The Burglary (94 page)

In violation of Stone's orders, Hoover quietly continued building secret dossiers based on people's political opinions. He already knew how to hide files, even within the bureau. He wrote and inserted in the files official memoranda saying political spying was not taking place even as he was ordering exactly that. Sometimes when agents asked for permission to conduct political surveillance he would respond that such surveillance was illegal—making that claim even as he directed other agents to conduct it.

The people and organizations he targeted then and placed in his files would remain his targets for life. Even in those earliest years in his career, members of unions, pacifist groups, anarchists, racial justice groups, and bureau critics were regarded by Hoover, with or without evidence, as subversives who should be spied on regularly and recorded in his files. Hoover assigned agents to work with, and sometimes help direct, political surveillance conducted by the police forces'
Red Squads, then common in various cities. His surveillance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People began then and continued for decades. Editors of black newspapers were monitored because they were suspected of “exciting the negro element of this country to riot.”

During the
Great Depression, Hoover assigned agents to monitor protests against the economic policies of President
Herbert Hoover. Political spying also was done during this time at the request of Republican Party officials and businessmen, some of whom had easy access to the director. In 1931, at the request of
Joseph R. Nutt, chairman of the board of Union Trust Company and treasurer of the Republican National Committee, five bureau agents were sent to Syracuse to interview
George Menhinick, editor of
Wall Street Forecast,
a financial newsletter that reported on the “dismal situation facing American banks and investors” at that time. After the interview, an agent reported that they had “thoroughly scared” Menhinick and that he was not likely to “resume the dissemination of any information concerning the banks or other financial institutions.”

While Hoover was widely assumed to be following Stone's rule that prohibited political surveillance, he also developed another skill he would use throughout his years as director—manipulating the meaning of words to suit his purposes. How he justified asking the State Department to monitor Americans traveling abroad provides an example of his early linguistic elasticity. Officially, such monitoring was to be limited to Americans who were
suspected of acting on behalf of a foreign government. He reasoned that the rule could be interpreted to mean that an individual “who advocates Marxist Leninism
might just as well
be working as an agent of a foreign power,” and, therefore, monitoring them could be justified. Under this stretching of the rule, Frankfurter, hardly a Marxist-Leninist, was one of many Americans spied on by the FBI while traveling overseas.

FROM WHAT IS KNOWN
, Stone never asked basic questions of Hoover—never conducted an internal investigation. Just months after Stone appointed Hoover, when Coolidge nominated Stone to be a Supreme Court justice, some senators openly expressed fear that Stone's Wall Street contacts would cause him to be too protective of business interests when he was on the court.
Stone responded by suggesting that senators should clarify their concerns about him by questioning him at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Hearings to question high-level appointees had never been held. The one held to question Stone set the precedent for what soon became required confirmation hearings for all people appointed to the federal bench. It is unfortunate that Stone did not apply the same critical standard in assessing Hoover that he suggested the Senate should apply to himself.

Basic questions about Hoover, posed to him or to others, if answered honestly, surely would have raised profound concerns in Stone's mind. Under the circumstances, some of the questions that should have been asked are: What were Hoover's responsibilities in connection with the Palmer Raids, the prison conditions of those detained, and the aggressive efforts to deport them? What were his responsibilities when he worked directly for the disgraced Palmer, Daugherty, and Burns? What records were maintained in the General Intelligence Division, formerly Radical Division, and what happened to those records when Stone closed the division? If Stone had learned about the 450,000 files that were maintained there on individuals and groups, he probably would have asked who ordered the building of those files. If he had learned that they still existed, neatly stored away for continued use and expansion, he probably would have demanded that those files be made available for his inspection.

Because questions apparently were not asked about these files, Hoover was able to keep them and develop new plans for them—make them the initial building blocks in his lifelong dedication to creating and maintaining massive files on people whose opinions he opposed. Some of them became the first entries for his Custodial Detention Index, the list of people the FBI
would detain indefinitely and without due process in the event of a national emergency. It was this index that Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered Hoover to close and to destroy, but that Hoover, in secret defiance, simply renamed and expanded. He started such defiance to authority not long after Stone appointed him.

If Stone had reviewed the index cards in those files, he would have seen Hoover's notes about the Palmer Raids, including his demands for more arrests, higher bail, fewer lawyers, and more spying. He would have seen Hoover's note about the argument he made that to give the detainees access to lawyers would “defeat the ends of justice.” Stone would also have found some of his friends in the files. He would have seen files on each of the twelve law professors who in May 1920 issued the “Twelve Lawyer Report,” a detailed investigation of the Palmer Raids. As Hoover would all his life with critics, when the report was issued, he immediately instructed agents to secretly investigate the scholars who wrote it. He questioned Frankfurter's loyalty to the country, and claimed that the criticism written by another professor in the group, Harvard professor
Zachariah Chafee, was “reckless and untrue.”
He secretly tried to get Harvard trustees to fire the two men. Lacking evidence, he failed in both efforts. He probably was especially upset with the twelve professors. Their detailed documentation of the crimes perpetrated by the government in connection with the Palmer Raids and their aftermath was widely credited with turning public opinion against the raids. When the professors' report became public, there was widespread concern that the government had abandoned the rule of law.

If Stone had read those files, he might have considered more carefully whether the person who created such files, and who had not destroyed them, despite Stone's order, should be the director of the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency.

It is puzzling that Stone did not ask essential questions before he appointed Hoover. Unlike Hoover's future supervisors, Stone surely was not intimidated by the twenty-nine-year-old Hoover. Surely he did not think Hoover had a file on him, a fear that in future decades kept countless members of Congress and other officials from questioning him about his operations.

THE LACK OF QUESTIONING
continued, even when Hoover, in a very rare instance, revealed the nature of his suppression plans to top officials.

On another March 8—this one in 1956—Hoover spoke before a meeting
of the National Security Council. Nearly all members of President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet, as well as other high-ranking officials in his administration, were present. Hoover's presentation, entitled “The Present Menace of Communist Espionage and Subversion,” exaggerated the power and size of the Communist Party in the United States at that time. The director lamented that the U.S. Supreme Court had recently eviscerated the Smith Act, thereby making it impossible to arrest people for simply advocating subversive ideas. Instead, the bureau would have to prove advocacy of actual violent acts. Hoover was furious that the court had limited the bureau's ability to arrest communists.

But Hoover had a plan to get around the limitations caused by the Supreme Court. He would secretly suppress communism through illegal means—and later other people and organizations he opposed. Instead of arresting them, now he would secretly harass and suppress them. He described his new plan to the president and all top members of his administration that day.

Hoover told the assembled officials at that National Security Council meeting that he would now use every means available to pursue and disrupt the CPUSA. As
James Kirkpatrick Davis, the first writer to reveal what transpired at this meeting, wrote, “
he failed to mention that many of the means he had in mind had already been in use for some time” and that the communist “menace” no longer existed.

Eisenhower asked him to explain the counterterrorism techniques he planned to use, and Hoover responded, “Sometimes it is necessary to make a surreptitious entry where on occasion we have photographed secret communist records and other data of great use to our security.” Additional counterintelligence methods that he listed included safecracking, mail interception, telephone surveillance, microphone plants, trash inspection, infiltration, and IRS investigations. In short, he said, “every means available to secure information and evidence.”

Without naming it, Hoover had described about-to-be-created COINTELPRO to the president and his cabinet. Apparently no official blinked as he laid out his strategy. According to minutes of the meeting and an interview years later with Attorney General
Herbert Brownell, who was present, when Hoover finished reciting his litany of the illegal activities the FBI would use, the room fell silent. The president was silent, Brownell recalled, but he seemed to nod in approval.

That was the beginning of COINTELPRO, the worst of Hoover's secret operations. Inside the bureau, two months later on May 18, 1956, he gave
orders for the first COINTELPRO operation, the one against the Communist Party, to begin. At first, it was focused on communists. And then it expanded. Eventually, by the mid- to late 1960s, the operations were so diversified that anyone or any organization Hoover disapproved of could become the object of these special operations.

Hoover's presentation at that National Security Council meeting is believed to be the only time he informed a president, attorney general, or any other officials of any presidential administration about the secret illegal operations he conducted. He may have taken their silence as permanent approval of such operations, just as he assumed he could bank on President Franklin Roosevelt's approval of going after subversives as permanent approval for doing so.

By well before that day, March 8, 1956, the secret FBI already was entrenched. Hoover had concluded it was all right for him to use against American dissenters tactics of espionage normally reserved for use against foreign enemies—without regard for the legality of his approach or for the legal protection of Americans' dissent required by the Constitution. The secret FBI would expand considerably with the addition of each COINTELPRO operation from 1956 through the late 1960s.

WHATEVER THE REASON
for the failure to question Hoover prior to his appointment, beginning then, in 1924, the pattern was set that would persist for a half century: Very few questions were asked of J. Edgar Hoover. No questions—therefore, no oversight—became the pattern as of the day Hoover was appointed acting director of the bureau. That frightening, damaging silence—the absence of questions—continued all the way to the next important March 8 in Hoover's life, the one in 1971, when files were stolen from the Media FBI office. After a half century of no questions, finally, when evidence from those files reached the public, it became imperative that questions be asked. That was precisely what William Davidon had thought: that if evidence could be found that the FBI was suppressing dissent, the public would demand that questions be asked and the suppression stopped.

By now, more than forty years after the burglary that revealed Hoover's secret FBI, the profound impact of the fateful appointment of Hoover has been well established, thanks to the Media files, congressional investigations, and journalists and scholars who have written articles and books and made documentary films based on bureau files released in response to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. Together these many
works have created a mosaic that can be assumed to be a fairly complete account of the actions of the person who served longer in government than any other public official and who exercised enormous power.

Gradually, it was revealed that the director had had a profoundly negative impact in some of the most important parts of American life. A few key examples: