Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [121]
Nelson Gibbons was lucky. In New York, while on a crash diet to meet Edgar’s weight standards, Agent George Blue collapsed and died at his desk.
The experience of Jack Shaw and his wife May, ten years later, was another Orwellian nightmare. Agent Shaw, a law graduate and former Marine captain, had served with distinction since 1963. He was thirty-seven years old and the father of four children under the age of ten when he enrolled for master’s degree classes at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a prestigious course for law enforcement personnel. Once qualified, Shaw hoped, he would go on to become an instructor at the FBI Academy.
When his sociology professor made some harsh criticism of the FBI, Shaw jumped to defend it. Later, however, he decided to prepare a detailed critique of the organization’s good and bad points. A bad point, he wrote, was that the Bureau had become ossified. ‘We are not simply rooted in tradition,’ he wrote, ‘we’re stuck in it up to our eyeballs. And it all revolves around one key figure, the life and exploits of J. Edgar Hoover.’
Though this was hardly the stuff of revolution, Shaw was apprehensive. ‘I feel certain,’ he wrote his professor, ‘that all of what I have said will be retained by you in complete confidence. In the Bureau’s eyes, of course, however academically intended, my statements would constitute a prima facie case of heresy. I would prefer not to be martyred this calendar year.’
Martyred he was, because of his own openness. Shaw made the mistake of giving the draft of the letter to a trusted FBI secretary to type. She in turn gave it to a colleague, and the private communication was private no more. The agent was soon being interrogated by Assistant Director Malone.
‘It was clear from the start that my head was on the platter,’ Shaw recalled. ‘The inquisition went on and on, from 4:00 P.M. till about 9:00. I tried to tell Malone this hadn’t been some covert, clandestine operation. No harm had been done. I hadn’t even mailed the critique to my professor yet.’
Reason, however, played no further part in relations between Shaw and the FBI. He was suspended ‘for possible insubordination and criticism of the Bureau’ and told to hand in his badge and gun and go home. There he heard his sentence: one month’s suspension without pay, six months’ probation and a transfer to Butte, Montana, for failing to report his professor’s original criticism of the FBI.
An FBI official called the president of John Jay College, Dr Donald Riddle, saying that no FBI students would attend the school while Shaw’s professor remained on the faculty. The professor stayed, so the FBI men departed, as did others – studying at American University, in Washington, D.C.
Jack Shaw, meanwhile, sat at home worrying about his future and about his wife, who was sick. In her condition a move to Montana was out of the question, so Shaw resigned. Edgar accepted the resignation ‘with prejudice,’ a blot on Shaw’s record that would make it virtually impossible for him to get work with another federal agency or a major company. A star FBI agent had been destroyed over a private letter no one had yet read, which had never even been sent.
Within months of Shaw’s resignation, his wife’s illness was diagnosed as terminal cancer. At first, as she lay desperately sick in the hospital, her husband’s FBI colleagues rallied around. Two agents offered to give blood for her transfusions, then shamefacedly retracted. They had been told not to associate with Shaw, because he was ‘in touch with enemies of the Bureau.’
The Bureau even used false pretenses to spy on Shaw as he sat in the hospital with his dying wife. The wife of another agent, a nurse, showed up in uniform in two different hospitals and chatted with Shaw as if out of genuine sympathy.