Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [60]
To avoid leaks, according to Edgar’s memorandum of the meeting, the President wanted no written request from the State Department to the FBI. Instead, Roosevelt said, he would ‘put a handwritten memorandum of his own in his safe in the White House, stating he had instructed the Secretary of State to request this information to be obtained …’
The Roosevelt presidential library was unable to trace such a memorandum, so there is no way of knowing what scope the President intended the order to have. What is clear is that he issued the directive secretly, without sanction of Congress, and that the Attorney General – Edgar’s boss – was informed only after the fact.
As a result of those White House meetings, Edgar’s freedom of action was greatly increased. Propaganda had already made him a mythological national guardian, the man who made the American housewife feel safe. Now, by presidential fiat, he wielded raw political power as well.
Immediately after his 1936 meeting with Roosevelt, and before even discussing the matter with Attorney General Cummings, Edgar triggered a massive surveillance operation against trade unionists and radicals. An FBI target list, still preserved in Bureau files, included the steel, coal and garment industries, educational institutions and organized labor. Though Edgar denied it at the time, the Bureau also began recruiting informants and preparing dossiers on political ‘subversives.’
In the spring of 1938, as eighteen alleged Nazi spies went on trial, the President responded to public pressure by making more funds available to the intelligence services. Edgar urged that the cash be used for domestic intelligence, and said it could be arranged without special legislation. Such spying on Americans at home, Edgar wrote to the President, should be pursued ‘with the utmost degree of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might be raised by either ill-informed persons or individuals having some ulterior motive.’ In the fall of the year, at a meeting aboard the presidential train at New York’s Pennsylvania Station, Roosevelt gave Edgar the go-ahead.
The Bureau now began hiring new agents in huge numbers – their ranks would swell from less than 1,000 in 1937 to nearly 4,000 by the end of the war. Many of the new recruits would be used to defend national security in wartime. Simultaneously, however, the Bureau gathered vast amounts of information on ordinary people of liberal persuasion, and on innocuous groups like the League for Fair Play (which supplied speakers for Rotary and Kiwanis clubs), the Independent Voters of Illinois, even a Bronx child-care center. There was a massive investigation of the NAACP, involving extensive use of informants. Edgar saw to it that all information gathered, including that collected on thousands of innocent citizens, was duly filed away for future reference.
The FBI file on the Ford Motor Company reveals that in January 1939, Edgar met with Henry Ford’s right-hand man, Harry Bennett. Bennett was a ruthless union-buster, whose special achievement had been to develop a day-to-day working alliance between Ford and the leaders of organized crime. He had personal contact with Detroit’s crime boss Chester LaMare, men like Joe Tocco and Leo Cellura, and he arranged Ford franchises for gangsters like Joe Adonis and Tony D’Anna.
Bennett used his underworld contacts to take care of Ford’s union problems. He used thugs to organize the beating of United Automobile Workers leader Walter Reuther, one of Edgar’s perennial targets, when he and others tried to distribute leaflets near the plant. In time he assembled a private army, armed with pistols, blackjacks and lengths of rubber hose, to break up union meetings and attack labor activists. Edgar got on very well with Bennett, sent him autographed photographs of their first meeting and worked with