Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [119]
The first test for new agents came at the end of the training course, when they filed into the presence to shake Edgar’s hand. As they waited in the anteroom, men were seen frantically wiping their hands on their pants. A moist palm was enough to end an agent’s career before it began. So were pimples or a bald head.
Once, as a group of recruits left his office, Edgar summoned the instructor back. ‘One of them,’ he snapped, ‘is a pinhead. Get rid of him!’ Afraid to ask which man Edgar meant, the instructor surreptitiously checked his pupils’ hat sizes. There were three men with small heads, all of them size 67/8. To placate Edgar, and to protect Training Division officials, all three were fired.
‘In our class,’ said former agent Jack Shaw, ‘we had a kid from Kansas called Leroy, who’d been a schoolteacher. He had a high-pitched voice, and this didn’t fit with the Bureau stereotype: tall, commanding, blond, blue-eyed, the perfect accent. Word came down about this, so they worked on Leroy to lower his voice. He got it to a manly level, and he was smart and sharp in every other way. But when he went for his final test, the Assistant Director looked at him and said, “Have your ears always protruded like that?” Leroy had large, flapping ears, and they told him his ears were wrong. He left that day.’
An agent who lost his gas credit card received a letter of reprimand from Edgar. Agent Francis Flanagan was talking on the phone one day, hat on and cigarette in mouth while trying to keep a key informant on the line, when Edgar walked in. His punishment, for failing to spring to his feet, was an immediate transfer to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
During the fifties, word reached headquarters from San Francisco that a nude belly dancer had performed at an agent’s retirement party. Edgar ordered all 200 partygoers to file a report, but not one admitted having seen the dancer. Each claimed he had been in the men’s room during the performance. For once, by sheer weight of numbers, Edgar’s wrath was thwarted.
In the sixties, a clerk called Thomas Carter would be subjected to an inquisition because of an anonymous letter claiming he had slept with a young woman. Carter admitted spending the night with the woman, who was his fiancée, but insisted he had done so ‘clothed in Bermudas and a sports shirt.’ One of his roommates was then asked if he had heard the bed creaking. He had not, but Edgar fired Carter anyway. Carter sued, arguing unfair dismissal, and the courts decided in his favor.
Grown men tolerated such nonsense because an agent’s job had great advantages. It was well paid, sometimes exciting, and there was the prospect of retirement after twenty years, a decent pension and a second career based on the FBI background.
There was also safety in numbers. It was an unlucky man who attracted the full blast of Edgar’s wrath or who suffered under the worst of his centurions. In offices far away from the throne, agents found ways to function as well as the system would permit – and at its best it was very good indeed. As in the Army, men put up with the sillier rules, kept their noses clean and got on with the job.
Yet the rules seem to have become increasingly absurd. Field agents, for example, had to spend a minimum number of hours out of the office, even when there was nothing to do. This was obligatory at times when the headquarters’ inspection team was expected. ‘Stay out of the office,’ one official told his men. ‘If you’ve seen all the movies, then go to the library or someplace … The main thing is to stay out of here.’
‘Since we weren’t allowed to drink coffee in the office except before 8:15 A.M.,’ former agent Jack Shaw recalled, ‘agents used to go down to Casey’s Kitchen on Sixty-seventh Street. John Malone, the Assistant Director in Charge, would position himself in the lobby of the office to catch them coming