Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [26]
The new Director did something else that pleased Stone, who had been an outspoken critic of Bureau outrages during the Red scare. He found that Edgar the Red-hunter had suddenly become Edgar the moderate. Within ten days of his appointment, he was assuring a Senate committee that the Bureau would no longer investigate citizens because of their political opinions.
At Stone’s request, Edgar met with the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger Baldwin. Baldwin had accused the Bureau of operating ‘a secret police system,’ had himself seen the telephone tapping equipment that Edgar denied existed, had seen Bureau plans to set up a phony union local and pack it with government informants. Now, though, after Edgar’s assurances about a ‘new era,’ Baldwin wrote to Stone saying he had been ‘wrong about Mr Hoover’s attitude.’
After Edgar’s death, however, when Baldwin was ninety-three, he was able to see old Bureau files on the ACLU. These showed that, even during the Stone regime, Edgar continued to receive reports on ACLU meetings – complete with purloined minutes and names of contributors – from an informer in place. The Bureau used police intelligence to spy on the group, and – as late as 1977 – was still refusing to say whether such operations had ceased.
Edgar tried to appoint his best friend, the right-wing extremist George Ruch, as his most senior aide. The Attorney General vetoed that plan following a public outcry, but confirmed Edgar’s permanent appointment as Director of the Bureau of Investigation. The news was announced on December 22, 1924, ten days before Edgar’s thirtieth birthday. (Federal was not added to the name ‘Bureau of Investigation’ until 1935. Only then did it become the FBI.) He would hold the post for forty-eight years, a quarter of the time the United States had existed as a nation.
For the rest of both their lives, Edgar fawned upon Stone and Herbert Hoover, the men most responsible for his promotion. Both received regular letters of adulation, and found FBI agents waiting to welcome them on their travels. Edgar jumped to do confidential research for Hoover, or fix a summer job for Stone’s chauffeur – a stream of little favors in return for the break they had given him.
Edgar had escaped from the rubble of the old Bureau. Now, from a small power base, he began to build an empire. Edgar was to create one of the most powerful organizations in the United States, in some troubling ways the most powerful of all. He would achieve it thanks to a combination of rapid social change, political shifts and a good deal of luck. He brought to the task his own brilliance as an organizer, a shrewd ability to read the national mood and a capacity for self-advertisement unparalleled in public life.
Edgar came to office at precisely the right moment. After the chaos of the Harding presidency, America was putting its faith in efficient administrators, education and the wonders of technology. The new Director responded to all three requirements.
Edgar fired the deadwood along with the crooked agents, and closed more than twenty field offices. Within five years, far from expanding, he would cut the number of agents to 339, a quarter less than when he had taken over. New recruits had to be between twenty-five and thirty-five, and have a background in law or accountancy.2
A rookie agent arrived on the job with a letter of appointment from Edgar, a salary of $2,700 a year plus travel allowance, and an obligation to go anywhere in the United States at any time. He presented himself for duty dressed in a suit, white shirt and conservative tie, topped off with a plain straw hat. He signed an oath of office, in the early days a terse statement promising to defend the Constitution ‘against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ Later, newcomers would take an extraordinary pledge, issued over Edgar’s own signature. It read like a catechism, with Masonic overtones:
Humbly recognizing