Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [59]
Edgar thought Roosevelt suspiciously left-wing. ‘Hoover didn’t trust liberals,’ said Sullivan, ‘and FDR had surrounded himself with other liberals. Hoover hated Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture. He hated Harry Hopkins, administrator of some of the most important programs of the New Deal; and most of the rest of the President’s staff was also unacceptable to the Director.’ Roosevelt’s New Deal, Edgar told his friend, future U.S. Senator George Murphy, was engineered by the Communists.
Edgar’s attitude to the President was mild compared with his dislike of Eleanor Roosevelt. He had grave misgivings about the President’s wife, about her enthusiasm for left-wing causes and left-wing friends, and he let the President know it. Once, when American Federation of Labor leader Robert Watt complained that the FBI was investigating him, Roosevelt responded with a smile of resignation. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said, ‘to what J. Edgar Hoover says about my wife.’ Yet the President tolerated Edgar, even relied on him.
Roosevelt, one historian remarked, had ‘a more spacious view’ of executive authority than his Republican predecessors. He saw the FBI as a tool that could be used for much more than law enforcement, that could be pressed into service for reasons of state and for his own political benefit. The President handed Edgar massive new powers, powers he would abuse for nearly forty years.
A month before Roosevelt’s inauguration, Adolf Hitler had become German Chancellor. The first concentration camp opened soon afterward. As Edgar was celebrating the capture of Machine Gun Kelly, Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations and announced plans to rearm Germany. As Edgar celebrated the shooting of John Dillinger, the Nazis assassinated the Chancellor of Austria.
By spring 1934, there were fears that rightist groups, including the American Nazi movement, were plotting to undermine the government. On May 8 Edgar went to the White House to discuss the problem with the President and senior members of the cabinet. The outcome was that for the first time, Edgar gained official sanction to conduct political intelligence.
He began by investigating American Nazis, but soon had targets of a different political stripe. That fall Roosevelt ordered Edgar to investigate striking mill workers in Rhode Island. At Christmas, when the American Civil Liberties Union asked for a meeting with the President, the White House asked the FBI for a briefing. The ACLU was one of Edgar’s pet hates, and on his advice the President turned down the ACLU request. Roosevelt and his advisers soon fell into the habit of calling for Bureau reports on matters that had little or nothing to do with law enforcement. Edgar eagerly obliged. He was becoming, as one historian put it, ‘the President’s intelligence valet.’
Stalin had murdered his way to absolute power in Moscow. The Nazis marched into the Rhineland, and civil war broke out in Spain. Roosevelt received troubling warnings, word of a home-based right-wing plot to topple him, and allegations of foreign espionage. On the morning of August 24, 1936, he summoned Edgar to a private meeting that would have far-reaching consequences. We have only Edgar’s version of what was said.
‘I called you over,’ Edgar was to quote the President as saying, ‘because I want you to do a job for me, and it must be confidential.’ According to Edgar, Roosevelt wanted to know how he could obtain reliable intelligence on Communist and Fascist activity in the United States. Edgar said the FBI could legally do the job, although it was outside the realm of law enforcement, if the request came – technically – from the State Department. The next day, in Edgar’s presence, Roosevelt