AMERICA
The cleaning-up of J. Edgar Hoover
DENIS BROGAN
A consideration of American popular heroes since the First World War has comic possibilities if it gives rise from time to time to serious worries. I am not talking of the collapse of Woodrow Wilson or of the even greater collapse of his former disciple Herbert Hoover, but I am thinking of the long ostracism of Colonel Lindbergh and the slow decline in the prestige and power of J. Edgar Hoover.
I think that, naturally enough, the Ameri- can people used Presidenit Hoover as a scape- goat. He had many faults and he had very little political talent, but he was a man of very great ability and, within his own limi- tations, of very great probity. Some of the
people who had been most critical of him— I dare to mention Mr Harry Truman and Mr Dean Acheson—came to realise that he had been, for all his limitations, a great public servant. But for a much longer time J. Edgar Hoover was regarded by most Americans not as a great public servant, but as the great public servant. While Joe McCarthy ranted and lied and other dema- gogues (some, like George Wallace, with a good deal of charm) imitated him, J. Edgar Hoover commanded his great police empire in an atmosphere of ever increasing adula- tion. Now there has been war on the Ameri- can Fouchd and it is possible that despite the defence of Mr Hoover by President Nixon, the heat may effectually be on. At any rate the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not what it was, and its behaviour is in fact better than it was at the height of Mr Hoover's prestige and power.
The role of the heads of great quasi-secret police organisations is. of course, difficult to assess. We have no doubt that Fouche was a very effective policeman indeed in the French Revolution, and his career is very romantic in a sense: from being an usher in a church school just before the Revolution, he ended up as a ducal exile in Sweden where his family, I believe, is still important—as it was in the reign of King Gustav V Adolph which is not very long ago. Some of Mr Edgar Hoover's reputation as a great public figure was justified. The American government got on very well, or at any rate got on, without any effective secret service or any effectual Federal police organisation right down to this century. One result of this indifference to higher police work was the only too easy assassination of Abraham Lincoln, one of the great disasters of American history. And in- deed, it was only after two other Presidents had been assassinated that the so-called secret service, which dealt mainly with counter- feiting and was a branch of the Treasury, developed into any form of security service whose main job was to protect the President of the United States. But there was always something amateurish, and worse than am- ateurish about it, (how amateurish it was comes out in the Warren investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy). The administration of the FBI was put into the hands of that famous or notorious private detective, William J. Burns who was as vul- nerable as his spiritual ancestor, Allan Pink- erton, had been. (Pinkerton was a Glasgow Chartist by origin, as Carnegie came from a Dunfermline Chartist family.) The scandals of the FBI under President Harding's admin- istration were no worse than the other scan- dals of that scandal-riddled administration. But after the death of the President, and after the cleaning-up undertaken by President Coolidge and his attorney-general, that great man, the future Chief Justice Stone, the FBI was turned over to a young, industrious and, what was much more important, honest official, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover did not in the least look like the head of a great secret police organisation. No Fouche he. He was, indeed, less physically attractive even than his namesake President Hoover, and he got less and less attractive in manner and even in appearance as he got older. Police work is very wearing.
What were J. Edgar's achievements? It was something to have an administratively 'tight ship' in charge of the police operations of the Federal government, and rigorous inspec- tion kept it, even by non-American standards, clean. One result was that Mr Hoover could get rid of any of his employees even on trivial grounds, for his duty to keep the organisation pure overrode all questions of natural justice. He was helped, too, by his impressive natural arrogance. I can remember his giving evidence before the Tydings Com- mittee of the Senate shortly before the war, and the kind of hush that fell in the Senate hearing chamber as the famous head of the FBI entered with two or three members of his staff and submitted, in an imperial man- ner, to interrogation. He was perfectly con., scions of the fact that the Senate, indeed all of Congress, suspected that he tapped their telephone wires, perhaps opened their letters, and knew a great deal more about them than even the most pure of Senators or Congress4 men wanted known.
I talked at the time to a friend of mine, a very distinguished Congressman, who said, 'We don't know if our phones are tapped or if we are being snooped on all the time, but some of us fear we are, and that's just as good as being snooped on or kept under constant observation by the FBI'. And of course it was notorious that no attorney general, except perhaps Bobby Kennedy and Ramsey Clark, ever dared to be even mildly rude to Mr Hoover who simply boycotted his formal superiors. I can remember his being asked why it was that certain important secret files were available to the top members of his staff which were not available to either Senators or Congressmen or, as Mr Hoover admitted, to anyone outside the FBI except the President. 'All members of my staff have been thoroughly investigated. The Senate has not been investigated.' Senators not only thought this arrogant but wondered was it even true? And it was the mysterious ramie fications of the FBI that counted in great part for Hoover's power.
He was very good at getting credit for achievements which may not have been his. For example, I was in Chicago the day Dillinger was removed, and the scuttlebut in the press—indeed, among some of the Chic- ago police—was that the job bad been done by police who came in from Indiana to avenge one of their number who had been bumped off by Dillinger's gang. But all the public credit went to the rm. And the rum-
ours of the ramifications of the FBI system produced rather sour jokes. A friend of mine who had bought an early nineteenth-century house in Georgetown and was asked, 'was it in good condition?' answered, 'It's only held together by the FBI wiring'. But of course one of the problems raised by the recent charges brought by Mr Hale Boggs is that you don't need the old-fashioned wire- tapping methods—there are other ways of getting the same result which enable the FBI to do its snooping on both Houses Yet there seems no doubt that the myster- ious power of the director of the FBI is not what it was. For one thing, he does not look physically nearly as well as he did. For an- other, he has perhaps made too many enemies —enemies among Negroes, enemies among Jews. He could perhaps say what a prefect of police in Paris said in the late nineteenth century d propos of the anarchists, 'Where- ever two or three of you are gathered to- gether, I am among you'. But people are not either so convinced that this is true as they were, or so alarmed even if it is true. A real life of J. Edgar Hoover could be an equiv- alent of The Secret History of Procopius, and all the threats of Mr Hoover, which were numerous, have become less and less formid- able to a society as disturbed in so many ways as the United States is today. I will feel no regrets if and when Mr Hoover is removed by the President or by God, but there is reason to hope that he has acted not only from vanity—and he has his share of vanity—but in some of his efforts to save the republic from Reds, etc, 'has done the state some service'. To draw up a balance-sheet and decide whether he has done more service than he has done damage is something that had better be left to his and my maker.
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