Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [32]
Edgar defended his fragile self like a nuclear bunker. This was a man, his associates learned the hard way, who never – ever – admitted he was wrong; he could not even admit the possibility. Once, when a Special Agent in Charge felt obliged to point out Edgar was quoting incorrect figures, he sat in silence, red as a beet, until the agent slipped quietly out of the room. Later, Edgar crucified the man who had supplied the statistics.
Edgar’s officials became expert at dealing with this problem – on issues that mattered and many that did not. When Edgar refused to accept solid research showing the Civil Rights movement was not, as he insisted, Communistinspired, an Assistant Director simply admitted humbly that his report had been ‘wrong.’ When Edgar dismissed as ‘baloney’ research confirming the existence of the Mafia, its authors did not argue. When Edgar announced his grief at the killing of an agent who had only been wounded, the man’s colleagues jokingly drew straws for who would finish him off. The Director was never wrong.
Edgar could be manic about control. One veteran agent inadvertently ruined a cordial meeting by reminding his boss of the good old days when the Bureau had been smaller, when ‘you could personally keep track of everything that was going on.’ Edgar exploded. ‘I still know personally everything that goes on!’ he roared. ‘I still personally run this Bureau!’ As he ranted on, he reached for the agent’s file to score out favorable comments he had made moments before.
The corridor to Edgar’s inner sanctum was known as the Bridge of Sighs, and few knew how to handle him better than Sam Noisette, the black receptionist who ushered visitors along it. ‘If it’s snowing and blowing outside,’ he said, ‘and the Director comes in and says “It’s a beautiful sunny day,” it’s a beautiful sunny day. That’s all there is to it.’
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At first glance Edgar’s corps of agents, the linchpin of his reputation, seemed a representative group. It came to include former farmers, airmen, journalists, a baker, professional football players, cowboys, railway workers and miners. Some had military experience, and Edgar was especially keen on former Marines. He had no interest, however, in hiring blacks, Hispanics or women – and he discriminated against Jews.
Three women were serving as agents when Edgar became Director in 1924. Two he fired within a month. He confirmed the appointment of a third, Leonore Houston, following pressure from her Congressman, but she did not last long. FBI records say she ended up in a mental hospital, ‘threatening to shoot Mr Hoover as soon as she was released.’
From then on Edgar brushed aside all talk of recruiting women, claiming that they ‘could never gunfight, and all our agents must know how to do that.’ He remained unmoved, nearly fifty years later, when two feminists sued the FBI, claiming that rejection of their applications violated their constitutional rights. As soon as he died, though, the policy was changed. Today there are nearly 900 female FBI agents, all fully trained in the use of firearms.
To the women he did employ as clerical staff, Edgar behaved like a martinet. He had grown up in a time when women were arrested for smoking in public, so he forbade them to smoke in the office. He refused to let women wear pants to work until 1971. Only then, persuaded by his own secretary that women needed pants to keep warm in the winter, did he capitulate.
Even at that stage, Edgar was still punishing employees for the way they behaved in private. ‘When a girl in the Fingerprint Section got pregnant without being married,’ recalled Miami Agent in Charge Kenneth Whittaker, ‘Hoover was furious. He wanted to know who investigated her before we hired her. Was she promiscuous? When he discovered she was