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FBI political espionage for the White House became routine. In late 1940, when the President asked Edgar to assign an agent to Palm Beach to watch the administration’s ‘friends and enemies,’ Edgar obliged with ‘complete coverage.’

Roosevelt turned to Edgar for help when, at a time the Chicago Tribune was opposing his defense plans, he wanted to boost a rival paper in the city. ‘FDR used the FBI for all kinds of dirty tricks,’ said the Tribune’s Walter Trohan, who became a trusted Bureau contact. ‘When the new newspaper, the Sun, was trying to put the Tribune out of business, the government used the FBI to intimidate newspaper publishers. I took it up with Hoover later, and he said, “Yeah, but I got a letter directing me to do it.” And he showed me the order. He wanted proof before he did that kind of thing …’

As time went on, Roosevelt often bypassed his Attorney General and communicated directly with Edgar. A long line of future attorneys general, who theoretically had full authority over the Director of the FBI, would have to learn to live with the same humiliation. As Secretary Ickes noted in his diary in June 1941, Edgar had become ‘so strong that apparently he can dictate who is to be the Attorney General, his titular chief.’

Edward Ennis, a senior aide to Francis Biddle, felt that attorneys general were cowed by Edgar’s relationship with the President, and by an ‘even deeper fear that he had files on everybody.’ The best that could be said, wrote Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, was that Edgar ‘has run a secret police with the minimum of collision with civil liberties, and that is about all you can expect of any chief of secret police.’

The fact was, though, that for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal official did wield such power, and his assault on civil liberties would be persistent and serious.

In May 1940, Roosevelt gave the go-ahead for use of that vital tool of any secret police, the telephone tap. On its face, Edgar’s track record on wiretapping was entirely respectable. The Bureau’s first manual, issued in 1928, said flatly that tapping was ‘improper, illegal … unethical’ and would not be tolerated. Edgar had assured Congress that any agent caught wiretapping would be fired.

Though some sought to find loopholes in it, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 had seemed to outlaw wiretapping altogether. And, in spite of an Attorney General’s ruling that allowed some tapping with prior approval, Edgar continued to say that he was against it except in life-or-death circumstances, such as kidnappings. The testimony of his own men, however, makes it clear that was not true.

For two months in 1936, five FBI agents were forced to reveal in court that the Bureau mounted round-the-clock wiretaps to investigate a case of interstate theft in New York. The evidence made it clear that this was nothing unusual, that there had been dozens of similar assignments, using the most sophisticated equipment available.

According to other agents, Edgar had on occasion used bugging to further his own private interests. There had been the time, years earlier, when he ordered taps on the telephones of Roosevelt’s Postmaster General James Farley, who wanted him replaced as FBI Director. In 1937, during a clampdown on brothels in Baltimore, reporters had asked Edgar about rumors that telephones were bugged during the operation. ‘We have to do that sometimes,’ he said carefully. It later emerged that there had been bugging – enough to fill two volumes of notes on conversations in one brothel alone. Part of their mission, former agents were quoted as saying, had been to get smear material on police officials who had fallen out with Edgar.

‘Perhaps only Mr Hoover himself,’ Federal Communications Chairman James Fly was to write, ‘can tell exactly how many times he has instructed his men to break the law that his Bureau was supposed to enforce; but he has chosen not to discuss such details.’ In 1940,