Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [242]
The golden name on FBI headquarters became more tarnished, figuratively certainly, with every passing year. ‘Why does society continue to honor someone like Hoover?’ asked Professor Lief. ‘Of course, he thrived in an era when anti-Communism was the unifying theme in the West. Society seems always to need its devils, and Communism was the Devil in this century – though in different circumstances it could have been the Jew or some other “demon.” Hoover seized above all on anti-Communism, so I guess he was honored because he was perceived to be fighting the Devil.
‘American society has a strangely polarized attitude toward its heroes. On the one hand people love to discover the idol has clay feet, to find the flaw in the famous man. On the other hand, thousands and thousands of people seem to have a need to identify with a hero, to increase their own sense of strength by believing in someone who presents himself as wiser or more powerful than themselves. And they are reluctant to take the hero off his pedestal, even when they discover that he was not what he seemed. This is a curious contradiction in our society, and sometimes a dangerous one.’
‘You affect the future,’ Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen observed, ‘by what you do with the past, how you interpret it. All over the world, when regimes change, so do names. Danzig becomes Gdansk. The Moldau becomes Vltava. Images of Lenin come down all over Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union Stalingrad becomes Volgograd. These are all political statements. They say, “There’s a new way of doing things.” But an FBI agent walking into that building looks up and sees J. Edgar Hoover’s name. What’s the lesson to him – that efficiency and bureaucratic success condone abuse of office?’
That Edgar created an efficient law enforcement bureau should not have been enough to secure him a position as an American hero for half a century. Someone else, more balanced and with more respect for the rights of citizens, could have set up the FBI. To take Edgar at face value was as perilous as tolerating a dictator simply because he ‘makes the trains run on time.’
When Edgar was alive, a perceptive writer noted that he had entered ‘the realm of the untouchables, a remote roseate country of mind, mood and attitude, beyond the harsh ridges of reality.’ Now that it is clear what the harsh realities were, it is not enough to complain that Edgar fooled America. The survival of a J. Edgar Hoover for so many years, and in such an atmosphere of phony adulation, could have occurred only in a society led by men who condoned his secret abuses and public hypocrisies, while maintaining otherwise. Edgar had many accomplices, including Presidents – Democrats and Republicans alike – who went along with his excesses because it suited their political purposes.
If there is a moral here, it is perhaps the one drawn by future Vice President Walter Mondale while taking part in a Senate probe of the CIA and FBI in 1975. ‘The lesson we learn from this history,’ he said, ‘is that we cannot keep our liberty secure by relying alone on the good faith of men with great power.’
AUTHOR’S NOTES
See List of Abbreviations on pages 575–7.
Chapter 1
1. White House tape transcripts, Oct. 8, 25, 1971.
Chapter 2
1. As an alert reader of the hardback edition of this book pointed out, January 1, 1895 was in fact a Tuesday. The mistake is in Hoover’s original note, in HC.
2. Sullivan served with the FBI for thirty years, from 1941 to 1971, by which time he had risen to the number three post in the Bureau – Assistant to the Director. Because he left the FBI after a quarrel with Hoover, described in detail in a later chapter, it has been suggested that his criticisms may have been more sour grapes than hard fact. Yet conversations with the co-author of Sullivan’s book, former NBC journalist Bill Brown, and analysis of his tape-recorded conversations