Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [239]
It was when Clyde declined the Director’s job that Nixon decided on L. Patrick Gray as a stopgap, an uncontroversial Acting Director for election year. Gray was a former Navy man whose career watchword, unkind critics say, had been ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ For a long time now, the ‘sir’ in question had been Nixon himself – and the President liked that.
Edgar had run his fiefdom as though he would live forever, and it remained in disarray for years, not least because of the chaos that followed Watergate. Gradually, however, first under Gray, then under FBI veteran and former police chief Clarence Kelley and – above all – during the nine-year directorship of William Webster, the Bureau entered the modern world. Women were admitted as agents, and staff across the country were released from the sillier of Edgar’s rules and regulations. Men no longer lived in constant fear of irrational punishment. The aging leaders Edgar had gathered around him were gradually forced out or left of their own accord. And, it is believed, the worst abuses of FBI power – against the Congress and ordinary citizens – have since been exposed and eradicated.
‘J. Edgar Hoover’s greatness,’ his old adjutant Louis Nichols wrote confidently in late 1972, ‘will grow with the passage of time.’ To fulfill that hope, loyalists busied themselves trying to perpetuate Edgar’s memory. They pressed Congress for a bill to create commemorative medals, commissioned portraits and sculptures. Edgar’s FBI badge – No. 1 – was presented to the Smithsonian Institution. His gun, a .32 Colt Pocket Positive, was solemnly preserved. FBI stalwarts, members of the old guard, made an annual pilgrimage to the cemetery. Their numbers soon dwindled, however, and Edgar’s grave was often seen to be untended, overrun by vines and weeds.2
Even four decades after his death, however, the name J. Edgar Hoover can still stir controversy. There are Americans who either yearn for the certainties he seemed to embody, or wonder how it was that his abuses were tolerated for so long. To understand the phenomenon better, we may ask what drove Edgar, what led him to the narrow world of the mind he came to inhabit – the world in which, with some success, he sought to confine his countrymen as well.
The vast library Edgar left behind, which was transferred to the FBI National Academy, offers few answers – just the predictable mountain of books on Communism, a stack of books on religion and health and some whodunits. There is no evidence that Edgar was steeped in any particular philosophy, nor that his life was the execution of any conscious plan.
Leading psychologists and psychiatrists, however, asked to study the information gathered for this book, all recognize a distinct pattern in Edgar’s makeup, one that began forming in childhood and led to serious mental disorder in the grown man.3 Separated by twelve years from his youngest sibling, conceived when his parents were mourning the death of his infant sister Sadie, Edgar had been rather more than the apple of his mother’s eye.
Annie Hoover saw herself as ‘a lady,’ with pretensions to a certain social status. If she ever nursed hopes that her husband would improve himself, rise above his origins, they were gone by the time Edgar was born. They vanished altogether when Dickerson was overwhelmed by serious mental illness. Instead, Annie had great expectations of Edgar, too great perhaps for his emotional well-being.
Edgar missed a vital stage of normal childhood development: the end of total dependence on the mother, a growing bond to a supportive father and the discovery of himself as an independent personality. Rather than working out a set of moral values for himself, he had little more to work with than the unreasoned rules of behavior imposed in childhood. Pushed by his forceful mother, he came to believe that only greater achieving could make him ‘good.