J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (8 page)

Mr. Rooney: “We are honored to have with us this morning the distinguished Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Honorable J. Edgar Hoover. I would like to say to him that he seems to thrive, as far as his appearance is concerned here today, on the barbs of these left-wing foul balls who have been trying to lay a glove on him. I don’t think anybody has succeeded up to now.”

Mr. Hoover: “Mr. Chairman, I have a philosophy. You are honored by your friends and you are distinguished by your enemies. I have been very distinguished.”
¹⁵

After filing his obit on the director, Hugh Sidey,
Time
’s White House correspondent, decided to write a longer piece for his
Life
column. His deadline being a week away, he had more time for thought and memories:

“I’ve lost count of the times I’ve ridden or walked the famous mile from Capitol to White House in inaugural parades or funeral corteges or moments of national triumph. Almost every time when we passed the FBI building I looked up and there was J. Edgar Hoover on his balcony, high and distant and quiet, watching with his misty kingdom behind him, going on from President to President and decade to decade…

“Now, that is past. There will be a special emptiness down along the Avenue.”
¹⁶

T
hat the day was overcast did nothing to suppress the exuberance of the crowd. Woodrow Wilson was the first Democratic president in sixteen years. Moreover, he was neither a politician nor a war hero but a college president, with what promised to be a different approach to government. And, of course, it was a holiday.

Even the two-hour wait, as the new president finished his lunch, his first in the White House, didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the thousands who’d gathered along the parade route. As Wilson climbed the steps and took his place in the reviewing stand, those close enough to see him roared their approval. Smiling with obvious pleasure, the president seemed to want to savor the moment, but had no chance. With a blare of trumpets, triggered by a signal from the chairman of the Inaugural Committee, the parade resumed, led off by the famed Black Horse Troop of Culver Military Academy, which wheeled in front of the stand, offering the president and the White House, which loomed majestically behind him, drawn sabers in salute.

As the crowd cheered and the president doffed his silk hat, the country’s best passed in review. The United States Military Academy Band, the only band allowed to play “Hail to the Chief,” was followed by the West Point cadets, the midshipmen from Annapolis, the cavalry, the field artillery, forty real Indian chiefs, governors’ and states’ militia, and, time and again, the new flag, which now had forty-eight stars, Arizona having been admitted to the Union just a year before, in 1912. It was, everyone agreed, the most spectacular inaugural parade in the nation’s history.

It was also the longest; four hours. It went on, and on, and on. Of all the officials in attendance, only the president remained standing throughout. As if
the hours foreshadowed the years ahead, his lone figure seemed to grow more and more fatigued, and even more solitary.

Late in both the day and the parade, long after the crowd appeared to have shouted itself hoarse, the cheering suddenly erupted again, from way down Pennsylvania Avenue. Startled, Wilson turned and looked for the cause of the excitement.

It was only a high school drill team, and a local one at that. Company B of the Central High School Cadet Regiment, according to its banner.

New to Washington, Woodrow Wilson was unaware of the strong community spirit of its permanent residents.

It was also a sharp unit, precision perfect. Even the admirals and generals on the reviewing stand smiled appreciatively as its young cadet captain snapped off cadence and, in a voice that hadn’t quite made the transition to manhood, barked, “Eyes left!”

That day and all its components—the special attention from the crowd, the nodding approbation of the president, the thrill of leadership, and the immense pride he felt for his outfit—would remain in memory as long as the cadet captain, John Edgar Hoover, lived.

It is unlikely the president ever knew the eighteen-year-old high school senior’s name, more unlikely still that he ever thought of him again, once the cadet regiment had passed. But, remembered or not, he would leave his mark on the record of the twenty-eighth president of the United States.

By the time Woodrow Wilson left office eight years later—his mind as sadly debilitated as his partially paralyzed body—many of the young men who’d marched in his two inaugural parades would be lying dead in the poppy fields of Flanders, beyond recalling that Wilson had won reelection on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Dead also, except in his own fevered imaginings, would be his dream of America’s participation in the League of Nations, the Senate having refused to ratify first the Treaty of Versailles, then membership in the League itself. The “New Freedom,” which had been the theme of his first campaign, was forgotten. Even the old freedoms would become casualties of the Wilson years, which would be marred by the infamous “Red raids” of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

Palmer would be ably assisted, in both the planning and execution of those raids, by a young Justice Department lawyer—the former cadet captain of Company B.

John Edgar Hoover was born in the shadow of the nation’s Capitol, whose pillars his great-granduncle, a Swiss stonemason, had helped carve, on New Year’s Day, five years before the start of the twentieth century and just thirteen years before the founding of the obscure Justice Department bureau which he was to transform into the monolithic FBI.

He was very much a product of his times, those last decades of America’s innocence which preceded the First World War. He never outgrew their Victorian manners and mores; that righteous-Christian sensibility not only remained
with him throughout his life but was the fuse of his complex personality—a courtly mind-set evidenced by his unchanging attitudes toward such subjects as God, country, duty, women (both kinds, good and bad) and “coloreds.” (As late as 1943, he would report to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that recent racial troubles in Washington were due to “the sporting type negro” and “a lower type of redcap.”)
¹

Equally, Hoover was a product of place, that still-provincial, decidedly southern, small town that was Washington, D.C. In years to come, he would defend it against “alien filth,” anarchist bombers, bonus marchers, Communists, hidden homosexuals, rioting blacks, unkempt peaceniks, militant priests, numerous politicians, and a number of presidents. He would do so with a ferocity understandable only if one realized that he felt his own home was under attack. To Hoover, Washington was indivisibly the nation’s capital, the seat of government, the center of not only his but all domestic and worldly power, and his hometown—its defense not merely a duty or an obligation but a birthright.

Except for the reports of his agents, he knew little of the rest of the world, or his own country for that matter, but he knew Washington as perhaps only a civil servant born of a long line of civil servants can. He knew almost instinctively that presidents come and go, that only the bureaucracy itself is enduring, and that it is the true foundation of the government.

He was to use this knowledge with a brilliant skillfulness to both establish and maintain his Byzantine power structure against all enemies for nearly five decades.

The Hoover family home, a modest two-story stucco house at 413 Seward Square, was one in a conclave of residences belonging to middle-level bureaucrats. He was the youngest of four children born to Dickerson Naylor and Annie Marie Scheitlin Hoover, his roots English and German on his father’s side, Swiss on his mother’s. His father—and his father’s father—worked for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, his father as chief of the printing division, while his only brother, Dickerson, Jr., who was fifteen years his senior, eventually became inspector general of the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service.

But it was his mother’s side of the family which he, in later years, most often mentioned in interviews, noting that her ancestors had been Swiss mercenaries and that her granduncle, John Hitz, had been Switzerland’s first honorary counsel general to the United States.

Unquestionably, the greatest influence on Hoover was his mother. It was apparent to even those who met him many years later, such as the presidential crony George Allen, that “he was very much a mother’s boy.”
²

Annie Hoover dominated the household. Short, plump, and something of a martinet, she held to the old-fashioned virtues and made sure her offspring did likewise. Her influence on her youngest—whom she called Edgar and the rest of the family referred to as J.E.—was particularly strong. In time her daughter Lillian would marry and move to the country; her son Dickerson, Jr., would
also marry and move, though only next door. Edgar never married. He lived with his mother in the Seward Square house until she died. He was then forty-three years old.

As the baby of the family, born two years after the death of Annie’s third child, Edgar naturally received special attention. But it went beyond that. According to his niece Margaret—who was for many years a next-door neighbor and whose baby carriage he pushed many a time around Capitol Hill—Annie “always expected that J.E. was going to be successful,” and “encouraged” him in the right directions.
³

Yet even with her he sometimes exhibited a stubborn independence.

In no matter was Annie Hoover stricter than in adherence to the principles of her church, which was Lutheran. And, as a boy, Edgar followed her lead: he sang soprano in the choir of the Church of the Reformation and was awarded a New Testament for attending Bible school fifty-two consecutive Sundays. But then, in his teens, very much against her wishes, he switched denominations, becoming a Presbyterian.

It was a conversion less to a church than to a man.

“My imagination was captured by a young Presbyterian preacher, Dr. Donald Campbell MacLeod,” Hoover later recalled. MacLeod, whom one writer has described as “a cleric who romped with the boys and showed them that a good Christian does not have to be a sissy,” was pastor of the old First Presbyterian Church of Washington. “He believed in boys like myself,” Hoover would remember. “His concern and compassion for young people made Dr. MacLeod my hero…If ministers were like Dr. MacLeod, I wanted to be one.”
⁴

Although he taught Sunday school, and for a time served as assistant superintendent of the church’s junior department, Hoover fatefully chose another career. But he retained a lifelong conviction that he had been ordained to distinguish wrong from right.

Decades later, in a bizarre turn of events, the recollections of his boyhood idol figured prominently in the FBI director’s hate-filled, highly personal vendetta against a man whom he refused to call reverend—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hoover’s religious phase coincided with one of America’s great self-help eras, a period when millions stood before their mirrors each morning and night repeating Emile Coué’s maxim: “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”

As a youth Hoover stuttered. Researching the subject, he found an article which asserted that for some the cure was to talk not slower but faster. Practicing alone in his room (his young nieces sometimes surreptitiously listening), he learned to talk rapidly and—except in moments of great stress—overcame the problem. But he didn’t stop at that. A nightmare common to all stutterers is the prospect of addressing a crowd. Hoover took up debating, and by his junior year at Central High School had led the team undefeated through twelve
straight contests, himself taking the affirmative on such topics as “Cuba Should Be Annexed to the United States” and “The Fallacies of Women’s Suffrage.”

The “runt of the litter” and a late bloomer, Hoover was shorter than most boys his age and slighter of build. But in debating, size and physical strength were unimportant. On the contrary, it was the little things that counted, particularly small details in an opponent’s argument, for it was here that an opponent most often showed weakness. By attacking those vulnerable points, Hoover learned, you could bring down the most formidable foe. It was a lesson he never forgot. Debating also taught him that if he could dominate a conversation, he could control it.

His staccato speech, machine-gun-like in its rapidity (so fast, legend would have it, that one court stenographer threw down his pad, complaining that while he could transcribe two hundred words per minute, Hoover was going at least twice that); an eye for detail, a tremendously important asset whether one was a policeman or a bureaucrat or, as in Hoover’s case, both; the ability to dominate conversations, whether with subordinates or superiors, and in the process almost always manage to get his own way—all these early characteristics were to become Hoover hallmarks.

Convinced he had overcome all the imperfections in his own character, he had no patience with or respect for those who could not measure up and do likewise. This attitude colored his perceptions on almost every subject, from the causes of crime to the behavior of his agents. Having set impossibly high standards for himself, and achieved them, he could demand no less of the men who served under him. That they often failed to reach his lofty goals angered, but never surprised, him.

Lacking them himself, he became an avid student of human weaknesses, a passion he would share with many U.S. presidents, including Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (who would respond to juicy tidbits with a puritanical frown and the practical comment “Yes, but how can we use this?”).

Hoover even overcame his shortness. The FBI public relations arm, Crime Records, would answer inquiries about his height with the prescribed response “The director is just a shade under six feet tall.” A raised dais under his desk, the avoidance of tall people at parties, and the rare promotion of tall agents to headquarters positions helped maintain the illusion.
^*

Religion and debate were not young Hoover’s only interests. He loved sports. According to Quentin Reynolds, Hoover got his prizefighter’s nose from a direct hit by a fly ball, while his high school nickname, Speed, came from his
dexterity on the football field. Reynolds was wrong on both counts, although one suspects it was Hoover himself who led him astray.

Too light for the football team, Hoover spent his after-school hours delivering groceries for the old Eastern Market. The tip, whether he had to walk one block or five, was usually a dime. Realizing that the more trips he made, the more dimes, he’d race back to the market as fast as he could, earning the moniker Speed and, on a good day, as much as two dollars.

Equally romanticized was Reynolds’s version of the Hoover nose. However, considering he knew Hoover during his “Stork Club era,” when the FBI director palled around with such famous newspaper men as “Quint” and Walter Winchell and such sports luminaries as Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the errors are understandable.

Practical jokers all, they probably wouldn’t have let Hoover forget had he told them the truth: that he got the nickname as a delivery boy and that his mashed nose was the result of a childhood boil.