Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [30]
Crime Records had multiple functions. One was to send the public messages that had nothing to do with law enforcement – and everything to do with what Edgar wished to preach. This language appealed to the emotions, especially that of fear, and denounced ‘moral deterioration,’ ‘apathy that is really a sickness,’ ‘disrespectful young people,’ ‘the depraved deeds of teenage thugs,’ ‘moral decay,’ ‘anarchist elements,’ ‘jackals of the news media,’ ‘the menace to the security of our country,’ ‘a new specter haunting the Western World’ – all those horrors in a single speech. The implication was that only Edgar and his FBI stood between America and disaster.
Edgar developed an insidious language, known to some as ‘Bureauspeak,’ for use in sensitive communications. This was used to smear people Edgar perceived as political enemies. The paragraph that follows concludes an interagency memo about the ‘alleged interracial sexual indiscretions’ of a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department:
These allegations were not made directly to representatives of the FBI but were received through a third person. Thus the FBI is not in any position to comment upon the reliability of the source; however, the source has furnished some other information, some of which is of a questionable nature, which leaves considerable doubt as to the credibility of the source.
In this one paragraph of Bureauspeak, Edgar managed to throw doubt on his source, thus protecting the Bureau, while still besmirching the character of his target. The memo, like thousands of others, had absolutely nothing to do with law enforcement.
Such quibbles later became academic. Edgar had been vastly strengthened politically when, on the eve of World War II, President Roosevelt handed him the new mission of protecting national security. Thanks to a mandate intended mainly to ensure effective investigation of Fascists, Edgar was again poised to tackle his enemy of preference, the ‘radicals.’
With Crime Records providing a torrent of propaganda, with a vastly expanded FBI employing more than 3,000 agents by 1946 and with presidential sanction to use police state tools such as wiretapping, the way was clear for a new open season on Reds. Thousands of American citizens were persecuted by the FBI, directly or indirectly, while Edgar fostered the notion that the Communists were somehow responsible for all manner of American social problems – from changing sexual standards to juvenile delinquency.
Edgar’s protégé Joseph McCarthy would make similar noises and succumb to his own demagoguery. Edgar survived because he was careful never to take center stage, and because he sustained the illusion of being ‘above politics,’ an unimpeachable source for the facts the nation needed to know.
He had long since secured the unquestioning loyalty of a powerful constituency that included the police, federal and state prosecutors, the myriad agencies that now relied on the FBI to perform security clearances, and patriotic organizations like the American Legion. The Legion, which Edgar had systematically wooed and penetrated, virtually deified him.
A series of polls showed that, by the late forties, a majority of the population had come to believe Edgar and the Bureau could do no wrong. Criticism was virtually nonexistent until the mid-sixties, and, when there was any, Edgar found ways to stamp it out. Impertinent journalists were frightened into silence or smeared.
By the end of the war, largely thanks to Crime Records, Edgar also had the Congress in his thrall. The Bureau made contact with and kept files on every single politician who made it to Capitol Hill. Men in key positions were courted assiduously, and most were happy for a chance to share Edgar’s limelight.