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‘My mother,’ said Edgar’s niece Dorothy, ‘used to say Uncle Edgar wasn’t very nice to his father when he was ill. He was ashamed of him. He couldn’t tolerate the fact that Granddaddy had mental illness. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect.’

Dorothy, a retired teacher with wide experience of life’s trials, said she thought perhaps ‘the whole Hoover clan were a little off in the head.’ Her memories suggest the Hoover family’s emotional life was seriously fractured. Dickerson, Jr., was distant, and his sister Lillian was ‘cold, very cold.’ The young Edgar, who used to come to Dorothy’s home to play croquet, at first seemed ‘quite fun to be around.’ Then he changed, becoming a remote figure ‘inclined to push us all away.’

‘I sometimes have thought,’ said Edgar’s niece Margaret, ‘that he really – I don’t know how to put it – had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people.’

Half a century later, FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan would voice the same opinion. Edgar, he thought, ‘didn’t have affection for one single solitary human being around him …’

‘I didn’t have any honor or love for him as an uncle,’ said Dorothy Davy. ‘Whatever he did for the country, he was no use as a relative.’ Other family members confirmed – often nervously, as though Edgar were still alive to rebuke them – that he bothered little with family ties. When his widowed sister was struck down by Parkinson’s disease, Edgar did little to help. When she died, his appearance at the funeral was so brief as to be insulting.

The only constant family connection for Edgar, far into the prime of his life, would be his mother, Annie. Once they were free of Edgar’s father, the burden they had both resented, they became inseparable. Edgar lived at home with his mother until he was a middle-aged man. Only when she died, in 1938, would he leave the house on Seward Square. And when he did find a home of his own, he would live there alone.

3

‘If you work for a man, in heaven’s name work for him! If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him – speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution he represents.’

Elbert Hubbard quotation, displayed on Edgar’s orders in FBI field offices

As Edgar grew to manhood, he closed the dossier on himself that he had kept since childhood. There are no more diaries, and few intimate letters, to help chart his six decades of adult life. In accordance with his wishes, his secretary destroyed his private correspondence – and almost certainly much else besides – after his death.

Enough evidence survives, however, to expose the hidden Edgar. The man who projected himself to the public as a stern moral figure, full of integrity, was a walking myth. It was so carefully crafted that he perhaps came to believe much of it himself, but it was a myth nonetheless.

What Edgar said of his past, especially of events long ago, must always be treated with caution. ‘He was a master con man,’ his aide William Sullivan was to say, ‘one of the greatest con men the country has ever produced, and that takes intelligence of a certain kind, an astuteness, a shrewdness.’

In 1913, the year he turned eighteen, Edgar graduated from high school, and decided to study law.

‘I don’t really know why I chose law,’ Edgar would say for public consumption. ‘You come to a crossroads, and you’ve got to go one way or the other.’ The other road beckoning, he claimed, was the Church. In the months before he left school, he said, he was preoccupied with the idea of becoming a minister.

FBI propaganda solemnly repeated this story, portraying a youth who had struggled to choose between one path of good, the Church, and another, the Law. According to this version, Edgar the FBI Director remained a regular churchgoer, a boss who kept a well-thumbed Bible on his desk, who took his religion very seriously indeed.

Some of this was simply untrue, some of it the truth stretched beyond recognition. Relatives recalled no family