Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [108]
FBI officials well knew that the very existence of such an operation was potentially explosive. ‘These matters,’ warned an instruction to field divisions during a primary campaign, ‘should be handled with extreme discretion to avoid the implication that we are checking on candidates.’
Yet that was exactly what Edgar was doing. ‘Hoover,’ said William Sullivan, ‘had a complete file developed on each incoming congressman. He knew their family backgrounds, where they had gone to school, whether or not they played football, and any other tidbits … Bureau indices were immediately reviewed to see if what we had was good or bad. Could he be looked upon as a person to cultivate and use, to draw into our stable on Capitol Hill? Or should he be looked upon as one who would be unfriendly to the Bureau?’
As an election approached, congratulatory letters from Edgar were prepared for all candidates. When the results came in, winners’ letters were rushed around the country, the notes to the losers trashed. A ‘friendly’ politician found himself courted by the FBI wherever he went. If he traveled to foreign capitals where the Bureau had offices, escorts were there to greet him at the airport. ‘We went out of our way,’ Sullivan recalled, ‘to make it clear, “We are pleased with you.”’
On Capitol Hill, politicians were watched by men well placed to serve as Edgar’s spies. From 1943 on, FBI agents were ‘loaned’ to congressional committees as investigators. Others ostensibly ‘left’ their Bureau jobs altogether to work as congressional staffers.
Edgar’s key bridgehead in Congress was the House Appropriations Committee, which holds the purse strings of government agencies. By the seventies, no fewer than twenty-eight FBI agents were attached to that committee alone. John Rooney, the Chairman of the subcommittee that controlled the FBI budget, was the Bureau’s cherished friend. The Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn kept just one signed photograph on his office desk – of Edgar. He lavished praise on the Director at every opportunity. ‘I have never cut his budget,’ Rooney said, ‘and I never expect to.’ Edgar, who turned down requests to testify before the House Committee on Crime, made an annual ritual out of his appearance before the Appropriations Committee, a platform from which to preach his view of the world and to reel off statistics suggesting the Bureau had achieved an extraordinarily high rate of convictions – usually around 96 percent of crimes committed.
These figures were cooked. The superb conviction rate referred only to the number of cases that came to court, not to the number of investigations undertaken. Many of the apparent successes, such as auto theft convictions, were actually achieved by local police. Over the years various public bodies and scholars have cast doubt on Edgar’s statistics. Warren Olney, an Assistant Attorney General in the fifties, thought them ‘hogwash.’ They were never challenged, however, by Rooney’s Appropriations Committee.
Edgar protected Rooney even though the Congressman was, in the words of crime consultant Ralph Salerno, ‘up to his ears in collusion with organized crime.’ Washington lobbyist Robert Winter-Berger, who said he personally saw Rooney accept a cash-filled envelope from a mob emissary, called him the ‘key connection for the underworld’ on Capitol Hill.
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