Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [58]
By 1936 millions of Americans were devouring G-Man movies and G-Man literature. Their children sported G-Man badges, toted G-Man tommy guns, slept in G-Man pajamas. One wrote to Edgar addressing him as an ‘American Jesus.’
That same year, a survey of 11,000 schoolboys concluded that Edgar was the second most popular man in the nation, topped only by Robert ‘Believe It Or Not’ Ripley. President Roosevelt came in a poor seventh. Youngsters, according to the poll, would vastly rather be Edgar than President of the United States.
A few brave voices in the press suggested Edgar was ‘stagestruck.’ ‘Some scenario writer,’ wrote Lee Casey of The Pittsburgh Press, ‘should do a burlesque on the G-Men. These federal agents have had things their own way so long there is a danger they will begin to believe they are half as good as people think they are.’
Edgar, it seems, did believe his own propaganda. In the spring of 1936, as the Republican presidential candidates jockeyed for position, he sent agents out to take soundings on his own political chances. One of them, Charles Winstead, talked with William Sullivan about his assignment before his death in 1973.
As Sullivan told it, ‘Hoover got the idea that he should run for president against FDR … He believed he had become a national figure. He thought that if he had the support of the entire law enforcement community – federal, state, city and county – he could run as a Republican and turn Roosevelt and his crew of liberals out of office … Hoover sent some of his most trusted veteran agents, including Charlie, most of them southerners, on a top-secret mission to test the political waters in the South and Southwest, where the Director thought his support was strongest. Charlie was told to approach local chiefs of police or sheriffs on some minor matter, then redirect the conversation to the subject of J. Edgar Hoover. “He’s a great man,” Charlie would say just as he’d been told to, “and he’s done an awful lot for law enforcement on every level in this country. Many people think we’d be better off if Hoover were president.” Then he would wait for the reaction.’
The reaction, Winstead said, was ‘overwhelmingly negative.’ A surprised Edgar put his presidential ambitions aside. The election was a second massive vote of confidence in Franklin Roosevelt.
A few months later Edgar received the writer Jack Alexander – a future editor of The Saturday Evening Post – in the grand octagonal chamber that was now his inner office. Alexander observed Edgar seated behind his huge mahogany desk, framed by flowers, exotic cacti and flags, and found the scene disquieting.
‘A few paces to the rear of the Director,’ wrote Alexander, ‘are two tall brass standards, topped by brass eagles and clingingly embraced by furled American flags. Much of the Director’s time is spent alone in the impressive quiet of this room, and in other quarters than the underworld there is uneasiness over what he may be thinking. Some persons of liberal and leftish beliefs are uncomfortably reminded by the symbolic eagles, and the magnificent distance between door and desk, of the official lair of Mussolini.’
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‘There is only one man in political life that FDR feared. He admitted that man was Hoover.’
Former aide to Colonel William Donovan, Chief of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II
Franklin Roosevelt did not live to record what he really thought of Edgar. Edgar, for his part, would claim years later that he and the President had been ‘very close – personally and officially.’ This was a compound of fact and untruth.
In public Edgar played the loyal courtier. As always with presidents, he behaved immaculately in formal situations, plied the White House with respectful memos. He escorted Mrs Roosevelt on a tour of Bureau headquarters. After dinner with Roosevelt, in the wake of the Dillinger shooting, he wrote asking the President for an autographed picture.
Yet,