau and was in the process of rooting out deadwood. Future qualifications to be a bureau agent, he said, would be an academic degree, some legal training. No longer, he said, would political connections lead to an FBI job in the bureau. By February 1925, the month Stone resigned as attorney general to become a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Hoover had announced a significant accomplishment. Now more than half the bureau's agents had legal training and most had academic degrees. He also now required that local bureau offices be inspected periodically.
Reformers were pleased that Hoover seemed to be imposing discipline in the bureau Stone once called a “lawless” organization.

In line with Stone's directive, Hoover also announced that no longer was the FBI interested in people's political opinions. But that was not true. Political spying continued.

The public didn't know that. In these, his earliest days in the bureau, Hoover had started to build the “other” FBI—the secret FBI.

Roger Baldwin, a founder and the original director of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, assumed Hoover was telling the truth when he told him such surveillance no longer took place. Grateful for the apparent change in Hoover's values, Baldwin established a cordial relationship with the director that began shortly after Stone appointed him. He learned later that Hoover had deceived him. “
They never stopped watching us,” he said in 1977. In fact, the ACLU was a favorite and continuous bureau target, with some ACLU offices infiltrated by FBI agents or informers throughout Hoover's tenure.
Surveillance of the ACLU included monitoring the group's lawyers as they developed legal strategy for cases they were trying.

Future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, a close adviser to Stone, thought Stone's appointment of Hoover was a terrible mistake.
The close professional relationship between
Stone and Frankfurter started shortly after Stone was appointed attorney general. When Stone arrived at the department in March 1924, he told friends he felt like an outsider. “
I don't know whom to trust,” he remarked during that early period. One of the few people he relied on for advice was Frankfurter, then a law professor at Harvard. Of the many letters Stone received right after his appointment, the one he seemed to appreciate most was a letter from Frankfurter. In that first letter to Stone, Frankfurter wrote that nothing “had been more saddening during the last few years than the betrayal of the law by its special custodians at the Department of Justice.” He told Stone he was confronted
in the department by a “Herculean job.” Stone wrote back that he would be grateful for Frankfurter's advice. “I need all the help I can get.” That was the beginning of a continuous correspondence. They wrote to each other every few days.

Frankfurter was especially concerned about the bureau. It was widely known to be corrupt. Agents commonly took bribes or demanded kickbacks from gangsters and bootleggers. Some agents had criminal records. Stone had said he wanted to turn the bureau into “an honest, professional, law-abiding force that deserved the public trust.” When Stone fired Burns as head of the bureau, Frankfurter applauded him.

In one letter to Stone, Frankfurter wrote about one of the bureau issues that concerned him most: “There can hardly be two opinions about the fact that the spy system in government has been the watershed of the improprieties, illegalities and corrupting atmosphere of recent years.” In public statements, it was clear that Stone agreed with the Harvard professor on this point.

Frankfurter addressed the appointment of Hoover in a letter several days after the appointment was announced. He reminded Stone of Hoover's connection with Palmer, his courtroom defense of the Palmer Raids, and his demands to the Labor Department for deportation orders. “Nevertheless, my mouth has been sealed about the Hoover appointment … because I feel so deeply about the ends at which you aim in reorganization of the Bureau of Investigation, that I did not want to set my judgment against yours.…”

But he warned Stone, “Hoover … might be a very effective and zealous instrument for the realization of the ‘liberal ideas' which you had in mind for the investigatorial activities of the Department of Justice when his chief is a man who cares about these ideas as deeply as you do, but his effectiveness might be of a weaker coefficient with a chief less profoundly concerned about these ideas.”

There is no record of Stone responding to Frankfurter's criticism of the Hoover appointment.

STONE APPARENTLY NEVER KNEW
that when he ordered the dismantling of the General Intelligence Division, Hoover made it appear that he had done so, but actually he had kept the heart of the division—the files. As head of the Radical Division, what became the General Intelligence Division, Hoover had ordered bureau agents to create dossiers on bureau critics, painting them with a wide brush, wrote
Kenneth D. Ackerman, as “parlor
Bolshevists and Red sympathizers.”
In a remarkably short period, two years, he had assembled files on 450,000 people and organizations. The dossiers were to be used as “ammunition to smear them at a moment's notice.”