Official and Confidential (18 page)

Yet, said William Sullivan, ‘Hoover didn't like Roosevelt. He never passed up on a chance to make a snide remark when FDR's name was mentioned, and he never failed to express his feelings about the president in internal memos … When I was assigned to the Research Division, I'd see those blue ink remarks about Roosevelt. One said, “He has an Emperor's complex.”'

Edgar thought Roosevelt suspiciously left-wing. ‘Hoover didn't trust liberals,' said Sullivan, ‘and FDR had surrounded himself with other liberals. Hoover hated Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture. He hated Harry Hopkins, administrator of some of the most important programs of the New Deal; and most of the rest of the
President's staff was also unacceptable to the Director.' Roosevelt's New Deal, Edgar told his friend, future U.S. Senator George Murphy, was engineered by the Communists.

Edgar's attitude to the President was mild compared with his dislike of Eleanor Roosevelt. He had grave misgivings about the President's wife, about her enthusiasm for left-wing causes and left-wing friends, and he let the President know it. Once, when American Federation of Labor leader Robert Watt complained that the FBI was investigating him, Roosevelt responded with a smile of resignation. ‘That's nothing,' he said, ‘to what J. Edgar Hoover says about my wife.' Yet the President tolerated Edgar, even relied on him.

Roosevelt, one historian remarked, had ‘a more spacious view' of executive authority than his Republican predecessors. He saw the FBI as a tool that could be used for much more than law enforcement, that could be pressed into service for reasons of state and for his own political benefit. The President handed Edgar massive new powers, powers he would abuse for nearly forty years.

A month before Roosevelt's inauguration, Adolf Hitler had become German Chancellor. The first concentration camp opened soon afterward. As Edgar was celebrating the capture of Machine Gun Kelly, Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations and announced plans to rearm Germany. As Edgar celebrated the shooting of John Dillinger, the Nazis assassinated the Chancellor of Austria.

By spring 1934, there were fears that rightist groups, including the American Nazi movement, were plotting to undermine the government. On May 8 Edgar went to the White House to discuss the problem with the President and senior members of the cabinet. The outcome was that for the first time, Edgar gained official sanction to conduct political intelligence.

He began by investigating American Nazis, but soon had targets of a different political stripe. That fall Roosevelt ordered Edgar to investigate striking mill workers in Rhode
Island. At Christmas, when the American Civil Liberties Union asked for a meeting with the President, the White House asked the FBI for a briefing. The ACLU was one of Edgar's pet hates, and on his advice the President turned down the ACLU request. Roosevelt and his advisers soon fell into the habit of calling for Bureau reports on matters that had little or nothing to do with law enforcement. Edgar eagerly obliged. He was becoming, as one historian put it, ‘the President's intelligence valet.'

Stalin had murdered his way to absolute power in Moscow. The Nazis marched into the Rhineland, and civil war broke out in Spain. Roosevelt received troubling warnings, word of a home-based right-wing plot to topple him, and allegations of foreign espionage. On the morning of August 24, 1936, he summoned Edgar to a private meeting that would have far-reaching consequences. We have only Edgar's version of what was said.

‘I called you over,' Edgar was to quote the President as saying, ‘because I want you to do a job for me, and it must be confidential.' According to Edgar, Roosevelt wanted to know how he could obtain reliable intelligence on Communist and Fascist activity in the United States. Edgar said the FBI could legally do the job, although it was outside the realm of law enforcement, if the request came – technically – from the State Department. The next day, in Edgar's presence, Roosevelt told Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the United States was threatened by Soviet and Fascist espionage directed from outside the country. ‘Go ahead,' Hull is said to have responded, ‘investigate the cocksuckers!'

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 him as an ally. Edgar's Agent in Charge in Detroit, John Bugas, soon had regular access to Bennett's ‘vast files on Communist activities.' Bennett, Bugas reported, was ‘a very valuable friend … without question one of the best sources of information.'

The FBI later discovered that Bennett had purchased many of the Communist names in his files from Gerald Smith, the local Fascist leader. This did nothing to dampen Edgar's enthusiasm for him.

In late 1939, without seeking higher authority, Edgar boldly ordered his staff to prepare dossiers for a Custodial
Detention List, an index of people who could be detained in time of war. The list named not only those who sympathized with Germany and its allies, but also those with ‘Communist sympathies.' It included, too, people who had done nothing to deserve suspicion, like Harrison Salisbury of
The New York Times
.

In 1942, on his way to a foreign assignment, Salisbury had problems obtaining a passport. It was not until forty years later, when he obtained his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, that he found out why. An eccentric female neighbor had told the authorities that Salisbury was an ‘employee of the German government.' He was a code expert, she believed, because he had recording devices at his home. Salisbury's house was secretly searched and a file opened on him at the FBI. It was this that caused the passport problem. Salisbury's name went onto the Custodial Detention List, marked: ‘Pro-German – stated he is in employ of German government.' Salisbury remained technically liable to arrest and internment, in the event of a national emergency, until 1971.

Edgar would resist bitterly when, in 1940, Attorney General Jackson insisted that the Justice Department – rather than the FBI – assume overall control of the Detention List. The Director found a way not to comply in 1943, when Attorney General Biddle ruled that the Department existed to pursue law-breakers, that it had no business cataloguing citizens according to their alleged ‘dangerousness,' and directed that the Detention List be abolished. Edgar simply ordered his officials to maintain the list, but to call it the Security Index instead. He did this secretly, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered in 1975, without informing Biddle, who was his boss.

In public, most attorneys general talked as though their relations with Edgar were good. In private, there was often terrific friction. Frank Murphy, a future Supreme Court Justice, who held the office in 1939, would conclude that
Edgar had ambitions to become Attorney General himself. He found the Director's behavior alarming. ‘He is almost pathological,' Murphy told Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell. ‘He can get something on anybody if he starts investigating him; that is his tendency.'

Indeed, Edgar kept a file on Murphy himself, one that contained information on his private life, and which stayed open until he died. Parts of the file remained withheld during research for this book.

In June 1939, with war looming in Europe, President Roosevelt agreed that the FBI – with the War and Navy departments – should take over all intelligence operations. In September, as Hitler signed a nonaggression treaty with Stalin and prepared to invade Poland, the President announced publicly that Edgar was to head the fight against foreign espionage and sabotage. At the same time, he authorized him to gather information on ‘subversive activities.' The orders were vague and designed to respond to a temporary need. Their effect, however, was to give Edgar the nearest thing he would ever have to a charter to conduct domestic intelligence – one he would fall back on for the rest of his career.

Edgar's first use of the new authority caused a storm of protest. In January the arrests of a number of anti-Semitic agitators, on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, ended in fiasco. It emerged that the men had received their inspiration and their weapons from a paid FBI informant, and all charges were dropped.

Then FBI agents in Detroit and Milwaukee seized twelve radical activists on the grounds that, three years earlier, they had recruited volunteers to fight on the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Under an old statute, it was an offense for private citizens to raise an army on U.S. soil for a foreign conflict. The arrests were curious because the alleged offenses had occurred so long ago, and the war in question was over. The new Attorney General, Robert Jackson, swiftly dropped the charges – too late, however, to stifle public outrage.

Edgar's men had swooped down before dawn, broken down doors, ransacked homes, held their prisoners incommunicado for nine hours, strip-searched them twice and allowed them access to lawyers for just one minute before they appeared in court. It was all reminiscent of the Red Raids of 1920 – and this time Edgar could not deny responsibility.

Suddenly the press was comparing the FBI to the secret police forces of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In Congress Senator George Norris spoke of ‘an American Gestapo,' calling Edgar ‘the greatest publicity hound on the American continent.' The way things were going, he added, there would soon be ‘a spy behind every stump and a detective in every closet in our land.' As FBI files now reveal, Edgar had a stool pigeon on Senator Norris' own staff in 1940.

Three days after the Detroit raids, Edgar was called in to see the President. Then, with Clyde in tow, he departed on a surprise ‘vacation' to Miami Beach. There he ensconced himself in a villa attached to the Nautilus Hotel, an island retreat for the very rich, to shelter himself from the barrage of criticism.

In Washington, Edgar's aides lobbied furiously to drum up a counterattack. Behind the scenes, agents investigated everyone who had criticized the arrests of the Spanish Civil War activists. Edgar, meanwhile, tried to get Attorney General Jackson to make a statement in his defense. Jackson hesitated. His predecessor Frank Murphy had made him ‘very dubious' about Edgar, warning that the FBI spied on government officials and tapped their telephones. Edgar denied such charges and offered to resign, and Jackson ended up issuing a compromise statement, expressing confidence in Edgar and committing the government to the protection of civil liberties.