J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (30 page)

On August 24, 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned J. Edgar Hoover to the White House for a private meeting. Exactly what was said during this and a subsequent meeting the following day is a matter of dispute, since there is only one record of what occurred: Hoover’s own memorandum for the files.
^†
In short, there is only Hoover’s word for what was said and—equally important—what emphasis was given to the subjects they discussed.

According to Hoover, the president called him to the White House because
he wanted to discuss “subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism.” However, if Hoover’s memorandum is an accurate depiction of what was discussed, the only reference to fascism was mention of the Coughlin-Butler incident and the American Liberty League affair. The rest of the meeting was devoted to Hoover’s reports on Communist activities, particularly those involving the American labor movement. According to Hoover, the West Coast longshoreman’s union, headed by Harry Bridges, “was practically controlled by Communists”; the Communists “had very definite plans to get control of” John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers Union; and the Newspaper Guild had “strong Communist leanings.” If the Communists gained control of just these three unions, Hoover maintained, they “would be able at any time to paralyze the country.”

The president (still according to Hoover) stated that “what he was interested in was obtaining a broad picture” of the Communist and Fascist movements and their activities as they might “affect the economic and political activity of the country as a whole.”

Hoover told the president that the FBI lacked authority to conduct such an investigation. Roosevelt asked if he had any suggestions. Hoover just happened to know of a loophole: “I told him that the appropriation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation contains a provision that it might investigate any matters referred to it by the Department of State and that if the State Department should ask for us to conduct such an investigation we could do so under our present authority.”
⁷

The following day the president and the director met with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Hoover’s memorandum of the meeting states, “The President pointed out that both of these movements were international in scope and that Communism particularly was directed from Moscow…so consequently, it was a matter which fell within the scope of foreign affairs over which the State Department would have a right to request an inquiry to be made.”
⁸

Apprised of the situation, Hull told the director—in language that does not appear in Hoover’s memorandum for the files—“Go ahead and investigate the hell out of those cocksuckers.”
⁹

Roosevelt asked Hoover to coordinate the FBI investigation with military and naval intelligence. He also stressed that he “desired the matter be handled quite confidentially.”
¹⁰

Not knowing—except from Hoover’s memos—what the president actually wanted, it is not possible to say whether the FBI director went beyond the president’s intent. If Roosevelt simply wanted a general intelligence operation to establish that the Fascist and Communist movements were foreign directed, Hoover definitely exceeded his mandate. On August 28 Hoover’s aide Ed Tamm submitted a tentative outline for the investigation. In its “general classification” were the maritime, steel, coal, clothing, garment and fur industries; the newspaper field; government affairs; the armed forces; educational institutions; Communist and affiliated organizations; Fascist and anti-Fascist movements;
and activities in organized labor organizations. This was, the director noted in the margin in blue ink, “a good beginning.”
¹¹

On September 5 Hoover instructed his field offices to obtain “from all possible sources”
^*
information concerning subversive activities being conducted in the United States by Communists and Fascists
and
“representatives or advocates of other organizations or groups advocating the overthrow or replacement of the Government of the United States by illegal methods.”
¹²
This expansion into purely domestic intelligence went beyond even Hoover’s memos concerning the president’s instructions.

Not until five days later, on Cummings’s return to Washington, did the FBI director inform his superior that the secretary of state, at the president’s suggestion, had requested him to have an investigation made of “the subversive activities in this country, including communism and fascism.” Whether there was a foreign nexus was no longer significant. By this time Hoover clearly presumed that he had the authority to investigate
any
groups or individuals whom
he
suspected of engaging in subversive activities.

If the attorney general expressed concern that the FBI director had made an end run to the president, there is no indication of it—perhaps because the only record of their meeting is, again, Hoover’s own. In his memorandum of the conversation, Hoover wrote, “The Attorney General verbally directed me to proceed with this investigation.”
¹³
Hoover apparently didn’t find it necessary to inform his boss that he had already done so. Once again, the Bureau was in the business of investigating “subversive activities”—a term which Hoover was not eager to limit by definition.

Actually Hoover had never lost interest in the subject. After Attorney General Stone’s 1924 edict, no
new
investigations were launched. But the SACs continued to send the director reports on such organizations as the CPUSA and the ACLU, as well as hundreds of individuals suspected of engaging in “radical activities.” There is no indication that Hoover ever ordered them to stop. The special agents in charge knew what interested the director, and they supplied it.

Also, the Bureau continued to maintain a close, albeit secret, relationship with Army intelligence. Following the Palmer raids, Hoover had struck a deal with military intelligence. The GID would share its reports with MID; it would also conduct investigations when requested. In return, the military agreed to provide Hoover with intelligence it had received from foreign sources—information which Hoover greatly coveted but which had been denied him by the State Department.

Although Stone’s prohibition had supposedly ended Hoover’s part of the bargain, he’d quickly found a way around it. In 1925 he informed Colonel
James H. Reeves that although the Bureau had discontinued “general investigations” into radical activities, he would continue to communicate any information received from specific investigations of federal violations “which may appear to be of interest” to the military.
¹⁴

Moreover, from 1929 on, Hoover maintained his reciprocal arrangement with the retired major general Ralph H. Van Deman and his private intelligence network, each making available to the other his confidential reports.

During Hoover’s meeting with Roosevelt and Hull, the president had ordered him to coordinate the FBI investigation with the Army’s Military Intelligence Division and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Roosevelt’s request simply formalized what was already an ongoing relationship. Moreover, since MID and ONI lacked trained investigators, they relied on the FBI “to conduct investigative activity in strictly civilian matters of a domestic character.”
¹⁵

This gave Hoover the whole field of domestic intelligence. Once he had it, he fought hard to retain it.

One of his biggest threats was, ironically, publicity. It was imperative, the director urged in a memo to the president, that the FBI, MID, and ONI proceed with “the utmost degree of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might be raised to such an expansion.” For this reason, Hoover opposed any new legislation to pay for the Bureau’s expanded intelligence program, since this might “draw attention to the fact that it was proposed to develop a special counter-espionage drive of any great magnitude.”
¹⁶
Thus the FBI’s return to domestic intelligence was to be kept secret from both Congress and the public.

Nor was this the only threat. As the situation in Europe worsened, half a dozen other federal agencies—including the Secret Service, the Post Office Department, and even the State Department itself—decided they wanted their own slices of the intelligence pie.

At Hoover’s request, the Justice Department asked them to instruct their personnel that all information “relating to sabotage and subversive activities” be promptly forwarded to the FBI.
¹⁷
To Hoover’s intense displeasure, the agencies mostly ignored the request, causing the director to complain to the attorney general that they were attempting to “literally chisel into this type of work.”
¹⁸
In a note to his assistant Ed Tamm, Hoover put it even more succinctly: “We don’t want to let it slip away from us.”
¹⁹

As a compromise, an interdepartmental committee was set up. Any relevant information would be forwarded to the State Department, which would then assign it to whichever agency it felt should conduct the investigation.

For a bureaucrat, Hoover was most unusual in that he was rarely willing to settle for compromises. And he, especially, had no intention of agreeing to this one. He wanted
all
civilian intelligence vested in the FBI. Arguing that it would result in “duplication” and “continual bickering,” he urged the new attorney general, Frank Murphy, to write the president asking that the committee
system be abolished. Murphy obliged, maintaining—in a letter the Bureau helped prepare—that only the FBI and military intelligence were equipped to handle such an immense task. In addition to having already gathered “a tremendous reservoir of information concerning foreign agencies operating in the United States,” the FBI had a “highly-skilled” investigative force, an “exceedingly-efficient” technical laboratory, and an identification division which had already compiled data on “more than ten million persons, including a very large number of individuals of foreign extraction.”
²⁰

Roosevelt did not need to be sold on the FBI, nor apparently did his new AG. On June 26, 1939, Roosevelt sent a confidential presidential directive—drafted by FBI and Justice Department officials—to the heads of the relevant departments, stating, “It is my desire that the investigation of all espionage, counterespionage, and sabotage matters be controlled and handled” by the FBI, MID, and ONI, and that no investigations in these areas be conducted “except by the three agencies mentioned above.”
^*
21

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. As the world watched Europe erupt in war, Hoover was busy fighting off still another threat to his authority, this one much closer to home. From his agents in New York, the FBI director learned that Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine—a Hoover enemy since the Brunette incident—had set up a sabotage squad; fifty detectives had already been assigned, with another hundred to be added later.

Deciding that continued secrecy was now potentially more harmful than helpful, Hoover on September 6 sent the attorney general a memo urging that the president issue a public statement “to all police officials in the United States” instructing them to turn over to the FBI “any information obtained pertaining to espionage, counterespionage, sabotage and neutrality regulations.”
²²

Within hours after receiving the director’s memo, Murphy drafted a proposed statement and sent it to the White House by special messenger. At 6:20 that same evening the attorney general called Ed Tamm and read him the presidential statement. An indication of how the director dominated this AG comes across in Tamm’s memorandum of the conversation:

“Mr. Murphy stated that when he was preparing this he tried to make it as strong as possible. He requested that I relay this to Mr. Hoover as soon as possible and he stated he knew the Director would be very glad to hear this. Mr. Murphy stated he prepared this on the basis of the memorandum which the Director forwarded to him.”
²³

Roosevelt’s statement, which the FBI later referred to as an executive order or a presidential directive but which was in reality a press release, for the first time mentions “subversive activities”—as well as espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, and violations of the neutrality laws—but it does so in a general way,
without definition, simply requesting that law enforcement agencies promptly report all such information to the FBI.
^*

In releasing the statement, Attorney General Murphy told the press, “Twenty years ago inhuman and cruel things were done in the name of justice; sometimes vigilantes and others took over the work. We do not want such things done today, for the work has now been localized in the FBI.”
²⁵

J. Edgar Hoover had managed to stage his own coup d’état—by memorandum.