Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [38]
Cummings, for one, was to regret the advice he had given the President. It was, he recalled ruefully, ‘one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.’ He would discover that Edgar was ‘difficult to handle, could not be controlled, and had the faculty of attracting too much attention to himself.’
At the outset, getting attention was exactly what was required. The Roosevelt administration was under pressure to do something about crime, and to be seen to be doing it. In the hard-hit Midwest, where farms lay untended and businesses closed, banks were being robbed at gunpoint and wealthy men kidnapped for huge ransoms. Now was the time of Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.
This was a regional problem. The statistics do not support the notion that there was a national crime wave, but the government saw the chance of good headlines in hard times. ‘We are now engaged,’ the Attorney General declared, ‘in a war that threatens our country.’ He called for a national crusade against crime.
As one kidnapping followed another, Cummings summoned several leading journalists to dinner. He told them, recalled the columnist Drew Pearson, that ‘he believed the best cure for kidnapping was to build up the FBI, not only in actual strength but in the strength of public opinion behind it … He asked our opinion about the appointment of a top-notch public relations man and those of us present, including Cummings, all agreed on Henry Suydam.’
Suydam was a former war correspondent, then working as Washington correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle. He was also a former head of the State Department Information Service, a personal friend of the President’s, and would go on to become aide to Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and adviser to the Shah of Iran.
Edgar, meanwhile, acquired his own personal scribe, an exotic figure named Courtney Ryley Cooper. Cooper had begun his career as a circus clown, and moved on to become press agent for Colonel William Cody, better remembered today as Buffalo Bill. He was also a writer of pulp westerns, a scribbler who turned out some 750 short stories. Cooper’s nonfiction, one reviewer noted, was ‘not always written with entire regard for actualities.’
Cooper, nevertheless, now became the Bureau’s Boswell. With Suydam, he pumped out the propaganda that made Edgar a household name. In 1940 he would be found hanged in a hotel room, driven to suicide, according to his widow, by some wrong Edgar had done him.
Many gangsters, and a number of brave lawmen, were to die bloodily in the mid-thirties. Cummings would eventually become just another forgotten Attorney General. Edgar, as ever, would survive, the one public official to emerge from the Depression as a national hero.
7
‘If this tremendous body of evil-doers could be welded into a unit of conquest, America would fall before it, not in a month, not in a day, but in a few hours.’
J. Edgar Hoover, on the crime wave, 1936
In the campaign against the bandits, Edgar’s chief lieutenant was twenty-nine-year-old Melvin Purvis, his Agent in Charge in Chicago. Theirs is a tale of friendship and betrayal, the only episode in Edgar’s personal life that is heavily documented. While virtually no other personal correspondence has survived, the Purvis family preserved some 500 letters the pair exchanged between 1927 and 1936. Many are intimate, and they make it clear that Edgar treated the younger man like no other field agent in Bureau history.
Purvis’ youth had mirrored Edgar’s own. The son of a South Carolina planter, he had captained his school cadet company and obtained a law degree, and he was a member of the Kappa Alpha fraternity and the Masons. He was incredibly hardworking, and so fastidious that he changed his shirts three times a day. Edgar took a shine to him the moment he hired him, two years below the regulation recruiting