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Edgar’s attitude filtered down to the ranks and generated crude contempt. Female employees were tolerated, said former Agent Cril Payne, ‘only to perform the boring clerical functions required to keep the Bureau paper flowing. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that it was perfectly all right to bullshit ’em and ball ’em; just don’t tell ’em any secrets …’

Edgar was apparently prejudiced against Jews. In Miami Beach, where he stayed every Christmas, he invariably chose hotels that – until World War II – carried the sign NO JEWS, NO DOGS. He referred to the Irish leader Eamon de Valera, in an early report, as ‘a Portuguese Jew,’ and fifty years later dismissed Robert Mardian, an Assistant Attorney General during the Nixon administration, as ‘that Lebanese Jew.’ In fact, de Valera was part Spanish, but had no Jewish blood, and Mardian was a Christian, of Armenian descent.

Over the years, two Jews became Assistant Directors. Jewish employees were given days off to observe religious holidays, and Jews once made up most of the FBI basketball team. Yet Jack Levine, a Jew who joined in 1960, calculated that only one half of one percent of Bureau agents were Jewish. He found pervasive discrimination, including a supervisor who said there was nothing subversive about the American Nazi Party, because ‘all they are against is Jews,’ and an instructor who described an expert witness as ‘a greasy-looking sheenie.’

Edgar hired hardly any Hispanics. ‘The average Mexican,’ he said, ‘is a psychological [sic] liar … They have visions probably of making money.’ ‘You never have to bother about a President being shot by Puerto Ricans or Mexicans,’ he told an interviewer. ‘They don’t shoot very straight. But if they come at you with a knife, beware.’

Edgar had no foreign friends, and had a knee-jerk distrust of anyone from a foreign country. Except for a couple of one-day excursions across the Canadian and Mexican borders, he never traveled outside the United States. He once ruled that Newsweek correspondent Dwight Martin was ‘not acceptable as an interviewer,’ because his Chinese wife, from Hong Kong, had met American naval officers while working as a tailor’s assistant.

‘I guess he was afraid she was a spy,’ said Martin’s colleague Ben Bradlee. ‘It was so stupid. But the really ridiculous thing was the fact that he had that sort of investigation done on a decent, respected reporter just because he’d requested an interview.’

As for black agents, Edgar’s attitude was that of most white southerners of his generation. ‘Coloreds’ were fine as the help, but they were to be excluded from the professions. The notion that law enforcement officers should address black people courteously seemed outlandish to him as late as 1966. ‘Instead of saying, “Boy, come here!”’ he noted scornfully, ‘they want to be addressed as Mr …’

Edgar kept the Bureau in a state of apartheid as long as he possibly could. There was one black agent when he took office, an ‘Uncle Tom’ figure called James Amos, who had started out looking after President Theodore Roosevelt’s children. He had become an agent thanks to Edgar’s predecessor, William Burns, and was used as a penetration agent against black activists. Amos was the first black agent, and would have been the last had Edgar had his way.

Of nine black men who rose from the lower grades in Edgar’s first forty years, five served as his personal lackeys.1 Edgar’s first flunkey was Sam Noisette, who moved up from messenger to become the keeper of his office door. Each morning, when a buzzer alerted him to his master’s arrival in the basement garage, Noisette would wait poised to greet him at the elevator. He stayed on hand until Edgar left at night, obsequious to a fault, addressing visitors in a suitably ‘darkey’ accent.

Noisette was a competent artist, and Edgar encouraged him. His painting of the Director’s dog, Spee De Bozo, hung in Edgar’s home, and others were displayed in the anteroom at the office.