Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [118]
Mitchell Rogovin, who was an Assistant Attorney General at the time of the expose, spoke of ‘all the leaking to Life magazine’ by the Bureau in those days. It was, he said, ‘part and parcel of the retributive mode that went on … This was one of a lot of cases …’
Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark expressed grave concern about the Gallagher case and that of Senator Long. The leaking of unproven information to the press, he said, was ‘inexcusable.’ ‘This,’ he had sighed at the height of the crisis, ‘is the work of the old man down the hall.’
This was the dark side of Edgar, the most insidious violation of his office. Most Americans saw only the other side, the formidable propaganda machine and the impressive corps of agents.
‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ Newsweek declared in 1957, ‘has become as bipartisan as the Washington Monument, as much an institution as the Smithsonian.’
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‘The FBI is a closely knit, cooperative organization of more than 14,000 men and women. I like to speak of it as a “we” organization.’
J. Edgar Hoover, 1956
One day in 1959, as the lights came up in a screening room at FBI headquarters, Edgar was observed to be weeping. He had just watched a preview of Hollywood’s movie The FBI Story, and he was crying with happiness. He thought the film, which portrayed a super-efficient agency staffed by a happy band of exemplary agents, ‘one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever seen.’
In his address to the Appropriations Committee that year, Edgar catalogued a battery of impressive facts. The Identification Division now held more than 150 million fingerprints on file, and most of those submitted by police had been successfully identified. The Laboratory had made 165,000 scientific examinations, an all-time high. FBI investigative staff had performed more than three million hours of overtime. The FBI National Academy had celebrated twenty-three years of training law enforcement officers. Three and a half thousand agents, along with 10,000 other Bureau employees, had as usual achieved a near-perfect conviction rate. Chairman Rooney thanked the ‘eminent Director,’ and dismissed him after perfunctory questioning.
Within the FBI, a generation of agents was beginning to ask questions. The structure of the organization had not changed since the reshuffle of 1924, but there were now two FBIs. There was the Field, with its corps of brave, hardworking agents serving in the front line against crime; and there was FBI Headquarters – the Seat of Government, as Edgar liked to call it – with its ever-expanding bureaucracy made up of men who had been office-bound for years. Communication within the Field was becoming a sterile business. Many active agents thought of headquarters as a place for timeservers and promotion-hunters, a source of meaningless paperwork and fatuous orders.
British MI-5 officer Peter Wright, at the FBI on a liaison visit, thought the Seat of Government a ‘magnificent triumphalist museum’ peopled by vacant-looking staff. At a meeting with Edgar and two Assistant Directors, he was shocked to see how the aides ‘for all outward toughness and the seniority of their positions … were cowed.’
Fear was woven into the fabric of FBI life. Edgar punished Acting Assistant Director Howard Fletcher, who had tried to change an unfair wages system, by excluding him from promotion. Bernard Brown, Assistant Agent in Charge in New York, was demoted and transferred to the boondocks for commenting to a journalist without permission. One man – his name is deleted from the FBI release – was reported for telling a risqué joke to a class at the FBI Academy. ‘I regret very much having told such a story,’ he told Edgar in a groveling letter. ‘I want to assure you, as I did Mr Tolson, that I do not consider myself a jokester … I have, of course, learned my lesson.’
The myth of the infallible Director had been institutionalized. ‘Boys,’ an instructor told a group of rookie