THE ADMINISTRATION: The Long Reign of J. Edgar Hoover

JOHN EDGAR HOOVER’S death at 77 refreshed memories of an extraordinary fund of Americana—a long, single-minded and complicated life that became a unique national presence. Hoover and the FBI were one—creator and creation. He served eight Presidents as the world’s most powerful policeman. With a genius for administration and popular myth, he fashioned his career as an improbable bureaucratic morality play peopled by bad guys and G-men. The drama worked well enough when everyone agreed on the villains—”Pretty Boy” Floyd, John Dillinger, Nazi agents—but finally curdled somewhat in more ambiguous days.

Almost no one ever challenged Hoover’s personal ethics, only the truculently moralistic and political code he followed and the methods he sometimes used to enforce it. Even at the end, he was a difficult target, for the vast police organization that he built almost singlehanded, which today has 19,401 employees, including 8,586 special agents, has over the years been astonishingly uncontaminated by outside political influence. The number of FBI agents convicted of a crime: none. Hoover’s bureau set the standard and wrote the rules for effective law enforcement throughout the world. No criticism could detract from his extraordinary achievement—the difficult establishment in a turbulent democracy of a national law-enforcement agency that was honest, expert and free from partisan taint.

Hoover once considered becoming a Presbyterian minister, but he obviously had a vocation elsewhere. The son of a Washington civil servant, he worked as a Library of Congress clerk while taking night courses at George Washington University. He earned a law degree in 1916 and a master’s a year later.

His bureaucratic rise was rapid. He joined the Justice Department in 1917, and two years later was head of a new general intelligence division ordered to study subversives during the “Palmer Raids,” an anti-Bolshevist dragnet that made McCarthyism a generation later seem a model of tolerance. It was Hoover’s first encounter with Communism, which all of his life he regarded as “the greatest menace free civilization has ever known.”

Vintage Year. In 1924, Attorney General (later Supreme Court Justice) Harlan Fiske Stone offered to make Hoover director of the department’s Bureau of Investigation, then a slovenly, corrupt outfit. Though only 29, Hoover insisted that he would take the job only if the bureau were divorced from politics and the civil service. He established an absolute authority at the beginning. He demanded that his agents have either a law or an accounting degree, resisted any and all political pressures. Hoover turned the bureau into the world’s most efficient crime-fighting apparatus, with an elaborate fingerprint library and crime laboratory. In 1930, the FBI became the clearinghouse for national crime statistics, reported by state and local authorities.

But it was not until 1932 that Hoover and the FBI took hold of the national imagination. Kidnaping had grown to something of an epidemic, most notoriously dramatized by the Lindbergh affair. Hoover’s men broke that case, and with the help of the Lindbergh Act, which made kidnaping a federal crime punishable by death, eventually curbed that particular vogue. Two years later, gangsters mowed down an FBI agent and several policemen in the “Kansas City Massacre,” and the FBI won the right to bear firearms and make arrests.

The vintage year was 1934. John Dillinger fell to the FBI on a Chicago street (his death mask was to survive as a tourist attraction at headquarters in Washington). “Baby Face” Nelson dropped on an Illinois highway. Not long after, Russell Gibson of the Barker-Karpis gang was killed resisting arrest in a Chicago alley. Then “Ma” Barker and her son Fred were killed fighting agents in Florida. Tennessee Senator Kenneth D. McKellar was incautious enough in 1936 to sniff that Hoover himself had never made an arrest, so less than a month later Hoover personally presided over the collaring of Alvin (“Old Creepy”) Karpis, whom the FBI called “Public Enemy No. 1.” (Karpis got the last word by insisting later that Hoover cowered in the background and waited for agents to put on the cuffs before he appeared to pose for pictures.)

A kind of comic-strip hero worship began. At his arrest in 1933, “Machine Gun” Kelly supposedly pleaded: “Don’t shoot, G-men; don’t shoot!” The coinage was to appear on G-man pajamas, G-man toy submachine guns, and the lips of a generation of radio actors. The FBI in Peace and War, introduced by the somber, implacable kettledrums of Prokofiev, fostered the image of relentless baritones in service to the general good. Much later, Hoover reserved his Sunday nights for watching TV’s FBI, starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., a paragon of rectitude specifically approved by the director himself.

During the ’30s, Hoover’s agents were mainly preoccupied with kidnapers, robbers and murderers. During the war, F.D.R. commissioned Hoover to search out Nazi spies and saboteurs. The FBI took 33 German agents on one weekend in 1941. But Hoover protested strongly when thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans were interned as part of the spy scare. After the war, the FBI focused increasingly on the pursuit of Communists, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. “There is little choice,” he once said, “between Communism and Fascism. Both are totalitarian, antidemocratic and godless.”

His prides and prejudices were strong, especially where the autonomy of his bureau was concerned. With Attorney General Robert Kennedy he fought a long battle of wills over FBI operations and their animosity was obvious. It was in a curt call from Hoover that R.F.K. learned of John Kennedy’s assassination. Though Robert remained Attorney General for ten more months, they never spoke again after Nov. 22.

For several decades, Hoover was a figure of heroic probity—another generation’s pistol-packing version of Ralph Nader. Unmarried to the end, he lived with his mother until her death in 1938. For recreation, he went to the racetrack, usually with his lifelong friend Clyde Tolson, who became Associate Deputy Director of the bureau; Hoover always cautiously restricted himself to the $2 window. In the ’30s and ’40s, he began to appear in New York nightclubs, such as the Stork Club, with cronies, notably Walter Winchell, but he would have only one drink, or two at most. Columnist Jack Anderson, whose agents assiduously went through Hoover’s trash cans recently in an exercise of exceptionally personal journalism, confirmed that he liked to drink Jack Daniels.

Hoover ultimately came to his police work with a vision of national destiny. If his FBI was incorruptible, it became at the same time an instrument of his zealotry. He exaggerated the domestic Communist menace while for years curiously neglecting organized crime. His men were swift to find the bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Chancy and Michael Schwerner after they were killed in Philadelphia, Miss., and to solve the Klan killing of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo in Alabama; yet they seemed slow otherwise to enforce the cause of civil rights. When Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that Southern FBI offices were unsympathetic to blacks, Hoover called him “the most notorious liar in the country.”

Embattled End. Perhaps the ’60s, with their extravagances of assassinations and riots and accelerating crime, were more than his stern and orderly mind could accommodate. He had become a legend whose own sense of discipline and integrity prevented many of the abuses that his vast power made him capable of. Yet toward the end the myth had begun to deteriorate. There were charges that the FBI was tapping Congressmen’s phones. Even if that claim was never proved, it did suggest the critics’ general theme: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was in his last days dangerously turning its resources to ideological purposes—harassing political radicals and even liberals, accumulating a frightening inventory of dossiers. And even within Hoover’s granitically disciplined bureau, the cracks were showing. Morale had deteriorated. Last fall Hoover forced out one of his top deputies, William Sullivan, in a feud that jarred the bureau’s highest ranks.

For J. Edgar Hoover, it was an unhappy, embattled end. After nearly half a century of his masterful, autocratic reign, the word senility was loudly whispered about. President Nixon’s highest advisers counseled him to find a dignified moment to ease Hoover out, and although the President resisted, he undoubtedly would have done so as soon as the criticism had sufficiently faded. Instead, the moment was chosen for him. One night last week in his neo-Georgian house at the edge of Washington’s Rock Creek Park, John Edgar Hoover died of hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

His body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda—the first civil servant ever to be so honored. The next day, in Washington’s National Presbyterian Church, not far from the house where Hoover was born, Richard Nixon did him the additional honor of delivering the funeral eulogy. The two men had had a mutual admiration ever since the days when Nixon, a freshman Congressman from California, had begun his pursuit of Alger Hiss and “the Communist conspiracy.” Hoover, said Nixon, “was one of the giants, a man who helped keep steel in America’s backbone and the flame of freedom in America’s soul.”