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RETAINING J. EDGAR HOOVER
By Jim Werbaneth
There is something addictive about a secret.
—J. EDGAR HOOVER
John Edgar Hoover was one of the most enduring and powerful unelected officials in American history—perhaps the most powerful. That he was permitted to remain in office for forty-eight years, amassing power for himself as well as for his agency, amounts to one of the worst long-term mistakes of modern times. It was the fault of every president under whom he served, all of whom kept him in office due to various combinations of respect and fear.
Hoover was appointed to head the relatively obscure Bureau of Investigation by Calvin Coolidge on May 10, 1924, at the age of twenty-nine. He would remain in this post until 1935, when Franklin D. Roosevelt named him to the newly upgraded and renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation. Little could either president have realized that Hoover would remain in office until his death on May 2, 1972.
Hoover’s goal was to build a fundamentally professional and highly skilled law enforcement agency, employing the most modern technical methods. Moreover, he saw his people as one of the FBI’s greatest assets, demanding high standards of competence and behavior. Yet there was a dark side to this, as his idea of an ideal agent was white, male, and college-educated. There was little place for women or minorities in Hoover’s FBI, except perhaps as clerks for the former, and household servants (for African-Americans, at least) for the latter. In addition, while Hoover could be fulsome in his praise of local law enforcement, thus building alliances, he could be arbitrary and vindictive with his own agents, sometimes acting out of jealousy.
A prime example of the latter is that of Melvin Purvis, the special agent in charge of the Chicago office, and a man who achieved the Bureau’s ideal of a gangbuster. Specifically, Purvis orchestrated the killing of John Dillinger in July 1934. However, Hoover felt threatened by the positive publicity that this act earned Purvis, as there was only room for one hero in the FBI—Hoover himself. The next year, he forced Purvis out of the Bureau; subsequently, Purvis practiced law until his death by apparent suicide in 1960.
Other agents suffered from the director’s whims. Hoover had a tendency to transfer agents, under the guise of giving them additional experience. However, he did so with little or no regard for the hardships of these frequent moves, for the agents or their families.
One could view Hoover as simply a bad boss, and he certainly could be one.
There were aspects of Hoover’s life that made him vulnerable to blackmail, or at least coercion. Most prominently, there have been consistent stories that the lifelong bachelor was gay, and had a long-term relationship with the Bureau’s assistant director, Clyde Tolson. Holding power during a time when homosexuality was socially unacceptable at the least and criminal at worst, he was certainly more exposed to compromise than any of the family-oriented agents he liked to hire. Indeed, blackmailing closeted public figures was a favored tactic of the Mafia in New York; as America’s top law enforcement official, Hoover certainly would have been an attractive target for extortion.
Whether or not he was blackmailed, Hoover stubbornly refused to direct the Bureau against organized crime for much of his time in office. He preferred to pursue outlaws like Dillinger, and subversives, such as the American Communist Party. Yet he would not even recognize the existence of La Cosa Nostra, and whatever attention he paid to urban organized crime was sporadic.
Hoover’s inattention to the Mafia changed on November 14, 1957, when police raided a meeting of the highest-level mobsters from across America in the upstate New York town of Apalachin. This was uncovered, not by the FBI, but by an inquisitive state trooper doing basic police work. The arrest of more than sixty leading mafiosi was evidence of the mob’s existence that even Hoover could not ignore.
In the years after Apalachin, Hoover became, if anything, more abusive of his powers. The FBI engaged in a long series of illegal wiretaps and “black-bag” burglaries, and not just against its new enemies in organized crime. In the sixties, Hoover sent the FBI after a new generation of domestic enemies, especially Martin Luther King Jr. In what may have been the Bureau’s most insane abuse, Hoover tried to use audiotapes of King cheating on his wife in order to drive him to suicide. In addition, he undertrook an extended effort to ruin perceived enemies—the sixties-era Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. Here, those black-bag jobs and wiretaps flourished, usually extra-legally. Unlike MLK, many of the targets really were subversives and domestic terrorists, including the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party.
Hoover was a methodical cataloger of the private lives of those whom he considered targets, such as MLK, and soon many members of Congress and Cabinet officials. Much of his effort to build political and popular protection involved managing image and publicity. Hoover influenced the portrayal of the FBI in the movies and on television, and also collected compromising information on those who could help or hurt the Bureau and its director. Even if he did not engage in direct extortion, potential victims’ knowledge that Hoover possessed such information about them could be enough to protect him and the Bureau.
Keeping Hoover in office was an epic mistake made by every president from Coolidge to Nixon. Perhaps Silent Cal and his successor, Herbert Hoover, could be excused for not recognizing how manipulative, power-hungry, and ruthless Hoover was. The same could not be said for later chief executives. Then again, it would not have been easy to remove someone who so successfully cultivated an image of America’s top cop, the head of a highly professional and incorruptible agency. It would have been even harder if the president had reason to believe that Hoover had evidence of embarrassing behavior. John F. Kennedy, for example, was a serial philanderer; public knowledge of his extramarital adventures would have undercut his image as a good Catholic family man, and of his White House as a latter-day Camelot. For his part, Lyndon Johnson was not always known for his own commitment to monogamy.
This is the core of the mistake: Hoover became bigger than his bosses. Presidents might come and go, but J. Edgar Hoover stayed, filling his file cases with the secrets, sexual and otherwise, of the powerful.
American history would have been much different had he been cashiered rather than allowed to die in office after almost five decades. To start with, presidents from at least Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon would have been in positions to demand more accountability, as a chief executive should, from the FBI. Secondly, a Hoover-less FBI would almost certainly have demonstrated more respect for privacy and civil liberties. Had FBI directors been nominated and retained for specific terms, as they are now, there would have been no time or opportunity for them to build the kind of power base that Hoover had.
Specific investigations probably would have gone differently, and with more effectiveness, too. For one thing, the Mafia surely would have had a lot more reason to fear the FBI in the forties and fifties. There is no reason why the Bureau could not have gone after the Lucianos, Lanskys, and Gambinos of America as well as the Dillingers. Hoover might have had some excuse for not investigating La Cosa Nostra in the twenties, when the Bureau of Investigation was a fairly minor and weak agency, but when it became a premier law enforcement agency, the excuses should have vanished. The “Mafia? What Mafia?” approach was one of choice, not necessity.
There is one Mafia line of business that the FBI could have interdicted under a different leader: labor racketeering. With the end of Prohibition, organized crime looked to the labor movement for new revenue. The FBI was seriously inattentive to organized crime as it extended its power into organized labor. While men such as Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Fitzsimmons, and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, all Teamsters, were brought down by federal prosecution, the FBI did not interfere sufficiently with the Mafia’s infiltration of the nation’s biggest unions.
Plus, when the United States was faced by real domestic terrorism in the late sixties and early seventies, the FBI fell short, this time because of excessive zeal. COINTELPRO accumulated good intelligence, but unfortunately not enough of it could actually be used in court. Therefore, really dangerous characters were able to walk free, maybe most importantly the Weather Underground’s married founders, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Rather than spending the rest of their lives in federal prison, these self-confessed serial bombers became college professors. Ultimately, COINTELPRO did not bring Ayers and Dohrn to justice so much as protect them by neutralizing the cases against them.
An America in which Hoover was removed after a decade at the top would have been a much better place. FBI effectiveness would have been increased by an earlier commitment to diversity. With the FBI stronger and getting an earlier start on investigations, it is highly possible that the Mafia would have been weakened sooner. Impeding the entry of criminal elements into the labor movement would have made unions cleaner and more accountable to their members. Perhaps, too, the Las Vegas hotel industry would not have been taken over by mob entrepreneurs funded with Teamsters Union retirement money.
Ultimately, J. Edgar Hoover did some good, leading the Bureau of Investigation into a new, stronger, professional agency. But he stayed far too long, and presidents lost control of the Bureau; indeed, it could be argued that the Bureau lost control of itself. If Hoover would not remove himself from his position, the president should have removed him. Yet none had the fortitude to do so.