Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [23]
‘Hoover lies when he denies responsibility for the Red Raids,’ Frankfurter told his law clerk Joseph Rauh. ‘He was in it – up to his ass.’1
Edgar claimed he had only been carrying out policy as instructed by others. This was a man, John Lord O’Brian would recall, ‘willing to carry out orders at any time.’ Judge Anderson, who presided at the deportation hearings, had no time for such officials. ‘Talk about Americanization!’ he snorted. ‘It is the business of every American citizen who knows anything about Americanism to resign if given such instructions.’
Neither Edgar nor Attorney General Palmer and the rest of his staff suffered the disgrace that should have resulted from the Red Raids. Congressional inquiries dragged on for so long – until a new Attorney General had been appointed under a new President – that everyone responsible escaped retribution.
Edgar had learned lessons he would not forget. For one thing, he now knew that state oppression could work in the United States. In spite of the furor, American Communists had suffered a crippling reversal. Party membership, estimated at about 80,000 before the raids, dwindled to 6,000 by late 1920.
Edgar also discovered it was possible to spy on people and hunt them down – not because of crimes but because of their political beliefs. To avoid being caught in the act, Edgar now knew, it was vital to ensure that – technically, at least – ‘due process’ was always observed. He also learned that a way had to be found to keep the investigator’s greatest treasure, his secret files, out of the public eye. Too many embarrassing documents came to light during the Red Raid hearings. Later, as FBI Director, Edgar would perfect a file system that, except on rare occasions, proved inaccessible to outsiders. Documents would be released on occasion, but only when it served Edgar’s purpose.
He was also learning about politics and the perils of allegiance to any one man. In June 1920, when Attorney General Palmer went to fight for the presidential nomination at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Edgar went along. ‘At the time,’ political veterans recalled, ‘he saw his future tied to Palmer’s political fortunes. He served above and beyond the call of duty, and mobilized all his official contacts to serve Palmer’s cause.’
Later, after Palmer had failed to get the nomination and the Democrats had been defeated, a Senate probe discovered that Edgar and three other officials had traveled to San Francisco at taxpayers’ expense. Edgar claimed he had been on a routine investigation of radicals.
The probe could have cost Edgar his job, and he henceforth posed as a man above politics. He never joined a political party and – as a resident of Washington, D.C. – never voted.2 ‘I don’t like labels and I am not political,’ he liked to say in public.
This was not true. Edgar was a staunch right-wing supporter of the Republican Party from 1921 until the end of his life. ‘My associations have been with the Republican interests,’ he told a former colleague, Denis Dickason, in a private letter after Herbert Hoover’s victory in 1929. ‘The results of the last election are particularly gratifying to me …’
Few of those Edgar called friends were Democrats, and close associates never doubted his allegiance. ‘Hoover was a Republican from beginning to end,’ said veteran Justice Department official Patricia Collins.
When it suited him, however, Edgar would conceal this. ‘He could be all things to all people,’ said William Sullivan. ‘If a liberal came in, the liberal would leave thinking, “My God, Hoover’s a liberal.” If a John Bircher came in an hour later, he’d go out saying, “I’m convinced Hoover’s a member of the John Birch