Secrecy And Power: The Life Of J. Edgar Hoover – Richard Gid Powers, 1987 ★★★★

The Making of a Swamp Thing

Sometimes without trying, I pick up a book with present-day relevance. What better way to delve into that mysterious monstrosity of the moment, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, than with this old biography of its legendary founder?

None, it turns out, except maybe to read about such vague characters as Comey and Manafort and make some accommodation for a century I have less time for the older I get. Hoover, now there was someone you can latch onto, however gray and unhandsome he may have been in the flesh. Richard Gid Powers agrees:

It was a face of confident power. The wary eyes looked as if they had seen the worst in human nature and expected to see it again. The grim scowl was that of a man who had seen all evil, heard all evil, and could be counted on to warn of any evil that would put the nation in danger.

Washington, D. C. is a swamp in both topography and inclination. J. Edgar Hoover was a true Swamp Thing, born in our nation’s capital just in time for the 20^th century. As Powers paints him, Hoover was a racist, an elitist, a die-hard establishmentarian, and as time went on, a growing threat to civil liberties.

Yet Powers also calls Hoover a “progressive” dedicated to a systematic approach to law enforcement. “Before science all things must fall, including the ramparts of criminality,” Hoover declared. However distorted and exaggerated in the public eye his image became, thanks to leftist critics and Hoover’s own predilection for “G-Man” propaganda, it would serve his country well.

Powers brings out the positive and negative aspects of the FBI’s gray-wall profile of indomitable, impersonal achievement. In the 1930s, when American culture was gripped by a crime wave with names like Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Ma Barker, it was Hoover’s young FBI that captured the public imagination and reassured Americans that their country was bigger and better than the tommy-gun-toting pirates who threatened it. Powers calls the 1934 manhunt for bank-robber John Dillinger “the greatest case in FBI history;” employing detailed pre-computer-age research and intra-police cooperation in a way only the FBI was equipped to do.

The aftermath of the Dillinger case exposed Hoover’s dark side. There was only one star permitted whenever the FBI cracked a case: Hoover himself. Melvin Purvis, the FBI special agent in charge of the climactic Dillinger stakeout at the Biograph Theater, was first airbrushed out of the FBI’s official Dillinger story, then shadowed in civilian life by FBI agents who warned would-be employers that Purvis was radioactive.

Purvis shot himself in 1960 with his FBI service revolver. Hoover didn’t bother sending a condolence note. Mrs. Purvis telegrammed Hoover to say she was glad he hadn’t, since it laid bare his “jealousy” of Purvis’s FBI service. Hoover jotted a note on its margin congratulating himself: “It was well we didn’t write as she would no doubt have distorted it.”

Powers notes pluses and minuses in Hoover’s colossal, brutish ego:

His insistence that his top aides participate in the ceremonial degradation of disloyal outcasts like Purvis reveals this need for total conformity of will and vision. Yet this obsessive need to control the minds and actions of his agents was probably a critical ingredient in Hoover’s ability to run the Bureau as a tightly knit team made of interchangeable agents handling cases according to standard, scientific procedures.

Coldness goes arm-in-arm with law enforcement, at least in fiction. Sherlock Holmes reserves his closer association for his cocaine syringe; Javert admires only the stars’ remote and chilly perfection, at least in the musical version. Joe Friday has his “just-the-facts” mantra and little time for the ladies.

J. Edgar Hoover was like that, too.

He lived with his parents until their deaths, inheriting from him a passion for public service and from her a craggy countenance and an iron will that registered in a long succession of family servants fired for talking back. He never married; lived for a time with his young niece (whom he warned to use a false name if ever she was caught at a speakeasy); and reserved his free time for his garden and his Cairn Terriers, with whom Hoover habitually shared his breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and toast.

Portrait of a young G-man: Hoover began over 50 years of service in the Department of Justice as a tracker of suspect aliens. This led to his appointment to the Bureau of Investigation (not yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation) as assistant director in 1921. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover.

Hoover’s Washington was much different growing up. Powers describes his Capitol Hill neighborhood as lower middle class, white, and unreflectively racist in attitude. For a time Hoover attended church, even teaching Sunday School. This churchy affiliation wilted over time, though a lifelong allegiance to conformity endured.

At Central High, Hoover excelled as a debater, being a good listener but a better arguer, pushing a case for capital punishment by noting it was supported by the Bible and practiced in other Christian nations. Powers notes the benefit of such a dogmatic tack:

The judge must either concur in the argument or admit to a forbidden skepticism about the basic articles of faith that supported his own authority. He must agree or expose himself as disloyal. It was a form of argument that Edgar would later find extremely useful in a much broader arena.

Hoover began his public career as a teenage message-runner at the Library of Congress, a job which taught him the value of organized information. From there, he went to the Justice Department, eventually winding up in its Bureau of Investigation, where he drew attention to himself investigating suspect aliens.

Powers notes this meant Hoover “got his first taste of authority under circumstances in which he could disregard the normal constitutional restraints on the power of the state.” Hoover reserved his toughest tactics for left-wing radicals, particularly after the Russian Revolution.

Hoover’s deeply-felt anti-Communism became a cornerstone of his career. By the end of the 1910s, long before Dillinger discovered banks, Hoover made a name for himself as the right hand of Woodrow Wilson’s red-hunting Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer.

Palmer’s pattern of enforcement failure and constitutional abuse, which blurred definitions of “red” and “radical,” left a sour legacy Hoover barely managed to escape. Ever after, Powers notes, Hoover worked cautiously, making sure at all times he had the support of his superior, which as his career advanced, meant the president rather than the attorney general. Powers notes how this helped him keep power:

Hoover was always quick to sense political weakness and to distance himself from it. He was willing to take risks in pursuit of his objectives, but he had learned to do that only when guaranteed the support of powerful sponsors and public opinion.

It’s here that Powers’s case for Hoover as preeminent Swamp Thing emerges, a guy who knew the score with everyone in D. C. and used this to hold to power long past his sell-by date. Powers does resist one notion that has become accepted wisdom in our national consciousness, that Hoover kept track of skeletons in everyone’s closets and used them for blackmail when threatened with exposure or removal. Powers’ Hoover was a subtler creature of his environment.

Not that the bedroom was off-limits. Back in the 1920s, when Hoover took on one of his most disliked targets, the Ku Klux Klan, Powers notes he did so by nailing Imperial Wizard Edward Young Clarke on a Mann Act violation involving a young woman:

In later years, the fact that the Bureau’s most important early civil rights successes had resulted from morals investigations may have accounted for Hoover’s instinct to start searching bedrooms whenever confronted by a difficult problem in the field of civil rights.

And what of Hoover’s own bedroom predilections? Powers is not silent on this point, but he is careful not to make too much of what exists in the public record. Hoover had an extremely close relationship with Clyde Tolson, his deputy at the FBI from its earliest days on through to Hoover’s death in 1972. Neither Hoover nor Tolson ever married, and frequently attended social events as a pair.

Much of their correspondence was destroyed after Hoover’s death, but photographs survive showing the men on vacation, including many taken of Tolson by Hoover. Powers notes: “The photos convey the sense of a caring, emotionally involved eye behind the lens, and whether it was a lover’s eye or a close friend’s, it was still qualitatively different from a business associate’s.”

Eddie and Clyde: Hoover was often photographed in the company of his handsome deputy, Clyde Tolson, leading to speculation then and after about what was really going on between them. Powers notes the photos show a lot of attentiveness, but hardly ever anything as suggestively intimate as a hand on a shoulder. Image from http://www.zpub.com/notes/hoover-photos.html.

If Hoover was homosexual, Powers concludes it was of an inactive, non-intimate sort. I found this take convincing.

Hoover’s real love was his job, which over time developed into his unhealthiest obsession. Powers quotes Hoover early in his career bemoaning the idea of retirement, and as he reached his mandatory retirement age, he was able to get a lifetime reprieve from President Lyndon Johnson. In return, Hoover vigorously prosecuted civil-rights cases against Southern racists despite his personal disgust with the main leader of black equality, Martin Luther King Jr.

However successful Hoover was at this, bitterly clinging to his office only diminished his legacy. By the time of the last president Hoover served under, Richard Nixon, the FBI was as reviled as it was admired, particularly when it came to light Hoover was investigating King and other civil-rights leaders under a series of investigations, called COINTELPRO, where, as Powers notes, “the only restraint on the Bureau’s ingenuity…was fear of getting caught.”

By this time, the FBI had made its own descent into mediocrity. Just as Hoover in the 1920s and 1930s raised the Bureau into a process-driven, scientific weapon of law enforcement, he now dragged it down with his insistence on a warped brand of loyalty.

Powers notes the example of William C. Sullivan, who as head of the FBI Domestic Intelligence Division once informed Hoover he could find no sign of Communist infiltration around Martin Luther King, only to cravenly back off and dub King “the most dangerous Negro of the future” when Hoover pressed him. Powers suggests Hoover may have just been playing high-school debater here, trying to gain clarity on the situation rather than racist conformity. But Sullivan, like everyone else, was too much in thrall to Hoover to show some spine.

Powers notes the circular nature of the problem Hoover created:

The assistants on whom he depended for information about the world fed him reports designed to anticipate and reinforce his increasingly rigid fixations and obsessions. This was partly because Hoover was increasingly loath to accept information that challenged his priorities and the policy of his Bureau. It was also partly the result of the structure of the Bureau. Everything depended on Hoover, and his subordinates were too intimidated to correct his misconceptions; and for that, Hoover had only himself to blame.

In Powers’ telling, Hoover’s last days exposed a pale shadow of his former self, lacking his customary vigor and exposing a mentality that Nixon’s staff found woefully out of touch. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic adviser, found him in Powers’ words “an old bore,” and was contemptuous of the massive displays of ego kept like a musty museum in both Hoover’s office and home.

Hoover was notably wan in appearance in his last years. Yet as Powers notes: "He was still his own man, and in 1972, there were very few in Washington who could say as much." Image from http://www.zpub.com/notes/hoover-photos.html.

Yet Hoover still had those survival instincts, and here at least, they would serve him well, both at the time and for posterity. He avoided getting his hands dirty in a domestic-surveillance program against American radicals Nixon supported, championed by the youthful, hard-charging Tom Charles Huston. Hoover resisted Huston until he, like Sullivan after the latter made a play for becoming FBI director, was reduced to another of Hoover’s victims left drained of power in the D. C. swamp.

Whatever his personal predilections, Hoover understood the danger of government overreach, and to his credit, spoke up about it, as he did in the 1940s with Japanese-American internment during World War II, where he proved a lonely voice amid liberal lions like Earl Warren and President Roosevelt. Resisting the Huston Plan caused Hoover to lose Nixon’s support (“I don’t understand Edgar sometimes,” Nixon later mused) but saved the FBI from involvement in such government scandals as the Ellsberg Burglary and Watergate.

Powers notes: There was a wide gap between Hoover’s private feelings (fully in sympathy with the president) and his professional judgment (which told him that massive intelligence operations conducted against a movement supported by so many Americans, using techniques no longer tolerated by the courts or much of the public, would be a disaster for the president, for the FBI, and, not incidentally, for himself should they be known.)

Though published by an imprint, Free Press, known at the time for neoconservative offerings like Robert Bork’s The Tempting Of America, Powers’ view of Hoover is generally consistent with that of a liberal scholar. He holds Hoover in low esteem for spying on King, and exonerates the support he often got for this from Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in a way he doesn’t extend to Nixon. But in the main, this is a very fair and measured book, chronologically well organized, which credits Hoover more often then you might expect. It lacks a deeper sense of his subject’s personality, which may just be because there wasn’t much of one beneath that Swamp Thing exterior.