From TIME’s Archives: The Truth About J. Edgar Hoover

The legend is crumbling: the squat, bulldog features, set fiercely in tenacious pursuit of the TEN MOST WANTED CRIMINALS. The gangbuster nemesis of “Baby Face” Nelson, John Dillinger, Ma Barker. The scourge of would-be spies and saboteurs. The alert sentinel and fearless fighter holding back the tide of the Red Menace. The stubbornly independent guardian of evenhanded law enforcement, highmindedly fending off Congressmen and Presidents who sought to use his agency for political purposes.

J. Edgar Hoover deserved some of that billing, although it was overblown from the start. Now, just three years after his death, a sharply different portrait is emerging of the man who built the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the world’s most reputable police organization through 48 years as its famed Director. To be sure, there had always been a few blemishes—some from scattered revelations through the decades, some from his own reckless conduct as he grew older and fought to retain the power he felt slipping away. But now, under congressional and journalistic scrutiny, as well as in the writings of his once fearful agents, a darker picture is coming into view.

In these new shades Hoover is seen as a shrewd bureaucratic genius who cared less about crime than about perpetuating his crime-busting image. With his acute public relations sense, he managed to obscure his bureau’s failings while magnifying its sometime successes. Even his fervent anti-Communism has been cast into doubt; some former aides insist that he knew the party was never a genuine internal threat to the nation but a useful, popular target to ensure financial and public support for the FBI.

Even more serious flaws in the Hoover character and official performance have come to light:

> Instead of insulating his bureau from politically sensitive Presidents, Hoover eagerly complied with improper requests from the men in the White House for information on potential opponents. If a President failed to ask for such information, the Director often volunteered it. He tapped the telephones of Government officials on request, perused files of politicians unasked, volunteered tidbits of gossip.

> He was a petty man of towering personal hates. There was more than a tinge of racism in his vicious vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. He had to be pushed into hiring black agents for the bureau.

> His informers, infiltrators and wiretappers delved into the activities of even the most innocuous and nonviolent civil rights and antiwar groups, trampling on the rights of citizens to express grievances against their Government. His spies within potentially dangerous extremist groups sometimes provoked more violence than they prevented.

> As an administrator, he was an erratic, unchallengeable czar, banishing agents to Siberian posts on whimsy, terrorizing them with torrents of implausible rules, insisting on conformity of thought as well as dress.

The fact that such a man could acquire and keep that kind of power raises disturbing questions not merely about the role of a national police in a democracy, but also about the political system that tolerated him for so long. The revelations show too that those political dissidents in years past who complained they were being harassed and spied upon were not so paranoid after all.

As the pendulum of public esteem swings away from the old Hoover reputation, the correction seems necessary, though it could also go too far. The Director’s defenders, at least, are outraged. “When the lion dies, the rats come out,” sneers Efrem Zimbalist Jr., longtime star of the once top-rated television series The FBI. Insists William Ruckelshaus, one of the victims of Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre: “Really, the man had only one motive. That was to make the FBI the finest investigative agency in the world.”

Certainly the post-Watergate morality casts a harsher light on official conduct that once was not questioned. In the cold war period, the Communist threat from abroad, if not at home, did look—and was—dangerous. Such FBI-infiltrated groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Weatherman did proclaim violence.

Throughout much of his career, Hoover used information compiled by his agents to build political support for the bureau. TIME has learned, for example, that Hoover went to one Senator with the revelation that his daughter was using hard drugs. Hoover agreed to keep the matter quiet—and thereby earned the Senator’s lasting gratitude. Similarly, when Hoover discovered that one Congressman was a homosexual, he visited the legislator to assure him that this news would never leak from the FBI—and thus made a new friend for the bureau.

The Director’s dealings with Presidents, as detailed two weeks ago by a Senate committee report (TIME, Dec. 15), were just as self-serving. Clearly the worst offender in demanding political information from Hoover was President Lyndon Johnson. Both men loved gossip and this type of intrigue. Hoover ingratiated himself with L.B.J. during the Justice Department’s investigation of Johnson’s congressional protégé and crony, Bobby Baker. Asked by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to “wire” someone to talk to a Baker friend, Hoover not only refused but reported the request to Johnson. The Justice Department lawyers went to Treasury agents instead and got the help they sought. That infuriated Johnson, who asked Hoover to check out Treasury for the men who helped Kennedy.

Always worried about Kennedy supporters in his midst, Johnson kept asking Hoover to investigate White House personnel. TIME has learned that Presidential Speechwriter Richard Goodwin resigned as the result of one such probe. Johnson also ordered FBI name checks on high officials in the Democratic National Committee for the same purpose. L.B.J. was so phobic about the Kennedys that when the Washington Star attacked him editorially, he asked Hoover to find out if there was any Kennedy money behind the paper. Since the FBI also had its own “enemies list” of newspapers critical of Hoover, the Director was sympathetic to such appeals.

Moreover, when Johnson’s aide, Walter Jenkins, was involved in a homosexual episode in 1964, L.B.J. suspected that a Barry Goldwater supporter may have set up the arrest. He angrily ordered Hoover to seek derogatory material on Goldwater’s Senate staff to be held for use if the Senator made an issue of the Jenkins matter in the presidential campaign. Goldwater never did so.

Johnson even directed Hoover to tap the phone of Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate Spiro Agnew in 1968 on the vague suspicion that Agnew was sending word to the South Vietnamese that they would get a better peace arrangement through Nixon if he was elected President than through L.B.J.

Such practices dated back to Franklin Roosevelt, who sought FBI name checks on U.S. isolationists in 1940 and began the practice of asking the FBI to wiretap some of his own top advisers, including Harry Hopkins and Tommy (“The Cork”) Corcoran.

Truman, by contrast, wanted nothing to do directly with Hoover, who had to deal with the President’s military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan. When Vaughan showed Truman an FBI transcript of the tap on Corcoran, Truman was unimpressed. It was about Mrs. Corcoran making appointments with her hairdresser. “Well, I don’t give a goddam whether Mrs. Corcoran gets her hair fixed or doesn’t get her hair fixed. What the hell is that crap?” Vaughan: “It’s a wiretap.” Truman: “Cut them all off. Tell the FBI we haven’t got any time for that kind of shit.”

Hoover seems to have had little more success in foisting political intelligence on Dwight Eisenhower. Although Jack Kennedy and his brother Robert, as Attorney General, went along with some of the Hoover wiretapping, the brothers posed new difficulty for the Director. For the first time Hoover found it impossible to bypass the Attorney General. Matters were not helped when Hoover visited Bobby for the first time at the Justice Department and the shirtsleeved young Attorney General threw darts throughout their conversation. The Director was outraged at what he considered disrespect. Bobby, moreover, often missed the dartboard and ripped the wall; to Hoover this was “a desecration of Government property.”

Bobby was the only Attorney General who dared summon Hoover by buzzer to his office. Kennedy, in fact, ordered a direct line placed in the Director’s office after discovering that this phone had been moved to the desk of Helen Gandy, Hoover’s secretary.

Out of fear, or respect, or both, many associates of Hoover have long refused to discuss publicly the personal side of the Director’s life. Even now, his posthumous grip is so firm in the minds of many that details of it are scarce. Yet some are dribbling out.

The man’s ample ego, for example, was shown by the way he furnished his $160,000 home, a red brick house in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. The foyer always greeted visitors with a photo of Hoover chatting with the incumbent President. A large portrait of Hoover graced the first landing of the stairs toward the second floor. A bronze bust of him stood for years at the top of the stairs. All four walls of the lower recreation room were papered with pictures of Hoover with various celebrities.

Given Hoover’s almost obsessive condemnation of illicit sexual activities of public figures, as well as the quick disciplining of any agents indiscreet enough to get caught in similar affairs, some visitors were surprised at the display of female nudity in Hoover’s house. There were numerous pieces of such sculpture, paintings, and even the celebrated nude photo of Marilyn Monroe.

Since Hoover has never been known to have had any romantic relationship with a woman, his own sex life has long been a subject of rumor, especially within the bureau. The talk has been fed by his close friendship with his FBI associate for 44 years, Clyde Tolson. The two dined and lunched together nearly every day, went to race tracks together on Saturdays, kept each other company on nearly every business or pleasure trip. Those who knew both men well feel certain that the relationship was not a sexual one. To support this feeling, they argue that Hoover was too openly scornful of homosexuals to have been one himself—which does not necessarily follow. At any rate, according to this view, the FBI consumed his passions totally, and he seems to have been basically asexual.

Another bachelor and lifelong FBI career man, Tolson never infringed on the Boss’s limelight, but could snap out orders to subordinates with all of Hoover’s authority and bite. Hoover left most of his estate to Tolson, who auctioned off much of it before his own death last spring.

It seems clear that Hoover was quite a miser. For some 20 years, he and Tolson dined nearly every night at Harvey’s, a topflight Washington restaurant owned by a Hoover friend. He never received a check but would leave a tip in cash. When the restaurant was sold, the two men continued dining at their reserved table, but quit when the new owner began sending Hoover a monthly bill.

Hoover, moreover, pocketed money from the bestselling book about U.S. Communism, Masters of Deceit, even though it was written under his byline by FBI agents working on Government time. On most every conceivable occasion, Tolson solicited gifts among top personnel for the Director. A record was kept of those foolish enough to fail to give. Hoover set up a tax-exempt charitable foundation to help support Freedoms Foundation, which gave at least two $5,000 personal-achievement awards to Hoover.

What sort of man was Hoover? “He was a charmer,” concedes one harsh critic, former Associate FBI Director William Sullivan in a Hoover biography, The Director by Ovid Demaris. “He was a brilliant chameleon. But he was also a master con man. That takes intelligence of a certain kind, an astuteness, a shrewdness. He never read anything that would broaden his mind or give depth to his thinking. I never knew him to have an intellectual or educated friend. Neither did Tolson. They lived in their own strange little world.”

Sullivan told TIME that Hoover was so intrigued by stories about expanding life spans through medical rejuvenation that he “ordered FBI officials in Switzerland to send him reports about a Swiss physician’s formula for prolonging life.” Added Sullivan: “He was a man with the ability to carry on 33 fights at the same time without slackening his pace or confusing one fight with another. He was always fighting—with other Government officials, with the immigration people, with the customs agency, with anyone who criticized him. The fights seemed to stimulate him.”

Hoover and Tolson’s world, of course, embraced the FBI—and, from the inside looking out, it was a unique atmosphere. There is little doubt that Hoover built an organization of competent, efficient, incorruptible investigators. But he also created a byzantine bureaucracy in which agents lived in states of recurring terror.

Hoover had so many rules of personal behavior and so many specific procedures for conducting investigations that in the rough world of dealing with crime, no agent could adhere to all of them. This bred a deep cynicism throughout the FBI and encouraged agents to find ways of breaking rules without getting caught. At the same time, agents spied on other agents. Even stenographers were encouraged to report violations, anonymously if they wished. Supervisors tried to blame subordinates for violations. There was no appeal when Hoover decided that an agent should be demoted, exiled to an undesirable post, or summarily fired.

The Director’s favorite punishment posts were Butte, Mont., Oklahoma City, and, surprisingly, New Orleans (Hoover thought the Louisiana climate was miserable, but many an agent gratefully accepted such punishment).

The result was an arcane world in which the Washington headquarters, where Hoover reigned so autocratically, was grandiosely referred to in internal FBI memos as the Seat of Government (SOG). Unofficially, the inspectors. whose nasty job was to check on procedural violations, were called “goons.” What they were seeking were “subs,” shorthand for “substantial violations” of either the three-volume Manual of Instructions, detailing how to pursue some 180 kinds of investigations, or of the thick Manual of Rules and Regulations, setting standards of personal conduct. Each lowly special agent in the field reported to an equally frightened Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) and to the regional bureau boss, the Special Agent in Charge (SAC).

ASAC dreaded the day when he would hear, in an echo of Mafia lingo, that there was “a contract out for him” from Hoover’s office. Then he knew the goons would promptly arrive to pore over every record of his bureau’s work. Inevitably, they would find cause for punishment—one of the mildest of which was to order the SAC to “hit the bricks” (a transfer from running a bureau to being an agent again). Some agents were convinced that Hoover had diabolically designed his rules to give him justification for firing almost anyone at any time.

Hoover was especially finicky about the appearance of agents (white shirts and dark ties, jackets on in the office, hair short). There were strict rules about the use of official cars (never drive them home overnight; no accidents, not even fender-benders). A late expense account could mean punishment. Unmarried agents were sometimes fired for sharing a hotel room with a woman. A SAC was once saved from demotion when aides to an inspector from Washington made passes at women in his office. The SAC, target of the investigation, reported the indiscretions to SOG—and the inspector was censured instead.

The evasions to skirt the rules were ingenious. To beat the anti-obesity program, one agent put lead weights in his pockets before stepping on the scales. In each successive weigh-in, he put in less metal. His superiors were impressed by such heroic efforts to reduce. No agent, of course, dared point out that Hoover looked a bit fleshy himself.

A glimpse into this bizarre life is offered by Joseph L. Schott, a retired 23-year veteran of FBI service, in his recent book No Left Turns. The title stems from the fact that Hoover’s limousine was once struck by another car while making a left turn. Agents thereafter were ordered to plan routes for Hoover so that his car rarely had to make a left turn. Schott claims that everyone around Hoover was too terrified to ask the boss what he meant by some of his impulsive comments. Thus, Schott reports, Hoover concluded one meeting of high FBI officials by saying: “I have been looking over the supervisors at the Seat of Government. A lot of them are clods. Get rid of them.” Instead of asking Hoover whom he had in mind, the officials formed a committee (others called it the Clod Squad). They managed to find one or two supervisors fed up enough with Washington to accept a transfer and thus appease Hoover.

Similarly, according to Schott, after a line of new agents just out of the FBI’s academy at Quantico, Va., filed past Hoover for the routine welcome, J. Edgar barked: “One of them is a pinhead. Get rid of him!” Hoover underlings secretly opened the recruits’ lockers and measured every hat (hats were mandatory) to find the man Hoover meant. When they discovered three tied for smallest size, all three were dismissed.

The sycophants around Hoover puzzled over his cryptic notes, always in blue ink, on orders and personnel files. The notes were known as “blue gems.” There was consternation when the Director wrote on one agent’s personnel record: “Give this man what he deserves.” The solution: the agent was given both a letter of censure and a transfer to a post he was seeking.

No whim of the Director’s was too insignificant to be ignored. Hoover once stayed at the home of a wealthy manufacturer of bathroom fixtures and liked the fancy commodes in the guest rooms. The host sent one to Hoover’s house. But, according to former Agent Schott, Hoover complained that it was too high. Agents duly measured the one at the manufacturer’s home and the new one in Hoover’s home. Sure enough, Hoover’s was two inches higher. A squad of agents worked through a weekend with a plumber to lower the fixture.

Though few if any agents were fond of Hoover’s nitpicking regulations, some found merit in his harsh disciplinary ways. “He imbued us with a spirit of belonging to something above the other agencies,” said Peter Kotsos, a former agent. “He built an esprit, and we lived in the knowledge that if you didn’t abide by the rules you got out.”

Although Hoover’s capriciousness took a heavy personal toll, he did indeed, singlehanded, take a corrupt and dismal organization and pound it into an impressive outfit. That part of the Hoover legend remains intact.

Hoover’s early history is familiar. Born in Washington on New Year’s Day, 1895. Son of a civil service worker. Presbyterian Sunday school teacher as a teenager. Law degrees from George Washington University night classes while a clerk at the Library of Congress by day. Joined Justice Department at 22. First major assignment: 1917, with War Emergency Division, dealing with enemy aliens. Transferred to the Bureau of Investigation at age 24 by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. Helped lead the “Palmer raids,” dragnet arrests that swept up hundreds of Russians and “radicals” across the nation. Named Assistant Director of the bureau in 1921, Director in 1924 at age 29.

The FBI achieved its fame after the Lindbergh kidnaping and the rash of major bank robberies in the early ’30s. The Hoover legend flourished amid a hoopla of bylined stories, radio shows and press releases.

Even then, the Hoover wonders were overdrawn. The FBI tried to conceal the fact that at first it had recovered the wrong baby’s body after the Lindbergh ordeal; the kidnaper, Bruno Hauptmann, was detected mainly through the tracing of ransom money by Treasury agents. The Dillinger killing in Chicago stemmed from a paid informer, the celebrated “Lady in Red,” rather than from clever police work. Hoover jealously failed to credit the agent in charge at the scene, Melvin Purvis, for his role; Purvis later quit.

Hoover’s wartime reputation for protecting U.S. defense plants against saboteurs and nailing German spies (eight were arrested while landing on Long Island) was well deserved. Although sometimes criticized as a haven for draft dodgers, the FBI performed counterespionage duties overseas as well. But after the war, Hoover suffered a bureaucratic blow when Congress created the CIA to handle foreign intelligence-gathering operations.

The agile Director recovered by embarking on his postwar anti-Communist campaign. His agents helped to arrest Alger Hiss, convicted of perjury for denying that he had been a Communist agent; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for treason; Colonel Abel, convicted for passing military secrets to the Russians. They blew one case against Judith Coplon by barging into her room without a warrant, causing charges of espionage to be dismissed.

Although both the bureau and Senator Joseph McCarthy denied it, Hoover’s men supplied the rampaging Wisconsin Republican with nearly all of the frail information he had about Communists in the U.S. Government. “I worked on it myself,” recalls a former agent. “But we didn’t have enough evidence to show there was one Communist in the State Department, let alone the 57 McCarthy was claiming.”

During the 1940s Hoover was reluctant to move against organized crime. Some FBI agents think they know why. They tell stories of Hoover sometimes traveling to Manhattan to meet one of the Mafia’s top figures, Frank Costello. The two would meet in Central Park. Costello apparently convinced Hoover that there was no organized Mafia—merely a loose collection of independent racketeers. (Some agents figure that Hoover also picked up some choice incidental tips from Gambler Costello on the Director’s passionately pursued avocation—laying $2 bets on the horses.) Hoover did not get cracking on the Mob until Attorney General Robert Kennedy insisted that he do so in 1961.

Mainly by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI was able to act swiftly in the early 1960s to solve several murders of civil rights workers in the South. But, as King charged, the bureau did little about enforcing civil rights laws that did not involve such sensational crimes. One reason: the FBI was concentrating on catching auto thieves and fugitives so as to keep its Southern bureaus’ arrest and recovery statistics on Hoover’s mandated upward curves.

It was King’s criticism that led Hoover to call him “the most notorious liar in the U.S.” and to launch an ugly vendetta against him. Hoover ordered one tape from a bugged Miami hotel room where King had been staying sent anonymously to King’s wife. The FBI sent word of King’s reported sexual activities to the Pope, trying to convince the Pontiff not to receive him.

One of Hoover’s men recalls discussing with the Director and another aide the FBI’s crusade against King. The aide claimed that the black leader had not only associated with Communists but that there was “a sexual matter.” King was homosexual? “No, no,” said the aide. “King isn’t queer.” “Then what’s the big problem?” the man asked. “King isn’t the only married guy who sleeps with other women.” Replied the aide as Hoover nodded agreement: “He sleeps with white women.”

Sex seemed often on Hoover’s mind. Shortly after the killing or wounding of 15 students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State in 1970, top-ranking officials of the Justice Department held a meeting to discuss a federal probe. At its end, Hoover took over and talked about only one topic: his belief that one of the coed victims had been sexually promiscuous. Recalled one official: “When Hoover finally ran down, no one else said a word. We all just got up and walked silently out of the room. We were all embarrassed.”

As Hoover became a public, bother, why didn’t Presidents try to retire him? Johnson made one weak effort. In 1967 he told his favorite Secret Service agent, Rufus Youngblood, to go to FBI headquarters and “take over.” Youngblood wandered around the bureau for several days. Hoover ignored him. L.BJ. changed his mind.

Nixon once screwed up the courage to edge Hoover out. He summoned the Director to breakfast in 1971 to offer him a special job as a consultant on crime, with an office close to Nixon’s own. Hoover, alerted, launched into a rapid-fire monologue all through the 45-minute breakfast, never letting the sensitive subject arise. Nixon, as a former aide put it, simply “chickened out.”

After one bitter Hoover diatribe at a Justice Department meeting, Assistant Attorney General Ruckelshaus called Attorney General John Mitchell aside. “We’ve got to get rid of that guy,” Ruckelshaus pleaded. “He’s getting worse all the time.” Replied the laconic Mitchell: “You’re right. Tell you what. I have to leave town later today, so I’m appointing you Acting Attorney General. You fire him.”

No braver, the Kennedys earlier had let the word out that if Jack had been re-elected in 1964, they would have retired Hoover when he reached his 70th birthday (Jan. 1,1965). Ethel Kennedy, spotting an FBI suggestion box at a Justice Department party, had even mischievously slipped in a note that Hoover ought to be replaced by the sheriff of Los Angeles County. The Director was not amused.

Some Washington veterans claim no President could possibly have fired Hoover because he held so much damaging information on all of them. Others scoffed at the blackmail notion, contending that Hoover was so popular (his ratings often were 90% or higher) that dismissing him would have been a grave political risk.

A disturbing question is why Hoover for so long was able to still any effective criticism. Didn’t journalists in particular know what kind of dirty tactics Hoover was employing? A few newsmen—Jack Anderson, Fred Cook, Tom Wicker, Jack Nelson—picked up and printed some facets of the dark side of Hoover. A few groups—Black Panthers, the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, Socia11st Workers Party, and Minutemen—had long been complaining, rightly as it turned out, about FBI harassment. But mostly, no one was listening. Even as late as 1973, most editors laughed when Norman Mailer threw a 50th birthday party for himself at Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant and urged the creation of “a democratic secret police to keep tabs on the bureaucratic secret police—the FBI and CIA.”

As in all of Hoover’s battles with various opponents, he was exceptionally adroit in handling the press. Long before Nixon, the FBI had its own enemies list of reporters and publications that seemed unfriendly and should be shunned on all inquiries, no matter how trivial. Anyone printing positive news about the FBI, on the other hand, might be favored with some of the FBI’s rare handouts of information on major stories. For a newsman, that was more readily productive than trying to interest an editor in some undocumented expose of FBI practices based on nervous, anonymous sources. The Los Angeles Times’ Jack Nelson tried anyway; soon his office was swirling with rumors that he was a drunk, and his boss got a letter from Hoover gently suggesting that Nelson be fired.

Has all that changed, now that the Director is gone? Some agents wonder. The new boss, Clarence Kelley, is a veteran and well-regarded lifelong police official. But Kelley is an outsider—he was chief of police in Kansas City, Mo.—and the FBI is still a closed corporation. The top officials under Kelley, in charge of the day-by-day supervision of the agency, are Hoover-trained loyalists. They are Associate Director Nicholas Callahan and Assistant Deputy Director James Adams. Both are also protégés of John Mohr, a retired Hoover aide still in touch with the bureau—close enough, some agents believe, that he in effect calls key signals.

Yet conditions are changing. Among the bureau’s 8,000 agents, there are now 103 blacks. Job applications still far exceed openings. Kelley does talk to his top agents around the country, and in the field—if not in Washington—morale is holding up. Many old petty rules have been relaxed. There is less emphasis on statistical achievements—stolen-car arrests and other easy shots—and more on white-collar crime, organized crime and other cases that rarely fatten the win column.

With all the public pressure and new scrutiny, any repeat of the old political abuses of civil rights seems unlikely. Mostly, it is a rocky time of buffeting for the bureau. The ship, in a sense, is dead in the water, awaiting new orders on new courses, which may well be set by Congress (see following story). Some may long nostalgically for the Old Man. But along the way, Hoover clearly lost that inner compass that had served the bureau so well for so many years.