Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [28]
Once agents were married, Edgar kept a strict eye on them. Heads of FBI field offices, known as Agents in Charge, were under orders to inform him if colleagues were having affairs outside their marriages. Edgar called such men ‘doubleyolkers.’
Generations of agents lived in terror of the inspection teams, known as Goon Squads. Their task was to descend without warning to sniff out the most trivial transgression – an airline schedule left in a desk drawer that should contain only official papers, laundry left in the wrong place, dirty clothes left behind a radiator. Edgar would claim his own office got the same treatment, which was not true.
Minor transgressions usually resulted in a letter of censure, and every agent earned a stack of them. Graver sins meant a transfer within hours. To face a series of transfers was to go on ‘the Bureau Bicycle,’ the device used to ease out an agent who had committed no fireable offense. A man forced to move every couple of months might resign.
The ultimate sanction, dismissal ‘with prejudice,’ spelled long-term disaster. The victim would never again obtain federal employment, and had no reference to help him get another job. For most of Edgar’s tenure, there was no one to appeal to once he had decided to fire someone.
An agent’s life was dangerous, and became more so in the gangster era of the thirties. Until 1934 agents carried guns only in an emergency, and twenty-two of them died on duty while Edgar was Director. In spite of the risks, and in spite of the draconian discipline, men readily served under Edgar. They received better pay and fringe benefits than similar government employees, and developed an esprit de corps that was the envy of other agencies. As for the dangers, Edgar earned the respect of his agents by personally supervising the manhunt that captured the killer of Edwin Shanahan, the first agent to be killed on duty. He saw to it that widows of murdered agents were looked after with a pension, and guaranteed a clerical job if they wanted one.
Edgar could play the compassionate boss or, without warning or justification, the ogre. One man recalls the readiness with which Edgar gave him a transfer to be near his pregnant wife, another the savage reception he got when – offered a promotion – he asked for a month’s delay to look after a newborn child. The promotion was canceled, the agent demoted to the ranks.
Edgar was loved and loathed by his men in equal measure. In the hungry years of the twenties and thirties, though, he made the Bureau a man’s institutional home, very like a branch of the armed services, a shelter from the outside world. Soon instructors were telling recruits, with a straight face, ‘This is the greatest organization ever devised by a human mind.’ They were officially instructed to quote Emerson: ‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man’ – meaning, of course, the Director. The Bureau became an extended family, with Edgar as a sort of nineteenth-century patriarch, praising or punishing as he saw fit.
Meanwhile, Edgar had made the Bureau unique and indispensable. In an era when much of America had progressed little since the days of frontier justice, Edgar brought modernity to law enforcement. He moved into the Director’s office in 1924 hefting several boxes of dog-eared fingerprint cards. These, coupled with 800,000 prints sent to the old Bureau from Leavenworth Penitentiary, were the germ of a technological revolution.
Edgar’s dream was ‘Universal Fingerprinting,’ the notion that the prints of every citizen – the innocent as well as the guilty – should be recorded. That never happened, but he soon became the custodian of those held by police forces across the country, then those of thousands of federal employees and later – in World War