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Edgar’s annual appearance before the House Appropriations Committee was a cakewalk. He would produce an array of wondrous statistics on crime, alleged FBI successes to make the Bureau look good, coupled with dire warnings to justify his latest request for cash. He was never denied a legislative mandate, and his demands were never refused. From 1924 to 1971 there was not a single public hearing on the FBI budget.

Edgar presented himself as the obedient, even obsequious, servant of authority. In theory his boss was the Attorney General. In practice, once Edgar became a public hero in the thirties, that seniority became nominal. No attorney general dared risk a head-on confrontation with the man who had become a national symbol of integrity and continuity.

The eight presidents he served, of course, had the power to fire Edgar. One or two came close and several yearned to do so, but none succeeded. Edgar had a way of making his services seem essential, and presidents who doubted it dared not offend the powerful forces who believed Edgar’s cause was their own.

Edgar’s vast filing system was part of his stock in trade. He was proud of it, just as he was proud of his scientific advances. Presidents and politicians, however, had to live with the threat – real or imagined – that those files could bring disaster down on their heads. From routine reports to scandal-filled dossiers, from detailed analyses to random fragments of information, Edgar’s paper mountain was both bureaucratic dream and democratic nightmare. Even today, few outside the FBI understand Edgar’s record system. While he was alive, no one in the outside world knew anything about it. Edgar’s insistence on secrecy, which he defended in the name of protecting privacy, made sure of that.

Edgar’s record system included files with names like the OBSCENE file, the SEX DEVIATE program, COINTELPRO, OFFICIAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, JUNE MAIL, even a DO NOT FILE system, so named to keep reports on illegal Bureau break-ins out of the central record system.3

The files remained, always, under the ultimate control of just one man. Edgar’s senior men might be brilliant in their specialties or mere time-serving hatchet men. Some were fine men of integrity, others devious creatures capable of great evil. All, though, depended on Edgar in a closed, compartmentalized world that permitted no alliance capable of threatening Edgar’s position.

He created this private fiefdom in such a way that – as long as he lived – he had absolute power over those who served him, and the weapons to fend off those who did not. He had, moreover, created an instrument that could be used to undermine civil liberties.

6

‘I want at this time to say that so long as I am Director of the FBI, appointments will continue to be made on merit, without regard to creed, color, or nationality.’

J. Edgar Hoover, 1943

Those who knew him at close quarters discovered there was something obsessive about Edgar. The little boy from Seward Square, the offspring of a disturbed father and an ambitious mother, was insistent that everything should run precisely as he directed, that everything should fit his concept of perfection.

This showed itself in the little things, like Edgar’s fixation on tidiness. At home, servants would report, there was hell to pay if a bedspread was even slightly askew, a cushion out of place, an undisciplined leaf neglected on the front path. Edgar’s first act on reaching the office each morning, his secretary recalled, was to give his shoes a flick with a duster – in case they had lost their sheen during the ride in the car to work.

At headquarters, which Edgar had everyone call the Seat of Government, an official once found himself in hot water because his office window shade was – in Edgar’s opinion – pulled down too far. He said it gave the building ‘a messy look from the outside.’

Like Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, Edgar worried constantly about germs.