Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [36]
‘Fear,’ one agent would complain, ‘actuates every move made by the employees …’
In 1929, however, as Edgar marked his thirty-fourth birthday, real success still eluded him. His revamped Bureau might be clean as a whistle, but it was rather obscure. So was Edgar. In an article about a half-dozen Washington officials who all happened to be called Hoover, he was listed last – two below his elder brother Dickerson, by this time an important official at the Department of Commerce.
These were doldrum days in Washington. After the years of drift under Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover was beginning the third consecutive Republican reign at the White House. Within months, this businessman president would fail to realize the gravity of the Wall Street Crash, and would announce the Depression ‘over’ when the real misery was yet to come.
By 1932 more than 13 million Americans, a quarter of the work force, were unemployed. Thousands of men and women stood in soup lines. A million and more were homeless. President Hoover’s very name had become synonymous with economic blight. There were Hoover blankets, the newspapers used by the destitute to ward off the cold; Hoover flags, pockets empty of money; and Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the homeless.
Edgar allowed the Bureau to be used – entirely improperly – to silence one of the President’s persistent critics. He sent no fewer than five agents to interrogate the publisher of the Wall Street Forecast, George Menhinick, who had been printing articles on the dire state of the nation’s banks. ‘Menhinick,’ Edgar reported with satisfaction, ‘was considerably upset over the visit of the agents … He is thoroughly scared, and I do not believe that he will resume the dissemination of any information concerning the banks.’
Then, on a March night in 1932, the disappearance of a baby from a nursery in New Jersey brought a much needed diversion for the President and a first taste of fame for Edgar. The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son, and the subsequent discovery of his body, caused an explosion of publicity. In a time of gloom, the aviation pioneer was a symbol of all that was positive about America. The President sent Edgar to the scene of the crime as his personal representative.
The case did not go well. In spite of publicity touting Edgar as a ‘world authority on crime,’ his involvement brought no magical breakthrough. Scornful of the Sherlock from Washington, local police told how, spotting a pigeon perched on the eaves of the Lindbergh residence, Edgar wondered aloud whether it was a homing pigeon bearing a message from the kidnappers.
One agent on the case, John Trimble, recalled being ‘stationed at a hotel in Trenton … solely for the purpose of relaying any news break to Mr Hoover so he could get it to the press …’ Edgar, Trimble thought, was just ‘using the case for publicity purposes.’
One of the shrewdest minds on the investigation was that of Elmer Irey, head of the Internal Revenue Service’s intelligence unit. It was he who saw to it that part of the ransom money was paid in identifiable notes and certificates, the measure that eventually led to the capture of alleged murderer Richard Hauptmann. Yet Edgar tried to have Irey removed from the case, upsetting Charles Lindbergh in the process.
According to Trimble, Edgar placed Irey and one of his aides under Bureau surveillance. It was the start of a long enmity. Five years later, long after the case was resolved, Irey would still be having his phone checked for signs of Bureau wiretapping.
In early summer 1932, with the economy in a shambles, the Democrats scented victory in the coming presidential election. As they gathered for the Convention in Chicago, one man of influence was nursing a bitter grudge against Edgar. Mitchell Palmer, the former Attorney General who a decade earlier had given Edgar a vital break in the days of the Red Raids, believed his young protégé had betrayed him. Edgar,