Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [25]
In fact, home life was strained. Most nights, Edgar would retreat upstairs as soon as he got home. Behind his bedroom door, he worked into the night on official papers. Now that he was Assistant Director he sometimes had to make speeches, and the prospect terrified him. From her room next door, his niece Margaret often heard him rehearsing. For some time, she said, he ‘had a problem with stuttering.’
A congressman, watching Edgar at work in pursuit of Communists, had thought him a ‘slender bundle of highcharged electric wire.’ He was smoking cigarettes now, a Turkish brand called Fatima, and too many of them. By 1924, still pasty and underweight, he was complaining of stomach problems.
At twenty-nine, Edgar was lonely and under stress. But he was about to make a major step forward in his career, an achievement that would make his mother very happy indeed.
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‘I certainly do not want to indicate that Hoover did not have some unusual ability in structuring an organization designed to perpetuate a sort of dictatorial control of both the FBI and, so far as he could manage it, the minds and aspirations of American citizens: but so did Adolf Hitler.’
Arthur Murtagh, former FBI Agent
On Mother’s Day 1924, Annie Hoover presented her son with a star sapphire ring studded with diamonds, one that he was to wear every day for the rest of his life. The previous day, May 10, a date that future agents would be required to memorize, Edgar had been promoted to head the Bureau of Investigation.
The way Edgar told it – and he told it often – he was called in that Saturday by Harlan Stone, the new Attorney General picked to clean up the Justice Department. Stone had started by firing William Burns, and Edgar half-expected to be fired, too. Instead Stone growled, ‘Young man, I want you to be Acting Director.’
Edgar offered this account only when Stone had been dead for years. He left out a less glamorous part of the story. Stone had taken over the Department knowing nobody, with no idea whom to trust. He therefore began consulting cabinet colleagues, including Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce.’1
Edgar had long been in touch with his namesake’s personal staff. He was especially close to Hoover’s closest aide, Lawrence Richey, a former Bureau agent who knew Edgar affectionately as ‘J. E.’ Told the Attorney General was casting around for a new Bureau chief, Richey had an easy answer. ‘Why the hell should they look around,’ he said, ‘when they have got one of the brightest young attorneys on the job at the present time?’ It was Edgar’s name that went to Stone.
Edgar’s appointment was not reported in the press, and Stone made it clear the job was not yet permanent. ‘I want just the right man,’ he said. ‘Until I find that man, I intend personally to supervise the Bureau.’ The Attorney General’s priority, after the abuses of the Daugherty period, was to restore confidence. Edgar’s was to hang on to his job at a dangerous time, and convince Stone he had made the right choice.
In the old Bureau there was an office known as the ‘Buzzard’s Roost,’ a room – according to an article generated by Edgar – ‘where the loafers congregated to swap dirty stories and help polish off the bottle which every returning agent was expected to furnish.’ Edgar closed it down and fired numerous agents. ‘Hoover,’ it was reported, ‘was as repulsed by the immorality of the roost as by the time it wasted.’
Of all his achievements, Edgar’s cleanup of the agent corps was the one of enduring worth. Since the start of his tenure, and to the present day, corruption among FBI agents has been virtually unheard of – a rare achievement