Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [120]
Word sometimes reached the agents at Casey’s that ‘Cementhead’ Malone, one of Edgar’s closest associates, was on his way to flush them out. ‘Seventeen or eighteen guys would abandon their breakfasts and clear out through the fire escape, rushing pell-mell, brushing pedestrians aside.’
For the agent and his family packed off to the other end of the nation for some trivial transgression, there was nothing to laugh about. ‘The worst thing,’ said a former Agent in Charge who suffered such punishment, ‘is what happens to you in the eyes of your family. “You must have done something wrong or Mr Hoover wouldn’t have demoted you,” they say. You can’t ever explain it, even in your own family. You lose faith in yourself. The things that used to be true aren’t true anymore. I don’t think Mr Hoover really understood this phase of his disciplinary actions, because he never had a family – wife and kids, I mean.’
The massive file on Agent Nelson Gibbons, who served from 1954 to 1962, is a catalogue of calculated cruelty. Gibbons came to the FBI after war service in the Marines and a spell on the police force. He proved an outstanding agent, attracting six commendations and for years no censures at all – a state of grace achieved by few. He was brave in action against armed criminals and won praise from Edgar for unmasking a Soviet spy. Gibbons became a Resident Agent, running a small FBI office on his own, at the age of thirty-three.
His troubles began only in 1958, when – at sixty-three – Edgar began worrying excessively about his health. There was nothing significantly wrong, but, not least judging from the bewildering number of doctors he consulted, he had become something of a hypochondriac. That year Edgar read an insurance company prospectus that listed ideal weights in proportion to height. It told him he was overweight, and, according to the FBI press office, he went on a diet that brought his weight down from 203 pounds to 170.
What the Director did for his health, agents were expected to do, too. Agents in Charge were charged with monitoring the weight of every man in the Bureau. As a health precaution, properly administered, the idea had merit. As an iron rule, rigidly enforced under pain of punishment, it was a disaster.
It was certainly that for Agent Gibbons, a thickset fellow, nearly six feet tall, who usually weighed more than 190 pounds. He weighed in at 195 when Edgar’s checks started, and the examiner recommended he lose seven pounds. Gibbons tried hard to conform, even though his own doctor thought his weight reasonable given his size. The agent duly lost seven pounds, but then his weight began straying up into the low 190s again. That was not good enough for headquarters.
In 1960, after being turned down for promotion because of the weight issue, Gibbons made a declaration of independence. He said he was happy with his weight at 190 and asked to see Edgar – a right theoretically extended to all agents. Edgar refused, ordering Gibbons to be transferred to Detroit and weighed every thirty days.
Gibbons was now on the Bureau ‘bicycle.’ Soon he was moved again, to Mobile, Alabama, then – two months later – to Oklahoma City. There he was twice censured and suspended without pay. Yet senior officials reported he had ‘no surplus fat,’ and he continued to work out at the YMCA. For all the abuse, he said he wanted to go on working for ‘the best organization in the world.’
Unimpressed, Edgar condemned Gibbons for not being a ‘team worker’ and transferred him again – to Butte, Montana. Then again, to Anchorage, Alaska, where petty punishment continued. At last, after a fatuous interrogation as to whether and how often he might have gotten drunk while in the Marines, long before he joined the FBI, Gibbons cracked. He quit his post and cabled Edgar, saying he felt ‘mentally unable’ to continue.
Though Gibbons