Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [35]
Edgar remained obdurate to the end. ‘I have not, and will not, relax the high standards which the FBI has traditionally demanded,’ he blustered once the Kennedys were gone. ‘Robert Kennedy became very angry with me over this. I would not yield.’ Edgar and some of his aides claimed there were not enough black applicants good enough to make the grade. Black graduates who were, they said, preferred to take better-paid jobs elsewhere.
Edgar died leaving the Bureau with just seventy black agents, not one of them in a senior post. By 1991 the number had risen to 500, though this was still only 4.8 percent of the total agent force of 10,360. Ugly stories of discrimination against serving black agents continue to surface today.
The sort of agent Edgar did want, veteran agent Arthur Murtagh told a congressional committee in 1978, was ‘a good white Anglo-Saxon, preferably an Irishman with conservative views … another good WASP, and have him apply to the Bureau and see he gets the job – to hell with the qualification…’
Some applicants were rejected just because their faces looked wrong. ‘Didn’t you notice that he has eyes like Robert Mitchum?’ an Agent in Charge once asked Murtagh during the screening of a former Air Force Captain. ‘His eyelids fall down over his eyes. I’d be afraid to recommend him. I got transferred one time for recommending somebody that had acne on his face.’
The way a man thought was most important of all. ‘We’re not interested,’ Edgar claimed, ‘in a man’s politics.’ Not true. The Bureau simply passed over applicants whose earliest interviews indicated liberal ideas, or any deviation from Edgar’s concept of the norm. According to former Agent Jack Levine, recruits were ‘heavily indoctrinated in radical right-wing propaganda.’ Liberals who slipped through the net were moved sideways, if not out, once their deviations were spotted.
Political control extended even to the FBI dress code, which forbade the wearing of red neckties. Agents ended up politically neutered at best, at worst as right-wing zealots. ‘Mr Hoover,’ said Agent Murtagh, ‘was able over a period of nearly fifty years to bring in thousands of carefully selected agent personnel who were as politically disposed to the right as he was … The result, because of the way he used those agents, was an unbalanced, damaging influence on American culture.’
A few brave agents started speaking out against Edgar’s policies soon after he became Director. In 1927 Senator Thomas Walsh, a known critic of the Bureau, received an acid memorandum from a former Agent in Charge, Franklin Dodge. He told of unfair treatment of staff, the twisting of facts to give the Bureau credit that really belonged to the police, illegal pursuit of radicals and improper collaboration with right-wing journalists. Edgar himself, Dodge claimed, had been ‘junketing around the country’ with his ‘wet nurse’ friend Frank Baughman, spending taxpayers’ money on personal pleasure trips.
Two years later another former Agent in Charge, Joseph Bayliss, sent a detailed complaint to the Attorney General. He spoke of an agency in which bureaucratic perfection was more important than investigation of crime, of a punishment system that terrorized men and destroyed individual initiative. He accused Edgar, accurately, of giving jobs to his former law school classmates, and of making appointments ‘to please certain politically influential persons … U.S. senators.’ Bayliss thought his complaint would be ignored – and it was.
Michael Fooner, a member of the Bureau’s Technical Section in the thirties, made the mistake of supporting the formation of an FBI branch of the Federation of Government Employees. Forty years later, when he obtained his file under the Freedom of Information Act, he was astonished to discover it was six inches thick. The Bureau had