Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [89]
Former Assistant Director Charles Brennan, an FBI specialist in hunting subversives, would recall wryly that even Bureau insiders never really knew quite what enemy they were fighting. ‘There was never any substantive understanding of what Communism meant,’ he recalled. ‘The word was just used as a general category for that which was foreign, unfamiliar and undesirable …’
Edgar, more than any other individual, would be responsible for the long episode of anti-Communist hysteria from which American society has never fully recovered. Edgar’s own figures credited the Party with a mere 80,000 members at the peak of its popularity, in the glow of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. In a population of 150 million, that was a percentage of .0533 – and less than a third of American Communists were industrial workers likely to threaten economic stability.
President Truman probably had it about right. ‘People,’ he said, ‘are very much wrought up about the Communist “bugaboo” but I am of the opinion that the country is perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned – we have far too many sane people.’ What the President thought in private, however, was submerged by Republican electoral gains and a chorus of right-wing demands for action.
In 1947, to appease the right, Truman ordered that all new civilian employees of the federal government be investigated for ‘loyalty.’ Serving employees suspected of ‘disloyalty’ could henceforth be brought before loyalty boards – with no right to know or challenge their accusers. Truman had deliberately entrusted much of the work not to the FBI but to the Civil Service Commission – a snub that led Edgar to take a momentous decision.
He obliged Congressman Parnell Thomas, soon to be jailed for operating a kickback racket, by agreeing to address the House Un-American Activities Committee. Edgar had never made such an appearance before and, by doing so in March 1947, was publicly confronting the administration he served. That he could do so, and get away with it, was a measure of his power in the country.
‘This is a big day for me,’ Edgar told a friend as he set off to make his speech. Communism, he told the congressmen, was being spread by ‘the diabolic machinations of sinister figures engaged in un-American activities.’ American liberals, he added pointedly, had been ‘hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the Communists.’
Edgar stopped short of attacking the liberal President by name, but the effect was the same. Truman was furious. ‘Pres. feels very strongly anti FBI,’ noted an aide. ‘Wants to be sure and hold FBI down, afraid of “Gestapo.”’ Yet Truman was also a realist. ‘J. Edgar,’ he told Clark Clifford, ‘will in all probability get this backward-looking Congress to give him all he wants. It’s dangerous.’
Edgar did get what he wanted – full control of the loyalty investigations. He had made his declaration of independence, established himself as the standard-bearer of the anti-Red crusade.
One man needed no conversion. During the HUAC hearing Edgar had taken several questions from a freshman Congressman named Richard Nixon. Leaning across to Edgar, attorney Bradshaw Mintener muttered that Nixon had faked smear evidence to beat his Democratic opponent in the recent campaign. ‘I know all about that,’ Edgar replied, ‘but, so far as law enforcement is concerned, he looks to me as if he’s going to be a good man for us.’
A decade earlier, as a young law student, inspired by a recruiting speech given by one of Edgar’s aides, Nixon had applied to become an agent. His appointment had been approved, then canceled, apparently because the FBI deemed him to be ‘lacking in aggressiveness.’ Now that he was a Congressman, Edgar had no doubts about Nixon. The two men met that year, and both would soon be engaged in the protracted effort to ruin State Department official Alger Hiss,