The Emperor's Old Files

By John Elson

J. EDGAR HOOVER: THE MAN AND THE SECRETS

by Curt Gentry; Norton; 846 pages; $29.95

For nearly five decades, he artfully promoted himself as America's chief guardian of law and order, ever on the alert to foil public enemies and Soviet spies alike. In fact, J. (for John, which he dropped in the '20s to avoid confusion with a small-time crook of the same name) Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was normally more engaged in battling his real enemies: anyone in Congress, the White House, the Justice Department or other intelligence agencies like the CIA who threatened his imperial sway over the crime-busting organization he had molded into an extension of his straitlaced, bureaucratic self.

In this relentless but richly detailed biography, Curt Gentry lauds Hoover for transforming the FBI from a haven for corrupt political hacks into an efficient national police. But during much of the director's extraordinary reign, from 1924 until his death in 1972, the bureau was virtually a law unto itself. Intercepting mail, wiretapping, burglaries, break-ins: the G-men insouciantly did them all, and usually without authorization by the courts or Hoover's nominal boss, the Attorney General. In peak years the FBI had as many as 1,000 bugs in place at any given time. Bureau agents illegally listened to conversations between Alger Hiss and his attorneys during the accused Soviet spy's second trial in 1949. When G-men learned (via wiretaps, of course) that the leftish National Lawyers Guild was preparing a report on the bureau's illegal activities, agents burgled the guild's offices to steal copies so the President and the Attorney General would be prepared to counter the charges.

For all the sub-rosa snooping, there were curious gaps in the FBI's store of ill-gotten knowledge. Hoover for years had loftily denied the existence of organized-crime families. As a result, the FBI had virtually nothing on file about the dons who were surprised by local police at a now famous Mafia summit in Apalachin, N.Y., in 1957. Two weeks before John Kennedy's doomed visit to Dallas in November 1963, FBI agents knew that Lee Harvey Oswald had threatened to kill the President, but they failed to notify the Secret Service. Hoover ordered documents shredded and forced agents to perjure themselves to keep the Warren Commission from discovering this shameful lapse.

A key source of Hoover's power and longevity in office was his private dossier of personal and official/confidential files -- derogatory information, often unsubstantiated, about the misdeeds and peccadilloes of celebrities and public officials. The material in these folders, kept under lock and key, served two purposes: 1) to amuse and titillate superiors whose favor the director sought to curry and 2) to cow potential opponents into silence and cooperation. Among the most feared and hated men in Washington was the bureau's unofficial liaison officer with Congress, whose task it was to inform a Senator, say, whenever G-men unearthed a particularly useful piece of dirt about the individual or his family. From then on, that Senator was usually in Hoover's back pocket on votes affecting the bureau.

Hoover was unforgiving: once an enemy, always an enemy. Perhaps his most loathed nemesis was "Wild Bill" Donovan, wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA's predecessor), who made the mistake of trying to take over the FBI's domestic surveillance operations for his own shop. Long after Donovan's death in 1959, Hoover continued to tell people, falsely, that his old foe had succumbed to syphilis contracted from prostitutes during World War II orgies. Eleanor Roosevelt made Hoover's hate list for having accused him of trying to build an American gestapo. In revenge, the director spread rumors of her alleged love affairs with both men and women. Hoover persuaded comedian W.C. Fields to give him a set of obscene drawings of the President's wife, which he delighted in showing friends.

The son of a federal bureaucrat, Hoover had thought of becoming a Presbyterian minister before he was hired by the Justice Department as a clerk in July 1917. He so blatantly cultivated an image of pious rectitude that one wit dubbed him "that Virgin Mary in pants." In reality, Hoover was permanently on the take: he decorated his home at government expense, funneled royalties from his ghostwritten books into a private slush fund, accepted free vacations in Florida and California from toadying millionaires. Hoover had no qualms about using gossip about clandestine homosexual encounters for blackmail. Meanwhile, he was seen so often in the company of his deputy, Clyde Tolson, that stories constantly circulated that the two bachelors were lovers. (Gentry leaves unresolved the question of Hoover's homosexuality and generally is better at describing what the director did than at analyzing what made him tick.)

"Hoover never trusted anyone he didn't have something on," an aide once said. In the end, Gentry argues, Hoover became prisoner of the confidential files he had amassed to keep others in thrall. Harry Truman and John Kennedy had wanted to fire Hoover, but pressure on the director to step down reached a peak during the Nixon era. Fearful that his enemies might succeed, Hoover began going through the confidential folders to determine which ones might prove damaging if they fell into the wrong hands. He had barely reached the letter c when he gave up the task as hopeless. After Hoover's death, his faithful secretary, Helen Gandy, had the personal files secretly transferred to the director's home. It took her 2 1/2 months to get rid of them all. Destroying the files may have been illegal, Gentry writes, but it was an honorable attempt to preserve Hoover's good name and that of the bureau. Gandy knew the real secret of the files: "nothing they contained was as derogatory as the very fact that they existed."