Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [5]
In his day he’d been famous. Not “fifteen minutes” famous, but famous famous, New York Times-page one-above the fold famous. Back before Neil Armstrong, before the Beatles, before American Bandstand, before the war, when Hitler was still a worrisome nut in a bad mustache and FDR was learning to find the White House bathrooms, he was the country’s best-known yeggman. Folks today, they didn’t even know what a yegg was. Dillinger, he liked to say, he was the best of yeggs. Pretty Boy Floyd was a good yegg. Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be.
And today? Today he and all his peers were cartoon characters, caricatures in one bad gangster movie after another. You could see them on the late show doing all sorts of made-up stuff—Warren Beatty as some stammering latent-homosexual Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway as a beautiful Bonnie Parker (now that was a stretch), Richard Dreyfuss as a chattering asshole Baby Face Nelson (okay, they got that right), Shelley Winters as a machine gun-toting Ma Barker, a young Robert De Niro as one of her sons. To him they were all ridiculous Hollywood fantasies, fictional concoctions in an artificial world.
At that point the old man would just shake his head. As he sprawled on his couch at nights, sipping his Jack Daniel’s and popping his pills, what galled him was that it had all been real. It had all happened. Not in some fantasy world, not in the movies, but right there in the middle of the United States—in Chicago, in St. Paul, in Dallas, in Cleveland. The truth of it all seemed lost now, forgotten as totally as he was. Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker: He had known them all. He was the last one left alive. He had even outlived Hoover himself.
Hoover.
Fucking Hoover.
He leaned over and reached for a bottle of his pills.
1
A PRELUDE TO WAR
Spring 1933
Washington, D.C. Saturday, March 4, 1933
It was a morning as bleak as the times. Gray clouds sagged low over the city, nudged along by a north wind and gusts of rain. A hundred thousand people stood outside the Capitol, waiting. The mood in the crowd was hushed, anxious. A few pointed to the rooftops. “What are those things that look like little cages?” someone asked.
“Machine guns,” said a woman.1
The sense of crisis was underscored by the nervous young soldiers who stood by on street corners, fingering their rifles. “The atmosphere,” wrote Arthur Krock in the New York Times, “was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime.”
The analogy was apt. It did feel like war. People were shell-shocked. The country they had known—the fat and happy America of the Jazz Age, of speakeasies and fun and sloe gin fizzes—had vanished, destroyed as utterly as if wiped out by an enemy’s bombs. Women who once spent their evenings dancing the Charleston now shuffled forward in breadlines, grimy and hopeless. Fathers who sank their savings in the stock market now sat in gutters, begging for change.
A bugle called. Everywhere, heads turned. The president-elect, appearing unsteady, stepped up the maroon-carpeted ramp to the lectern. The chief justice, Charles Evan Hughes, read the oath of office.
When he was finished, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped to the lectern and gripped it tightly. His face was grim. “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he intoned, “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt looked out over the crowd. “This Nation asks for action, and action now,” he continued. “We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline . . . I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we