All things J. Edgar Hoover

jedgarhoover
J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, after having
led the FBI for over 40 years.

This month, we give you all things J. Edgar Hoover: photos, movie links, books excerpts, cartoons, and the rest.  Check this page for the latest, below:

 — Own Clyde Tolson’s actual apartment !  Yes, this is FOR REAL !!

— Hoover: Andrew Simpson on J. Edgar as a student at George Washington University

Hoover: A journalist’s view — Charles Elliott on searching J. Edgar”s trash.

Hoover: The view of an FBI veteran;

Still more snapshots of J. Edgar, including in the White House, 1930s-1970.

More photos of J. Edgar hoover in the 1930s.

J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson — the actual photos

A few cartoons of J. Edgar Hoover.

  — “The Real J. Edgar Hoover,” interview with NPR’s “On Point,” 11/9/2011.

— “Five Myths about J. Edgar Hoover,” Washington Post, 11/9/2011.

Washington Post web conversation on Hoover “5 Myths” article.

–SPECIAL FEATURE: a free peek at Young J. Edgar, the opening chapter in its entirely.

My favorite photo of J. Edgar Hoover 

Guest Photo: Hoover and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach

SNEAK PREVIEW: New edition of YOUNG J. EDGAR now available on Amazon.com

MOVIES: Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover — Looking good so far.

DiCaprio as J. Edgar, from the new movie.

“Mr. Black said he had been interested in Hoover ever since his brother gave him a copy of a book called ‘Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties.’” 
Interview with Dustin Lance Black, screenwriter for the firm “J. Edgar,”  WSJ “Speakeasy,” 11/4/2011.

Hoover in 1924, from the new
edition of Young J. Edgar.

 

Young J. Edgar

YOUNG J. EDGAR: 

Hoover and the Red Scare, 1919-1920

 “As hard as Mr. Ackerman is on Hoover, he does not demonize him.   .[His] moral is apparent in his conclusion: ‘To the extent that our modern war on terror is paralleling the attitudes of the 1919-1920 Red Scare, we have to wonder: How many young J. Edgar Hoovers are we creating today?'”
-Carl Rollyson, New York Sun, May 2007.

Hoover+new.JPGOn June 2, 1919, bombs exploded simultaneously in nine American cities, including one that destroyed the home of the Attorney General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer, and nearly killed him.  In the aftermath of World War I, America suddenly faced a new enemy—radical terrorism.  Concerned that new American Communist parties threatened revolution, Palmer vowed a crackdown.

To lead it, he turned to his youngest aide, J. Edgar Hoover, just twenty-four years old, who already made a name for himself as a zealous wartime bureaucrat.  Now, under Palmer’s wing, Hoover helped execute a series of brutal nationwide raids, bursting into homes without warrants or warning, arresting almost 10,000 Americans and assembling secret files on hundreds of thousands of suspects and political enemies.

Amid the hysteria, truth of the abuses emerged, prompting a backlash.  A handful of lawyers like Clarence Darrow, Felix Frankfurter, and Harlan Fisk Stone (the latter two future Supreme Court justices) dared to defy Palmer publicly.  But as Palmer’s reputation fell, his young protégé Hoover survived to become the most controversial American law enforcement figure of the Twentieth Century, uniquely praised, feared, and condemned. In 1924, he was asked to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a post he would hold for five decades until his death in 1972.

In Young J. Edgar, I have tried to bring to portray the drama of Palmer’s raids and Hoover ’s coming of age in a narrative rife with modern overtones.

 


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Visit All Things J. Edgar Hooverlinks to Hoover photos, cartoons, background, so on.


Interviews on Young J. Edgar:


Reviews of Young J. Edgar:

HOOVER: A journalist’s view — Charles Elliott on searching J. Edgar’s trash.

Another great comment I received on my recent Washington Post article “Five Myths about J. Edgar Hoover,” came from Charles Elliott, a journalist at the time who participated in a key investigation of Hoover.  Here’s his full description of the episode from his blog Clarity Research: Ruminations of a researcher/writer.  He’s given us permission to reprint it here:  



Columnist Jack Andrerson, circa 1970.  Anderson
reached an average 40 million readers through his
“Washington Merry-Go Round” column, and had
a proud spot on President Nixon’s “Enemies List.”

 When I saw it recently, Clint Eastwood’s interesting new film, “J. Edgar,” stirred old memories for me. I know firsthand that he got at least one thing wrong, and missed another major opportunity to accurately portray long-time FBI director Hoover in his last days. 

In 1971, I was a young reporter in Washington, D.C. Eager to prove my investigative reporting chops in the big leagues, I had just transitioned to a position as a leg man for columnist and ABC TV personality Jack Anderson. Anderson had heard that President Richard Nixon wanted to replace the top G-man. So Anderson decided to put Hoover under surveillance using the same techniques that the FBI was then known to be using against Jane Fonda and others accused of no crimes but being harassed by the government for opposing its policies, especially the Vietnam War. 
I was sent out to interview Hoover’s neighbors in his upscale Northwest Washington neighborhood, stake out his house, follow his chauffeured limo, watch him and his number two man, Clyde Tolson, as they ate lunch every day at that same corner table in the Rib Room at the Mayflower Hotel up on Connecticut, and pick up Hoover’s trash.
There is a reference in the film to the possibility of going to Tolson’s “house” for dinner. But I know firsthand that Tolson actually had a highrise apartment in 1971, not a house. I know because Anderson had heard that Tolson owned a collection of antique vehicles formerly belonging to major crime figures arrested by the FBI. So he sent me out to look. Tolson’s building had a parking structure underneath, I found, and there were, indeed, several antique black vehicles from the 1930s parked there.
The Eastwood film does not include any reference to Anderson or my work for him. But at least two major biographies of Hoover included an account of my escapades picking up Hoover’s trash. I did so on several occasions, the most notable being one morning with a reporter from Washingtonian Magazine riding along with me.
The L-shaped alley adjacent to Hoover’s two-story brick house ran behind to the west and then on the north to the street east of the house. When we pulled up to the trash cans in the alley beside the house, we noticed that Hoover’s limo was still at the curb out front, engine running, and a film crew from ABC was across the street. Apparently the film crew wanted to grab a quick interview with Hoover on the way to work, but Hoover was refusing to come out of the house until they left.


Hoover’s official car in 1971, a Cadillac Fleetwood,
recently sold on eBay for $6,677.77.
Click here for that story.



Nonetheless, I opened the trunk of a large car I had borrowed for the occasion, and began loading Hoover’s trash into the car. Suddenly the film crew noticed me and began filming. That alerted the people in the house to my presence. Within a minute or two, Hoover’s chauffeur — a tall black man who seemed to be nearly seven feet tall — came to the side gate and loomed over me.
“What do you think you are doing?” he demanded.
I knew the applicable law at the time in Washington was English common law, which held anything put out as trash to have been abandoned by the former owner. Anyone could legally pick it up.
“He put it out to be picked up and I am picking it up,” I said simply, continuing to load the car. Fortunately the film crew continued to film. My chances of being assaulted or at least physically restrained seemed diminished by their presence. I flashed them a “V” for victory.
Meanwhile, my companion from Washingtonian remained in the front passenger seat in the car, but he was now shaking like a leaf.
“Don’t you think you’ve got enough?!?” he kept asking piteously. “Don’t you think you’ve got enough?”


Charles Elliot in 1971 standing by Hoover’s trash can, in 
alley on north side of Hoover’s Washington, D.C. home. 
Photo by ABC News.



When I finished my work to my satisfaction, I closed the trunk and we drove away.


Anderson reported on the basis of these forays into Hoover’s wasteland that the top G-man meticulously wrote menus for his housekeeper to prepare on small stationery emblazoned, “From the Desk of the Director.” While he and Clyde generally had a light lunch at the Rib Room, evening meals were heavy with beef and rich desserts. Although Hoover had railed against the evils of drink in WTCU publications, the trash included miniature Jack Daniels Black Label Whiskey bottles. The public and private man seemed greatly at variance. And there were Gelusil packages, too. Anderson suggested tongue-in-cheek that it was possible Hoover no longer had the stomach for his job.
Hoover responded dourly, “The only time I have indigestion is when I read a certain man’s column!”  
From my perspective, the major thing the Eastwood film missed, though, was Hoover’s severe paranoia in his last years. Hoover’s neighbors told me that he would not enter or leave his waiting car at the curb any time a long-haired youthful neighbor was anywhere within sight. And they pointed out that he placed a hat on the rear shelf of the limo, then sat on the other side and hunkered down. At the Rib Room, I also observed, Hoover and Tolson sat side-by-side with their backs to a wall, and vigilantly faced the entry way. The last time Hoover saw me there, he scowled at me.
He must have been particularly shocked when he began trying to find out who I was, and learned that my roommate was the son of an FBI Special Agent stationed in Oregon, and that the large apartment we shared with two other young men had been rented in the agent’s name. I do know that the agent was soon on the phone to his son, and the son made certain that I moved out. But not before a couple of men — one older, one younger — showed up with a large old Graphflex camera outside the building as I arrived home from the office. Since Anderson by then had written about my work regarding Hoover, I considered the possibility that they were with a wire service or some other news organization newly interested in my story.
“Who are you guys with?” I asked as they blinded me with the flash, taking pictures.
“Oh,” said the older fellow in ominous tones, “we’re just neighbors!” 
While taking the last of my things out of that apartment one day when my roommate was absent, I found a letter from Hoover to my former pal. “Thank you for your actions in regard to this Charles Elliott matter,” Hoover wrote, adding to my astonishment that he especially appreciated my roommate’s “concern for my personal safety.” 
I also know Eastwood’s film got the entry hall of Hoover’s house all wrong, since I went to the door one morning and looked in through the screen while Hoover was away at work and a cleaning crew was in there with everything wide open. That entry way was sparse in the film, but the real one would have provided a telling indication of his character, since immediately to the right inside was a pedestal with an imposing, life-sized bust of J. Edgar Hoover. And the wall behind it was covered with such things as framed letters of commendation, plaques awarded for achievement and photos of Himself posing with presidents including Harding, Coolidge, Roosevelt, and Truman.
After his death, Hoover’s closed coffin was placed in the Rotunda of the Capitol,  and more than 25,000 visitors passed by to pay their final respects. The coffin was kept closed. A camera was set up at the bier, and everyone who passed by was filmed. Someone was making a movie, checking to see who showed up. As I recall, I smiled into the camera. That time, too.  

Chuck Elliott is a retired journalist who served as a featured daily columnist, investigative reporter and editor in local news and was managing editor of the nation’s leading trade magazine for the propane industry. He has three published books on Southern California history, is a nationally published poet with more than 280 poems online at The Beautyseer Channel on YouTube, an award-winning fine art photographer, and freelances as a writer and marketing consultant. Visit him at Linked (http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=81992875&trk=tab_pro), read his Clarity Research blog,  and check out his poetry on YouTube.  

SPECIAL FEATURE: a free peek at Young J. Edgar

          Before seeing the new film J. Edgar with Leonardo DiCaprio,  take a free peek at the opening chapter of Young J. Edgar, presented in its entirely.   We hope you enjoy it.  
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1.  Denials 

Washington, D.C., May 10, 1924, four years after the Palmer Raids. 

    THE DOOR CLOSED and J. Edgar Hoover found himself alone with his

boss, Harlan Fiske Stone, the new Attorney General of the United

The photo shows J. Edgar Hoover, circa 1920.

States. “He told me brusquely to sit down and looked at

me intently over the desk,” Edgar recalled years later,

telling the story for the hundredth  time. He snapped to

the command. Stone cut an imposing figure. He stood

six and a half feet tall, weighed 250 pounds, was almost
 
twice Edgar’s age of 29,  and a full head higher. Stone
 
loved fishing, and proudly displayed a medal he’d won
 
from the Long Island Country Club for hauling in a 36-
ounce trout.

        Stone wasted no time on small talk. Edgar tried to

raise administrative odds and ends, but Stone cut him off.

“Then he said to me ‘Young man, I  want you to be

Acting Director of the Bureau of Investigation.’”

               J. Edgar Hoover still had boyish good looks in 1924: wavy dark hair, a

bright face, and flashy brown eyes. He dressed smart in the latest fashions,

double-breasted suits, vests, spats, cashmeres and tweeds, crisp white shirts,

like any other up and coming child of the Jazz Age. He spit out his words in

a confidant fast staccato, a delivery he had forced on himself as a teenager to

stop stuttering. He had to be thrilled at the offer. The new Attorney General

was paying him a stunning compliment and offering a rare career opportunity.

He looked back across the desk at Stone and studied the older man’s brown

eyes peering back over his glasses, the bushy eyebrows, the massive forehead,

the receding brown hair.

Leonardo DiCaprio as young Hoover
from the film “J. Edgar”

               “I’ll take the job, Mr. Stone, but only

on certain conditions,” he answered. Harlan

Stone gave a quizzical look. It took a rare

cockiness for anyone, certainly a youngster like

J. Edgar Hoover, to play coy at a moment like

this, on being offered a top Federal post.
 
            Stone had spent weeks trying to decide

whom to pick as the new chief for the Bureau

of Investigation. Scandal engulfed Washington

in 1924, the notorious

“Teapot Dome,” named for the stretch of Wyoming desert that held

one of the United States Navy’s principal oil reserves. Interior Secretary Albert

B. Fall faced prison for leasing these lands to oil industry friends in 1922

in exchange for bribes, prompting a criminal prosecution making headlines

across the country. But the scandal went deeper. Senate hearings that spring

had uncovered a sewer of corruption at the Department of Justice and its Bureau

of Investigation: graft and kickbacks from gangsters and bootleggers,

agents with criminal records, badges being issued to private provocateurs

(called “dollar-a-year men”) who grew rich on extortion, and Bureau agents

assigned to harass members of Congress. As the details came out, insiders

tagged Justice with a new name: the Department of Easy Virtue.

Harlan Fiske Stone in 1924.

           In March 1924, a new President, Calvin Coolidge,

brought in a new Attorney General to clean up the mess, an

old-line reformer and long-time dean of New York’s

Columbia University Law School. This new man was

Harlan Fiske Stone.
      
           Reaching Washington in April 1924, Stone barely

knew where to start.  “When I became Attorney General, the

Bureau of Investigation was…in exceedingly bad odor,” he

recalled.  Reaching the Justice Department building on

Vermont Avenue, Stone found himself an outsider,

surrounded by strangers. “I don’t know whom to trust; I

don’t know any of these people,” he lamented.

              Installing a new chief at the Bureau of Investigation

would be his biggest step yet. The day before, on May 9, 1924, he had fired the Bureau’s corrupt

sitting Director, a cigar-chomping, wise-cracking former private detective namedWilliam J. Burns. Now,

to replace him—at least temporarily—he had sent for J. Edgar Hoover.

             Edgar had no social pedigree and no Ivy League diploma. He had earned

his law degree from George Washington University and his father had been

a mere government clerk, a map printer at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.

And he was so young, younger than most of the Bureau agents he’d be

expected to supervise. Would they respect him? Would he have the backbone

to stand up to older entrenched powers? Oddly, Harlan Stone thought

yes.Who could miss the hard work, the professional polish, the competence

of the young man? Stone frequently saw Edgar working long hours at the office,

staying well past dinner each night and routinely working on weekends.
 
Edgar had a command of detail, an ability to decide questions, and a willingness

to give orders. He seemed to have no social life, no girl friends and few

close office buddies. Other than belonging to a handful of men’s clubs like the

Masons, the Sigma Delta and Kappa Alpha fraternities, and the University

Club, he made his job his life.

            And now, this latest wrinkle—the fact that this young J. Edgar Hoover

had the composure and confidence to set his own conditions on the job as Bureau

Chief—only deepened Harlan Stone’s growing respect.

           “What are they?” the Attorney General asked.

           Edgar had come prepared. As Stone studied him from across his polished

desktop, Edgar proceeded to lay out an agenda of ideas that couldn’t help but

impress even the most zealous reformer. “The Bureau must be divorced from

politics and not be a catch-all for political hacks. Appointments must be

based on merit. Promotions will be made only on proven ability. And the bureau

will be responsible only to the Attorney General.”

           Despite his age, Edgar already counted himself a Justice Department veteran

by 1924, having worked there for seven years since starting in 1917 as a

22-year-old clerk. It had been Edgar’s first job after earning his law degree, and

he’d made the most of it.
 
         America had entered WorldWar I during that summer of 1917 and Edgar

should have topped any list for military service. He was smart, fit, and welltrained,

valedictorian of his high school graduating class, captain of its cadet

corps and leader of its track and debate teams. He even led the school’s cadets

marching down Pennsylvania Avenue inWoodrowWilson’s 1913 inaugural

parade. Born and raised inWashington, D.C. in a modest neighborhood near

the U.S. Capitol, a few boyhood friends still called him “Speed,” a nickname

he earned as a 10-year old when he carried grocery bags for a few nickels for

old ladies in the neighborhood. A typical high school report card gave him

good grades for English, French, History and Physics, but perfect grades,

straight E’s, for Neatness.

           His mother raised him Lutheran and he once sang soprano in the church

choir, through he switched and joined a Presbyterian church as a teenager,

drawn by a charismatic local preacher who organized baseball games and got

Edgar to teach Sunday school.

            But family duty had squelched any thought of his joining the Army in

1917. That spring, Edgar’s father had been forced by higher-ups to quit his job

as a Federal government clerk after 42 years, losing his pension and leaving
 
the family with no income. Earlier, his father had been committed to an asylum

in Laurel, Maryland, for chronic depression, what his doctors called

“melancholia,” a little-understood, debilitating condition marked by dejection,

self-loathing, disinterest in the outside word and suicidal thoughts.

Edgar, the youngest of three children, became his parents’ main financial support.

So as America went to war in 1917 and he watched school friends ship

off to face death in European trenches, Edgar stayed home and used a family

tie to win a draft-exempt desk job at the Justice Department.

             At Justice, Edgar had engineered a meteoric rise. During the War, he

went to work for the newly-formedWar Alien Enemy Bureau, responsible for

tracking German residents on U.S. soil. He earned repeated promotions and,

after the Armistice, won a spot on the Attorney General’s staff, then another

series of promotions in the Department’s Bureau of Investigation. By 1924,

Edgar had climbed the ladder to become one of Justice’s top officials.

            He had mostly kept his nose clean during Teapot Dome. As the scandals

worsened, he avoided them by burying himself in the Bureau’s routine paperwork

and a few special cases that caught his eye. By the time the new Attorney

General called him in for a talk, he had prepared himself to deliver a

perfect pitch. Harlan Stone found Edgar’s conditions very appropriate; in fact,

they were exactly what he wanted to hear. “I wouldn’t give [the job] to you

under any other conditions,” Stone told him from across the desk. Then, just

as abruptly, he ended the conversation. “That’s all. Good day.”

           Edgar followed Stone’s lead in executing a catalog of new reforms. He

fired scores of incompetents, hacks, and dollar-a-year men, raised standards

for new recruits, and directed his agents to stop the political witch hunts and

keep the Bureau’s activities “limited strictly to investigations of violations of

law,” as Stone put it.  In applying the rules, Edgar refused to be bullied by

politicians, and Stone consistently backed him. Stone was delighted with his

protégé. He praised Edgar as “a man of exceptional intelligence, alertness,

and executive ability” who gave “far greater promise than any other man I had

heard of.”

             Stone took only seven months to declare his experiment a success. In

December 1924, he named Edgar the permanent Director of the Bureau of Investigation,

later renamed the FBI.

           J. Edgar Hoover would hold the Directorship for forty-eight years, until

the day he died in 1972 as the most controversial law enforcement figure of

the Twentieth Century. He would achieve mythic status in America, building
 
the FBI into a pillar of government, with over 8,600 agents and a budget

of $336 million. His reorganization of the Bureau in the 1920s under Harlan

Fiske Stone drew wide praise. In the 1930s, he made headlines solving the

Lindbergh baby kidnapping case and capturing or killing gangsters like John

Dillinger, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Lester “Baby Face” Nelson. He

introduced scientific crime fighting, an FBI National Academy and Crime

Laboratory, Uniform Crime Reports, and a Fingerprint Division whose files

by 1974 held a staggering 159 million sets of prints. In the 1940s and 1950s,

boys across the country dreamed of growing up to be G-Men, portrayed on

screen by movie and television stars like James Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, and

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

             But all these achievements came with a cost. By the 1960s, his abusive

probes of leftists, VietnamWar protestors, and Civil Rights leaders likeMartin

Luther King, Jr. made him a figure to be feared. Stories abounded about

Hoover’s power, how he could blackmail presidents, senators, and movie stars

with voluminous, secret sex files that he kept on so many. Even after death,

his legend grew. Congressional probes would reveal decades of FBI abuses:

black bag jobs, covert wiretaps, and systematic violations of law. Later biographies

cast him in surprising roles, some doubtful, some plausible, from stories

of cross-dressing to suggestions of his being one of America’s highest ranking

gay men, or the descendant of an African-American ancestor.*
________________________
* Hoover’s homosexuality, now part of the accepted legend, has never been established and is
doubted by some biographers. The cross-dressing story, unearthed by Anthony Summers in his 1993

biography, has raised particular doubts because it seems contrary to Hoover’s extreme discretion and

self-discipline; its sourcing has been questioned by, among others, biographers Athan Theoharis

and Richard Hack. If Hoover had a gay relationship, it was probably a stable, monogamous, and

discreet one with long-time confidante and FBI associate director Clyde Tolson, but this too is unproven.

Hoover’s attraction to sex secrets and sex files, though, is well established. The possibility

of his having an African-American ancestor, explored by Millie McGhee, is not unlikely given

Hoover’s father’s family roots in Virginia and Maryland in the Antebellum South.
__________________________

              Throughout his life, Edgar never tired of telling the story of how Harlan

Stone first asked him to take the job of Director back inMay 1924. He made

it part of his legend. He required every young FBI recruit for the next fifty

years to learn it in basic training. He insisted that every authorized FBI history

feature it as an icon. No one ever questioned the story’s truth.

            But this too, like most things involving J. Edgar Hoover, had a dark side.

The story was based on a lie. In fact, it was Edgar’s favorite kind: the elegant

silence of a kept secret. The conception was not immaculate at all. In convincing
 
Harlan Stone to give him the acting job that day in 1924, bright,

fresh-faced, earnest young J. Edgar Hoover had cheated the older man.

                                                            

                Of all the abuses bothering Harlan Fiske Stone on that cool spring day in

May 1924 when he decided to choose Edgar as his instrument to reform the

tarnished Bureau of Investigation, none rankled him more than the anticommunist

crackdowns of 1919 and 1920, already known infamously as the

Palmer Raids. They were named for his predecessor, Attorney General A.

Mitchell Palmer, once a leading progressive who now lived in sad obscurity

inWashington, D.C. But back during his height of power in 1919 and 1920,

Palmer had directed Federal agents and local police to go and round up between

5,000 and 10,000 people in a three-month orgy of government bullying.

Many were held for months in cramped, filthy, makeshift prisons, beaten,

brutalized, railroaded, denied lawyers or access to family members, then released

with no explanation, never charged with a crime.

            The nation had seemed to go berserk that year, hypnotized by a Red

Scare, with Palmer and his circle fanning a paranoid fever against communists,

anarchists, radicals, socialists, or anyone not “100 percent American,”

as they called it.
           
            Only the outspoken resistance of a handful of lawyers had turned public

opinion against the crackdown and saved thousands of innocent people from

being deported. Harlan Fiske Stone had been one of these dissenters. At the

panic’s height, he had risked his job and reputation to denounce the Red

Raids. Stone had submitted public testimony to a Senate investigating committee

accusing Palmer and his Justice Department of ignoring constitutional

rights, conducting warrantless arrests and searches, and abusing Federal

power.8

             J. Edgar Hoover had been Palmer’s Special Assistant when the Raids

began on November 7, 1919, and he had his fingerprints all over them.

Palmer had assigned Edgar to run the Justice Department’s Radical Division

which planned and led the operation. Edgar publicly argued its highest profile

legal cases and sat at Palmer’s right hand on Capitol Hill when Palmer testified

about the Raids to two different Congressional investigating committees.

In internal debates, Edgar consistently argued the most strident views:

demanding more arrests, higher bail, fewer rights for detainees, and a tougher

line against anyone who stood in the way. Edgar had ordered Bureau agents
 
to compile large dossiers against many of its critics, painting them as Parlor

Bolshevists and Red sympathizers, ammunition to smear them at a moment’s

notice. His files covered 450,000 people by 1921, a remarkable feat for the

pre-computer age, and they included many of Harlan Stone’s closest personal

friends, including lawyers, professors, and even a sitting United States

Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis.

            None of these facts, though, seemed to reach Harlan Stone inMay 1924.

Instead, as the new Attorney General, Stone got exactly the opposite impression:

that young J. Edgar Hoover had played at most a minor role in the

affair. It only made sense: Edgar had been just 24 years old at the time of

Palmer’s Raids, just two years out of law school. “[H]e was just a kid, and he

always insisted that he was only doing his job,” claimed Ugo Carusi, Harlan

Stone’s executive assistant, “and I wouldn’t challenge that, because I can’t

imagine policy being made by a fellow in his early twenties.”9

          Edgar himself would spend a lifetime denying any major role in the Raids.
 
His FBI publicity machine would blast as a “vicious and false…smear” that

he had led them. Edgar would tell one biographer that he “parted company”

with his Justice Department bosses “in the illegal methods and the brutality

sometimes employed in rounding up aliens [and was] appalled [by] agents who

lacked any knowledge of the rules of evidence and who made arrests which

could not stand up in court.”10 In 1924, he would tell Roger Baldwin, head of

the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union, created in response to

the Raids, that he played only an “unwilling part.”

             And Harlan Stone believed it.

             To most Americans, it didn’t seem to matter. The world had changed

quickly since the dark days of 1919. America entered the Roaring Twenties,

a happy time of Coolidge prosperity, of jazz, flappers, and speakeasies, Babe

Ruth on the diamond, Jack Dempsey in the ring, Al Jolson on Broadway, live

ballroom music on the radio,Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish on the silent silver

screen, Post Toasties on the breakfast table, F. Scott Fitzgerald on the

bookshelf, and Sigmund Freud in the bedroom. Life was good. People had little

time to care about communists or other spooks.

               But back in 1919, just four years earlier, it had all made perfect sense—

the Red Scare, the Raids, the fear. Most thinking, informed Americans

agreed:WorldWar I had ended but the country was still fighting, against anarchists

and communists at home just as surely as it had fought the Kaiser’s

Germany in Europe the year before. American soldiers still faced bullets onRussian soil in 1919 and
 
Bolshevism was sweeping the world. Anarchists had

exploded bombs in American streets and people had been killed. Radicals

had infiltrated labor unions and threatened to topple major industries. The

country demanded safety and somebody had to act.

               A.Mitchell Palmer and his team had taken responsibility. Had there been

excesses? Certainly. But that didn’t change the fact. The principal fact was the

bombs, and the danger of more bombs, and the duty to protect Americans.

Everything else took a back seat.

If you enjoyed the excerpt, please consider buying the full book.  Just click here.
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MOVIES: Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover — Looking good so far.

Leonardo DiCaprio as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

The new Clint Eastwood-directed bio-pic J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role as Hoover, the legendary autocrat who sat atop the FBI for five decades, released this week its official trailer/preview.  (To see it, click on the image at the bottom. The movie itself comes out in November.)  The trailer runs just two minutes, 29 seconds — obviously too short to judge the entire film.  But having spent two years of my life getting to know Mr. Hoover while researching and writing my own book about him called Young J. Edgar, I must say I liked what I saw.  

Photo shows Hoover at about 22 years old.

J. Edgar Hoover casts a long shadow over modern America, and a good, truthful movie about him is long overdue.  Hoover was the most controversial law man  in 20th century America.  He served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for an astonishing 48 years, holding the post under nine presidents from Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s to Richard M. Nixon in the 1970s.  Though considered a hero and role model most of his life, investigations after his 1972 death confirmed massive abuses of power, illegal wiretaps, bugs, break-ins, and secret files on hundreds of thousands of people which he used as blackmail against presidents and movie stars.   Hoover stands today as one of the most hated men in American history—a probably gay man who harassed gays, a possible descendant of an African American who harassed civil rights leaders, a top law enforcement official who placed himself above the law and ruined many peoples’ lives, all making him something of a monster. 

But in truth, I found Hoover — at least the younger one I wrote about in my book — to be oddly sympathetic.   Hoover did not step into the world as an evil villain.  To a great extent, this side of him was shaped by events and forces that engulfed him during his lifetime, especially his younger formative years.  This is not to make excuses for Hoover’s very long record on the dark side, but simply dismissing him as a cartoon villain and cross-dresser misses the deeper lessons.  

Hoover came to work at the Justice Department in 1917 as a eager, bright young man ready to impress his superiors and save the country.  Within four short years, he had risen to become deputy director of the Bureau of Investigation and had already played a lead role in the Palmer Raids, one of the most eggregious civil liberties abuses in US history.  This transformation — from bright young man to hardened bureaucrat –fascinated me, especially since, to my eye, post-9/11 America seemed to be a period not unlike Hoover’s own formative years during the 1919-1920 Red Scare.  It is a core theme of my own book Young J. Edgar, and, based on the trailer, it also seems to be at the heart of the new film.  

 I have been following the Eastwood-DiCaprio project for months through news reports and Washington gossip.  I was impressed early on by two things–

  • First, the writer, Dustin Lance Black, who also wrote the screenplay for Milk (the movie about assassinated  San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk), reportedly spent several months in Washington while developing the script doing primary research at the National Archives and Library of Congress.  To understand J. Edgar Hoover, there is no substitute for seeing the FBI files.  They are simply stunning, a dazzling reflection of the man who created them.  They make endlessly fascinating reading and paint a stark portrait of absolute power breeding absolute corruption.
  • Second, when the movie crew came to Washington, D.C. last May, one place they filmed was at the Library of Congress, one of my own favorite research haunts.  I heard many stories from friends there about the movie crew and how they did their work: their eye for detail, making a point to show,  for instance, Hoover/DiCaprio’s fascination with the Library’s card catalogue.  The real-life Hoover actually worked at the Library of Congress during law school in 1914-17 and its card cataloue was a key inspiration for him in designing his FBI files.

The new trailer released this week shows the film dwelling not so much on the usual tawdry stuff about Hoover’s alleged cross-dressing or his actual fascination with celebrity sex gossip.  Yes, he very likely had a gay relationship with FBI assistant director Clyde Tolson, but much of the rest is widely disputed.   Rather, the film appears to focus on the real tension of Hoover’s life — his war (as he saw it) of good against evil, society against anarchy, patriots against traitors, subversives, and phonies, all giving him an excuse to bend the law as he saw fit and to hold power at all costs.

I fully expect to have my own list of nit-picks and criticisms once I see the entire film in November.  But for now, based on the trailer, I like what I see.

Audio Clips

Most Notorious podcast on Boss Tweed, September 28, 2020.  Click here.

— Interview with B’nai B’rith Podcast, on early days in 1840s New York, December 6, 2018.

— Interview with NPR’s”Bryant Park Project” on Boss Tweed, April 2008

— Interview with Leonard Lopate (WNYC – NPR) on Young J. Edgar Hoover, New York, July 2007

— Interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Dark Horse, July 2003

— Panel at NY Historical Society with Mayor Ed Koch and Pete Hamill on Boss Tweed, April 2006

Video Clips

A few speeches:

Flagler Museum, Palm Beach, on assassination of President Garfield, February 2013.

Interview on “Trotsky in New York” for Bookman’s Corner TV, August 2017.


TV Clips from C-SPAN

And don’t miss these:

Articles

Radio Clips

Interview with NPR’s “On Point,” November 9, 2011

Interview with NPR’s”Bryant Park Project” on Boss Tweed, April 2008

Interview with Leonard Lopate (WNYC – NPR) on Young J. Edgar Hoover, New York, July 2007

Interview with NPR’s “On Point” on Boss Tweed, April 2005

Interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Dark Horse, July 2003


TV Clips

Flagler Museum, Palm Beach, on assassination of President Garfield, February 2013.