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By Root 914 0

to the tense house dominated by his father’s mental illness, then – after Dickerson Sr.’s death – to life alone with Annie. As time passed, even that relationship soured. The strain showed in petty things. Edgar’s niece Margaret, who lived with the Hoovers in the twenties, recalled the grown Edgar behaving like a spoiled child. ‘He was quite a tyrant about food … His breakfast – and this goes back to Nanny running the house for him, although they had a cook – was a full-scale operation … His favorite breakfast was a poached egg on toast, and if that egg was broken, he wouldn’t eat it. It went back to the kitchen and another egg was prepared …’ Edgar would eat one bite of the second egg, Margaret said, then give it to the dog.

‘Nanny,’ recalled Margaret’s sister Anna, ‘always liked to leave the shades down all through the back and front parlors, so it was a very cool dark atmosphere when J.E. came home in the evening. Then up went the shades. There was no argument about it. He simply would go around and raise the shades and go up to his room. It was a kind of battle of wits on the part of two very intelligent people … You had two very strong personalities here … It was a case of dominating the situation. She ran a beautiful home for him, but he provided the wherewithal to run it beautifully. And he was very good to her. He’d give her gifts, jewelry, some very nice jewelry …’

For Edgar’s brother, Dickerson, who was also helping out with the bills, it was galling to see Edgar bringing extravagant presents home to Annie. Dickerson, now a senior official at the Commerce Department, was jokingly called ‘the General’ in the family. Edgar, the younger man, remained ‘the Major.’ ‘And how is the attorney tonight?’ Dickerson would inquire mockingly when Edgar appeared. Edgar, increasingly conscious of his status, was not amused.

At work at the Justice Department, Edgar was living up to his mother’s expectations and more. In November 1918, two months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, he had been elevated to the grade of Special Attorney, with a salary of $2,000 a year – as much as his father had earned at sixty.

Though still a lowly unknown, Edgar was already working on his image – by altering the way he styled himself. Until now he had initialed documents ‘JEH’ or signed himself ‘J. E. Hoover,’ with a flourish to the loop of the ‘J.’. That, apparently, would no longer do. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ the name that was to become part of the American lexicon, was about to be born.

Edgar would claim he first changed his signature in 1933, after being refused credit at a clothing store because another John E. Hoover had failed to pay his bills. Like so much of the past according to Edgar, this was not true. It was on December 30, 1918, two days before his birthday, that the young man’s pen hovered over an otherwise dull memorandum for John Lord O’Brian. He signed it, with a truly enormous flourish, ‘J. Edgar Hoover.’

Perhaps, just weeks after his humiliation at the hands of Alice, Edgar simply needed to give his ego a boost. The man who headed the Bureau of Investigation at the time, and who had advanced Edgar’s career, styled himself A. Bruce Bielaski. Looking back, waspish Justice Department veterans concluded that Edgar – already imagining himself at the top of the bureaucratic pecking order – was aping Bielaski.

O’Brian, who also propelled Edgar on his path to power, spoke cautiously about him while he was alive. He survived, however, to the great age of ninety-eight, outliving Edgar by a few months. Before his own death, O’Brian was asked about his role in furthering the career of the youth who became J. Edgar Hoover.

‘This,’ the old man admitted, ‘is something I prefer to whisper in dark corners. It is one of the sins for which I have to atone.’

4

‘I always worry when I see a nation feel that it is coming to greatness through the activities of its policemen.’

Cyrus Eaton, industrialist and critic of J. Edgar Hoover

The elevation of Edgar came thanks to an opportunistic Attorney General and his anti-Communist witch-hunt.