Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [18]
In 1918 Edgar worked on a drive to register all German women in the United States. That June, when The Washington Post reported that the work was going slowly, he rushed off a memo denying it. He would detest the Post and The New York Times all his life, would specifically exclude them from his daily reading, claiming that they ‘distort and slant the news.’ ‘When they throw brickbats at the FBI,’ he was to say, ‘I’m happy – brickbats from some people are like bouquets.’
Edgar worked seven days a week in 1918, often into the night, and his boss took note. ‘Hoover,’ O’Brian observed then, ‘is a conscientious and honest fellow.’ Edgar received three pay increases in his first year at Justice, doubling his starting salary. Yet there was something odd about all this. Why had this twenty-three-year-old not gone to war?
All American males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty were required to register for military service within weeks of the declaration of war. As the government raised an army for the war in Europe, the first officers’ training camp opened in Washington. Three million men would be drafted before it was over. One hundred and fifty thousand of them would die. There was a surge of righteous anger against young men who avoided the draft. In one roundup alone, 60,000 men were picked up in New York City, 27,000 in Chicago.
Edgar was a perfect draftee: a fit man in his early twenties, with years of officer training behind him at a school with strong links to West Point. Many of his former classmates did march off to the training camps, and some were sent to the trenches in France, but not Edgar.
He would later make much of his readiness to serve his country – once the hell of World War I was over. In 1922 he would obtain a commission as Major in the U.S. Army Officers’ Reserve. In World War II, by which time he would be in his late forties, he would hold the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Military Intelligence Reserve – and resign only at the insistence of the Secretary for War, who said he could best serve his country as Director of the FBI.
Two decades later, Edgar would tell a newspaper that he stayed out of uniform in World War I for the same reason – because his ‘superiors persuaded him that he could perform a more valuable service in espionage work.’ Yet his voluminous staff file, filled with the details of the World War II period, is silent on World War I.
‘Espionage work’ is an inflated way to characterize Edgar’s pen-pushing pursuit of aliens. His name, moreover, does not appear on the register of 102 Department of Justice employees who were given occupational exemption from military service. Sons who could prove they were the family breadwinner were eligible for exemption, but it is not known whether Edgar made such a claim.
Had he wanted to serve, as did so many of his classmates, he would have done so. The youth who enthused about the Cadet Corps more than anyone required, who as a grown man would cultivate military men as friends and contacts, who would one day persecute Vietnam War draft resisters, who would delight in combat metaphors in future speeches, could have been expected to rush to the recruiting office. Yet he flinched from doing so.
Edgar, the man whose bachelor status was to spark endless gossip, considered marriage in the closing months of the war. The episode proved a devastating emotional setback, one that may have played a key role in triggering his sexual ambivalence.
The account came from Helen Gandy, the woman who served as Edgar’s confidential secretary for fifty-three years. In conversations before her death in 1988, the usually tightlipped Gandy revealed a sad story of frustrated courtship. When he was twenty-four, said the former secretary, Edgar saw a good deal of a young woman named Alice.