Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [27]
One of the new recruits, Edward J. Armbruster, served from 1926 to 1977 as an expert on bank fraud. He was typical of the new breed of agent, a teetotaler and nonsmoker, a Mason and Sunday school teacher, who brought seven of his pupils into the FBI, and lived all his life in the Sears and Roebuck prefabricated house bought the year Edgar became Director. Edgar thought him a paragon, and allowed him to work long past retirement age.
An agent of a later generation, Norman Ollestad, drew this portrait of a veteran colleague. ‘He surrounded himself with an armor of shibboleths – rings, badges and jeweled pins. He was all battened down. A lion’s head clasp kept his tie from going awry, cuff links tightened down his white sleeves. He wore a college ring on his right hand to set him apart from the uneducated, and a Masonic ring on the same hand that protected him spiritually. On the third finger of his left hand he wore a wedding band as a shield against any designing women he might interview.’
Leon Turrou, a celebrated first-generation recruit, offered a telling definition of the sort of man Edgar wanted. ‘He is part and parcel of the great middle class. He will always eat well and dress well, but he will never get that sleek Packard or that sumptuous house … He is a man who for better or worse is married to his job twenty-four hours a day. He belongs to the Bureau body and soul, and is simply on loan to his family and friends. He learns to revaluate his life in terms of his work, divorcing himself from the ordinary pleasures of ordinary mortals and often forgetting how to relax. The motto of his life is “For God, for country, and for J. Edgar Hoover.”’
Under their breath, agents would come to call Edgar ‘Kid Napoleon.’ He was dictatorial and diminutive in stature – estimates of his height vary between 5’7” and 5’10”, the higher figure being the one he had entered in his personnel record. Edgar compensated for his lack of height, generations of colleagues noted, with artful devices. The Director sat on a swivel chair, screwed up to the maximum height so that he looked down at visitors, who were ushered to a low couch. His chair and desk, in turn, sat on a slight platform. ‘He used to accuse me of wearing built-up shoes so I would be as tall as he was,’ said Miami agent Leo McClairen. ‘That was funny, because I stand six foot two.’ Edgar, however, did have his shoes custom-built, by a personal shoemaker.
Edgar was a hard taskmaster. During Prohibition, which coincided with his first decade in office, he fired agents caught drinking – even off duty. In 1940, long after Prohibition, an agent had his pay cut just for being in the company of a colleague who got drunk in a nightclub. As late as 1960, rookie agents, caught with a half-bottle of Cutty Sark, were threatened with dismissal.
Unmarried agents were expected to live like monks. Once, when Edgar learned that an agent had been caught having sex with a woman in the Knoxville, Tennessee, office, he did not just fire the offending couple. He dispersed almost all the Knoxville staff around the country.
Though Edgar insisted that he had no wish to keep his men unmarried, he tried in the early days to obstruct marriages that failed to please him. At best, prospective wives were given the Bureau once-over. At worst, Edgar used covert means to break up marriages of which he did not approve. One agent’s wife received anonymous letters claiming, falsely, that her husband was unfaithful.
In 1959 Erwin Piper,