Enemies: A History of the FBI (11 page)

Hoover’s own role in the political battle against Russian recognition was more subtle. He carefully fed documents from the Bureau’s files to trusted politicians and privately financed anti-Communist crusaders. He helped a former Associated Press reporter named Richard Whitney research a series of incendiary articles, later collected in a book,
Reds in America
, in which Whitney gratefully acknowledged Hoover’s personal assistance. Whitney argued that Soviet agents had an all-pervasive influence over American institutions; they had infiltrated every corner of American life. He called the Bridgman meeting a key moment in “
the most colossal conspiracy against the United States in its history.” He looked at the silent-movie studios of Hollywood and named Charlie Chaplin as a secret Communist. He charged his alma mater, Harvard, with harboring Communist sympathizers like Felix Frankfurter. He warned that the Comintern’s political agents in America were spearheading the Senate’s move to recognize Russia.

The movement toward Russian recognition halted; it would not revive for a decade. The argument against it seemed simple: why recognize a regime that wanted to overthrow the United States?

But the American government now seemed likelier to fall by the weight of its own corruption. The Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation were at the rotten core of it.

“A
SECRET POLICE
”

A gunshot inside the attorney general’s hotel suite marked the beginning of the end. At daybreak on May 30, 1923, Jess Smith, Daugherty’s roommate and right-hand man, put a bullet through his head at the Wardman Park Hotel. Their downstairs neighbor—William J. Burns, director of the Bureau
of Investigation—raced upstairs and took charge of the crime scene. But he could not keep the suicide quiet.

Three weeks later, President Harding left Washington for a long summer vacation, traveling cross-country to the Pacific Coast and embarking on a cruise to Alaska. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was aboard the ship when it set sail from Puget Sound on July 4. President Harding summoned him for a meeting in his cabin; Hoover recorded the conversation in his memoirs.

“
If you knew of a great scandal in our administration,” Harding asked, “would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?” The scandal, he made clear, was at the Justice Department. “Publish it,” Hoover replied. The president said that would be “politically dangerous” and he “abruptly dried up” when Hoover asked if Daugherty was the malefactor.

Harding’s heart stopped four weeks later, on August 2, 1923, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. He was dead at fifty-seven. His successor was the upright Calvin Coolidge, the former governor of Massachusetts, whose national reputation rested on his breaking of the Boston police strike. Coolidge was a dry and dour man, but he had morals. He needed them: the American presidency had sunk to its lowest state since the end of the Civil War.

The decay that had consumed the government of the United States slowly began to reveal itself, like wreckage after a flood. Senators Walsh and Wheeler investigated the worst of the scandals, though Daugherty and Burns did their best to stop them. They sent at least three Bureau agents out to Montana to drum up cases against the senators. The agents concocted a phony bribery charge against Wheeler; the indictment and prosecution were palpable frauds, founded on perjury. The jury quickly acquitted him.

Truths eventually came out. The Harding administration, from the top down, had been led by men who worshipped money and business, disdained government and law, and misled the American people. The secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, had taken some $300,000 in bribes from oil companies; in exchange, he let them tap the navy’s strategic oil reserves in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. The Justice Department had gotten wind of the scandal but had quashed an investigation. There was more: the head of the newly created Veterans Bureau, Charles Forbes, a poker-playing pal of Harding’s, had pocketed millions in kickbacks from contractors. A Justice Department official, Thomas Miller, had banked
bribes from corporations trying to free seized assets—and, years later, the evidence showed that Attorney General Daugherty had gotten at least $40,000 of the swag.

When Senator Wheeler announced that he and his colleagues had been the targets of the Bureau’s spies, the political outrage was sharp, and the public shared it. On March 1, 1924, the Senate resolved to investigate the Department of Justice. John H. W. Crim, the chief of the Criminal Division, was a willing witness. He was about to retire after eighteen years at Justice, including a stint at the Bureau. His advice to the Senate was blunt: “
Get rid of this Bureau of Investigation as organized.”

The senators subpoenaed Daugherty, demanding the Bureau’s internal records. Daugherty defied the order, and that was his undoing. It took weeks of pressure, but on March 28, President Coolidge announced that the attorney general was resigning. Daugherty eventually was indicted for fraud, but he avoided jail after two juries deadlocked. He escaped conviction by the grace of the Fifth Amendment’s constitutional safeguards against self-incrimination.

President Coolidge named his new attorney general: Harlan Fiske Stone, the longtime dean of the Columbia Law School, a pillar of legal scholarship, and a friend to Coolidge since college. Stone was not a liberal, by his own standards, but he stood foursquare in favor of civil liberties. He had been a pointed critic of the 1920 Red raids. He had urged the Senate to investigate the arrests and deportations of the radicals as an assault on the law and the Constitution.

Stone was sworn in on April 8, 1924, and he spent the next month walking the corridors of the Justice Department, talking to people and taking notes. Those notes show that he found the Bureau of Investigation “in
exceedingly bad odor … filled with men with bad records … many convicted of crimes … organization lawless … many activities without any authority in federal statutes … agents engaged in many practices which are brutal and tyrannical in the extreme.”

On May 9, Stone fired William J. Burns as director of the Bureau of Investigation. He then issued a public statement whose power resounds to this day:

A secret police system may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly comprehended or understood. The enormous expansion of Federal legislation, both civil and criminal, has made the Bureau of Investigation a necessary instrument of law enforcement. But it is important that its activities be strictly limited to the performance of those functions for which it was created and that its agents themselves be not above the law or beyond its reach.

The Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is only concerned with their conduct and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which should be our first concern to cherish. Within them it should rightly be a terror to the wrongdoer.

On May 10, Harlan Fiske Stone summoned J. Edgar Hoover, second in command of the lawless Bureau. Still seven months shy of thirty, his hair slicked back, thick neck straining at his tight shirt collar, Hoover looked up at Stone, who stood a head taller at six foot four. Stone looked down, with steely eyes under thick gray brows. He told Hoover that he was on trial.

For the time being, Stone said, Hoover would serve on an interim basis as the acting director of the Bureau of Investigation. Hoover was to report directly to Stone. And the rules of the game were going to change.

The Bureau would only investigate violations of federal law. The political hacks and the blackmailers were to be fired forthwith. No more midnight break-ins at the Capitol. No more cloak-and-dagger work. No more mass arrests. The Bureau would no longer be an instrument of political warfare. It was out of the spy business.

Hoover said yes, sir.

Stone made his terms plain and he made them public. He was in no hurry, he told the press. He was putting Hoover to the test. He wanted just the right man for the job. And until he found that man, he would run the Bureau himself.

Harlan Fiske Stone stayed on for nine months before ascending to the Supreme Court. Hoover lasted forty-eight years.

7

“THEY NEVER STOPPED WATCHING US”

T
HE SURVIVAL OF
the Bureau—and its revival as a secret intelligence service—depended on Hoover’s political cunning, his stoic patience, his iron will. In time, the man became the institution. They would withstand every political storm for the rest of his life. He never lost his faith that the fate of the nation lay with him and his work. And he never took his eyes off his enemies.

While Hoover was still on probation as acting director of the Bureau, Attorney General Stone heard a warning from a friendly acquaintance, Roger Baldwin, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Baldwin was an American aristocrat who traced his roots three hundred years back to the
Mayflower
; he had been investigated by the Bureau for political subversion and imprisoned for resisting the draft in World War I. The ACLU itself was created in 1920 chiefly to defend the constitutional rights of people prosecuted under the espionage and sedition laws.

Baldwin urged Stone to study a new ACLU report, “The Nation-Wide Spy System Centering in the Department of Justice.” It accused the Bureau of wiretapping, opening first-class mail, bugging, burglaries, political blacklisting, and spying on lawful organizations and individuals. The ACLU said the Bureau had become “a secret police system of a political character.” It noted that Hoover’s files were the fuel for the espionage machine—the General Intelligence Division, and its predecessor, the Radical Division, had driven the Bureau’s spying operations since 1919.

Stone read the report with intense interest. It described precisely the kind of conduct he had forsworn. He handed it to Hoover and asked him what he thought.

Hoover’s future depended on the skill of his scalding seven-page rebuttal. He insisted that the Bureau had investigated only “
ultra-radical” people
and groups breaking federal laws. Many if not most were “charged with activities inimical to our institutions and government.” The Bureau’s work since 1919 had been “perfectly proper and legal.” It had never wiretapped or burglarized anyone. “The Bureau has very rigid rules on matters of this kind,” he wrote. The ACLU, for its part, was “consistently and continually advocating … on the part of the communistic element,” taking civil liberty as criminal license. One week later, on August 7, 1924, Hoover, Baldwin, and Stone sat down for a conversation at the Justice Department. Hoover did most of the talking, as was his custom when confronted with a conversation that posed the potential for trouble. He maintained, as he did all his life, that he was not a willing participant in the Red raids. He assured Baldwin that the days of political espionage were over. He said the General Intelligence Division would be shut down—though he would keep its files unless Congress ordered him to burn them—and the Bureau would stick to the investigation of violations of federal law. He renounced his own past. He was utterly convincing. “
I think we were wrong,” Baldwin wrote to Stone a few days later. He told reporters that Hoover was the right man for the job. Hoover responded with a gracious thank-you note. It was his goal, he wrote, “to leave my desk each day with the knowledge that I have in no way violated the rights of the citizens of this country.”

The FBI kept right on infiltrating the ACLU throughout these exchanges of pleasantries, and in the months and years thereafter. In the fall of 1924, the Bureau maintained a spy on the ACLU’s executive board, purloined the minutes of its meetings in Los Angeles, and kept tabs on its donor lists. Seven weeks after his cordial meeting with Baldwin, Hoover was receiving new and detailed reports on the ACLU board’s legal strategies. His files grew to include dossiers on the group’s leaders and prominent supporters, among them one of the world’s most famous women, the deaf and blind Helen Keller. Hers became one file among thousands in the FBI’s unique history of the American civil-liberties movement.

“We never knew about the way that Hoover’s FBI kept track of us,” Baldwin said half a century later. “They never stopped watching us.”

Nor did Hoover abolish the General Intelligence Division. On paper, the division disappeared. But its lifeblood, the files, remained. To preserve their secrecy, Hoover created an entirely new record-keeping system called “Official and Confidential.” These documents were kept under his control. In theory, the Bureau’s centralized records belonged to the Justice Department. They were vulnerable to discovery in the courts or subpoena by Congress.
The “Official and Confidential” files maintained by Hoover were his and his alone. For fifty years they remained his inviolate cache of secrets. His power to spy on subversives depended on secrecy, not publicity. Confidential files were far better than blaring headlines. Despite the dangers of discovery, Hoover and the Bureau maintained surveillance over America’s Communists.