WILLIAM n Novemser 18, 1964, J. Edgar Hoover, the old O bulldog of the FBI, held a press conference. The occasion was, to say the least, singular —and in two respects. For one, Hoover rarely indulged in a give- and-take press session. For the other, he tossed aside the usual script warning of decaying morals and Reds on college campuses to fulminate at length against an ar- ray of distinguished and respected American public figures and institutions. In the span of one briefing he managed to brand Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Mar- tin Luther King, Jr. “the most notorious liar in the country,’ label justices of the Supreme Court “bleeding hearts” for insisting a prisoner be arraigned within twenty-four hours, place the onus of urban crime on the shoulders of “lenient” judges, scold the Warren Commission for slapping the FBI’s wrists in the Lee Harvey Oswald affair, and once again take a swipe at _ ‘the proposed national crime commission (to combat organized crime) advocated by the late President Ken- nedy, the late Senator Estes Kefauver, Bobby Kennedy and many other experts. . The intemperate outburst touched off a furor. The issue was not so much whether. Hoover was right or | wrong, or whether everyone was out of step save J. Edgar. Since the monumental boggle at Dallas it had become increasingly clear that it was the old G-man himself who was losing his magic touch. Rather, it was the fact that he said it: two generations of Americans that had come to regard Hoover as a permanent fixture were shocked by the sudden realization that he had - unaccountably made himself a storm center of con- 66 RAMPARTS e MARCH 1965 ‘touchable (he recently bragged to an aide he wasnt troversy —and thus terminated his usefulness as the nation’s top G-man. But as the echo of his bitter vale- diction faded, a question arose that no one had really given much thought to: After J. Edgar, who? It is indeed difficult to ponder on the fate of an FBI without Hoover; The Man, as his associates call him, has been widely regarded as irreplaceable and, iront- cally, it has been the currency of such rumors that has helped perpetuate him in office. But General Motors didn’t flounder when its president, Charles E. Wilson. went to Washington in 1953, nor did F ord when Robert McNamara abdicated to become the present Secretary of Defense. Neither will the FBI when Hoover tums in his badge. The FBI as an organization is one of the phenomena of our times: no agency of government has ever been so universally adulated and pampered: yet largely un- fathomed by the general public. The Bureau as it exists today is solely the product of Hoover's dynamic am- bition; it is molded in his image and reflects not only his strong points but his weaknesses, caprices and preju- dices as well. Yet the latter have been submerged by publicity techniques that grossly exaggerate his — and the Bureau’s — accomplishments, The effect has been to generate a euphoria, rendering Hoover virtually un “gettable”) and placing the FBI on a pedestal. Neither condition is healthy in a democracy. Never agalt should an FBI chief be permitted to become so int mately identified with the organization that he is @ institution in his own right and cannot be separates f
from it (at the other extreme: Britain’s secret service cloaks its chief in total anonymity). And now is the time to partially decentralize the FBI, to reduce the breadth and scope that has bred undue power, influence and intimidatory potential. The practical problem of course is how to retrench and modernize the FBI without adversely affecting the national security and the war on crime. To help in a solution, it is worthwhile to trace the Bureau’s growth and acquisition of power, examine its accomplishments and faults, and determine precisely what its role should be. : In 1924, when Hoover took over as director, the FBI was a modest force of 402 special agents and 99 clerks, about the size of today’s Secret Service. At the time the post of director was of such little consequence that appointment was not subject to presidential or congres- sional approval. Under the relentless Hoover the Bureau has burgeoned to over 16,000 employees consuming an annual budget of $150 million, some one-hundredfold more than the early days. And as it flourished a natural metamorphosis took place: a once compact elite force (4 special agents to each clerk) became a ponderous, sprawling bureaucracy (almost 10,000 more clerks than agents). ; ' This beadledom presides over a jurisdictional do- main encompassing 170 areas of criminality — every- thing from bank robbery and extortion to illegal use of the Smokey Bear emblem and interstate transpor- tation of switchblade knives — and all areas of internal security, including subversion, sabotage, counterespio- nage and loyalty investigations. In the past decade the FBI has poked more and more into non-statutory fields: on behalf of the executive branch, often treading on tenuous ground as inthe steel price dispute two years ago when agents rousted reporters out of bed in the middle of the night for interrogation. Under the last Republican administration these inquiries reached a peak from which they have never tapered off, and con- sequently are referred to in the FBI as “Eisenhowers.’ All of this is a far ery from the narrow intent in which the FBI was conceived. In 1924 the Bureau was responsible for only a modest patchwork of federal] laws. Essentially, it enforced criminal statutes not spe- cifically assigned to Treasury Department agencies and i i t entrepreneur to permit of status quo: some duties he actively proselytized, others stuck to the FBI like lint to a flannel suit. Not all logically dovetailed, and some were anomalous. As a result there was a substantially vertical expansion that saw the Bureau prying into a larger and larger cross-section of the American society. @ He: AND THE FBI have quite rightly earned their niche in history. But the success story was not 68 RAMPARTS « MARCH 1965 if yt “HW Spis6  Pocld:s99f6514 “Page 59 other special units. But Hoover was too much of an- Lp Pe PERT OE written overnight. During the first eight years under terred the young director there was little to shout about. The buildir FBI sat pretty much on the sidelines while Elliot Ness ‘down and his T-men (Treasury Department) wore down Al now tt Capone and the prohibition era gangsters. The A wild gunman named John Herbert Dillinger growtl changed all that. It was the era of Wonderful Nonsense, bank r and Dillinger got into the spirit of things by almost all the singlehandedly terrorizing the midwest. To be sure, he now w had a colorful supporting cast with outrageously ~ distinct hammy nicknames: “Prettyboy” Floyd, “Babyface” these cc ‘Nelson, “Machinegun” Kelly, “Kreepy” Karpis, et al. Ten Mc But in retrospect they seem tawdry and garish, as out- a spate landish as country bumpkins (which they were) in an ing the executive suite compared with the contemporary em- cracked perors of million-dollar Cosa Nostra syndicates. Never- excuses. theless they possessed a reckless stamina that attracted movie?’ lurid newspaper accounts of their escapades. On th Congress responded to public clamor by enacting a deep int. host of new federal laws, among them bank robbery, G-ment kidnapping and interstate stolen cars. Given jurisdic- an ant f tion, steely-eyed G-men routed the enemy with a flurry | penetrati of gangbusting, shoot-em-up tactics that fascinated the nation an nation. By the time the last public enemy had been dwindled snuffed out Hoover and his minions had captivated the the FBI, popular imagination. formers, At this propitious moment the FBI ‘chief received an J treasury urgent summons from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, J trumping one of his staunchest admirers, War clouds were gather- J @ppropria ing in Europe and there was evidence beyond doubt § stitutes a that enemy agents were abroad in the United States. | membersh What the country needed, F.D.R. told Hoover, was an ff 4 everyor agency to assume overall liability for subversive and f and at lea: counterespionage activity. The FBI, he added anticli- J dupes and mactically, was it. None oth With this grave burden the FBI agent force was § scemed, d strengthened to over 4,000. To its credit, the Bureau J merely a E proceeded to belabor the Nazi bunds and fronts with In the | the same rawish skill it had displayed against the crimi- purely crir nal public enemies. When war came it rounded up ff) "strument German spies with equal energy, although some seem- J ‘ant screer ingly sensational feats were purposely overblown to § Commissio: boost civilian morale and deter the Nazis from sending ducted loy: over more spies. At war’s end Hoover claimed that employees . there had not been a single perpetration of foreign’ — As with t directed sabotage. But while the FBI had been pre- §Uy after W occupied with thwarting the comparatively crude Nazi §°f supposed agents, their polished Russian counterparts managed the sovernment greatest espionage coup since the Trojan horse: the # nator Joe theft of vital atom bomb secrets. “0, W. Scot Of course this debacle was not discovered until 1947 ificer whor _ when the Soviets detonated an atomic device yeats" J°°mpany M advance of their estimated timetable. But in 1945, flush ration for with seeming success, Hoover pressed to take over the $5 not going overseas intelligence functions of the wartime Office #2nctions oy of Strategic Services then being disbanded. Perhaps d¢ JS, in part.
vears under about. The Elli ess re d Al t Dillinger ] Nonsense, i by almost be sure, he itrageously “Babyface” arpis, et al. rish, as out- were) in an porary em- ites. Never- at attracted S. " enacting a ik robbery, en jurisdic- vith a flurry scinated the y had been otivated the received an . Roosevelt, ver her- yond doubt ited States. yver, was an versive and ded anticli- : force was the Bureau fronts with it the crimi- rounded up some seem- erblown to ‘om sending Jaimed that of foreign- | 1 been pre- ‘crude Nazi nanaged the horse: the terred by Hoover’s manifest proclivity for empire- building, then-President Harry Truman turned thumbs down on the G-man’s bid and instead created: what -is now the Central Intelligence Agency. The rebuff only temporarily stunted the FBI’s growth in the postwar period. It continued to pursue bank robbers and kidnappers with an efficacy made all the more remarkable by the fact that the bandits now were largely rank amateurs unidentifiable by a distinct modus operandi, It dramatized its efforts versus these consistently drab adversaries by inaugurating the Ten Most Wanted F ugitives Program and encouraging a spate of movies, books and feature articles glorify- ing the G-men and their exploits. (Washington wits cracked: “When other agencies blunder they make excuses, When the FBI blunders it just makes another ! movie.’ On the security front FBI paid informers burrowed deep into the ranks of the Communist Party, enabling G-men to study the conspiratorial maze as one watches an ant farm. Gradually the Party, enfeebled by FBI penetration, plagued by waning appeal in a prosperous nation and riddled by internal dissension and defection, dwindled to but a few thousand members. Ironically, the FBI, through dues paid by its honeycomb of in- formers, became the largest contributor to a Party treasury barren of cash. Yet Hoover persisted in trumping up the menace. The Party, he said in 1964 appropriations testimony, “wields an influence and con- stitutes a security danger far out of proportion to its membership.’ Besides, he added, the Party isn’t as small as everyone thought — there are 10,000 actual members i} and at least 100,000 “state of mind” members, meaning dupes and Comsymps. His authority for these figures? None other than Gus Hall, the top Red. Both, it ] seemed, didn’t want anyone believing the Party is merely a paper tiger. In the late ’forties the FBI irretrievably shed its purely criminal investigative character and became an mstrument of administrative policing. It handled appli- cant screening investigations for the Atomic Energy * Commission and Civil Service Commission and con- ducted loyalty probes on government employees and | employees of firms with government contracts. As with the anarchist hysteria that gripped the coun- {try after World War I, this was a time of Red phobia, of supposed “interlocking subversion” rooted deeply in government. It was the heyday of the archconservative | Senator Joe McCarthy and his State Department alter H tgo, W. Scott McLeod, an ex-FBI agent turned securit d until 1949 ‘ice years in 1 1945, flush tke r the times fice HW 54756. ‘| officer whom the Alsop brothers described as a “road- | Company McCarthy?’ Hoover not only expressed ad- miration for McCarthy as ‘gq vigorous individual who  S Not going to be pushed around?’ but he had ho com- 4 dunctions over borrowing certain of McCarthy’s tac- & i [ Perhaps de- jis, in particular the use of faceless informants, a Doefd: 32245514. Page 300 blunders it _- just makes another movie., concept that in a later, calmer hour was to be viewed as a dangerous abrogation of the basic American right to confrontation of the accuser. As the jet age arrived the FBI was called upon to cope with the rash of aircraft hijackings, bombings, bomb hoaxes and other exotic crimes. Still, car theft remained the Bureau’s bread-and-butter category — the largest single source of what Hoover refers to as “statistical accomplishments.’ One of the paradoxes of the latter-day Bureau is that its impressive conviction rate has not extended to civil rights violations in the South, a record starkly out of kilter with its demonstrated ability in other areas. The Bureau has not made imposing headway in solving the wave of home bombings, church burnings and other acts of terror visited on Negroes. Indeed, until the firm hand of Bobby Kennedy was laid on the FBI’s shoulder, the sight of an agent delving into civil rights matters was a curiosity in the South. The FBI, sadly, has been only as effective as it has been forced to be: journalists William Bradford Huie and Louis Lomax knew earl] in the game who lynched three civil rights workers in Mississippi last summer, a formidable number of whites in the region knew, yet FBI arrests came with pointed timing only days after Dr. King’s charge of heel- dragging. To be sure, there is often a gap between knowledge and proof, but it seems incredible that a bureau able to riddle the Communist Party with in- formers could not have long ago duplicated the feat with the Ku Klux Klan, known to have been implicated in practically every premeditated act of racial violence South of the Mason-Dixon line. The reason is that the FBI hierarchy is sympathetic to the segregationist, states’-rights viewpoint. For ex- ample, in 1955 a northern-bred agent based in Savannah, Georgia, was conducting a personnel investigation of a Negro applicant for a position at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. The Negro, the agent learned, was a high ~caliber person and a university graduate. The onl possible blot on his record was an account for collection listed by the local credit bureau. The agent, a thorough, RAMPARTS »« MARCH 1965 69 N |When the FBI. on seth ode aug eae
Seeiee oS Se eed ts mrss tnt pratt massa nananns OOo nme 54756 incisive investigator, inquired of the woman in charge of the credit bureau as to the circumstances of the collection. She balked at revealing the information, but the agent persisted, explaining that as it stood the col- @ cin could be construed as disqualifying derogatory data. Finally, the woman acknowledged that the col- lection was merely the outgrowth of a dispute over the purchase of a faulty radio. But she later filed a complaint against the agent with local FBI headquar- ters, charging he had been too determined to get the. information. Although it turned out the woman had recently been hospitalized as a psychopath, FBI offi- cials summarily demanded the agent’s resignation on the vague grounds of “action unbecoming an agent.’ HE BIAS 18 Not wholly ideological. There is the “T practical fact that the FBI offices rely heavily on local police for statistical sustenance. But for the most part it lies in the strong personality and peculiar orien- tation of Hoover himself, from whom all FBI policy ultimately flows. Hoover is a product of the old school: straight-laced, self-righteous, pompous, uncompromising. His class consciousness reflects in his cool aloofness towards his own agents and his hesitance in hiring Negroes. Until Kennedy, Negro agents in the FBI could be counted on the fingers of. one hand. Even the title “special agent” "was nominal: one Negro was a manservant in the di- eo“: office, the others were used in servile duties 5 uch as chauffeuring the director in his limousine while on “working vacations” about the country. But since the pressure has been on Hoover he has recruited a total of twenty-seven Negro agents and claims they have compiled a “brilliant” record. But as one dis- gruntled white agent gripes, “if the Negro agents so much as take a crap Hoover sends them a letter of commendation?’ This, of course, is the show business side of the Bu- reau. However, the simple fact remains that the evan- gelical fervor that consumes the FBI chief when he speaks of anti-Communism and ridding the city streets of crime is not kindled by the cause of racial equality, A Trumpet of Gideon had sounded from Ninth and Pennsylvania, all right, but it wasn’t Hoover who had pursed his lips and blown, as he had so often in causes closer to his heart — it was Bobby Kennedy. ~ Understandably, political factors underlie Bureau policy in civil rights, and for that matter other issues. Nobody but a tourist from Iowa would believe that Hoover has survived forty years and six administrations in the Washington political jungle through sheer popu- larity. Not that he plays a conventional game of parti- san politics; he does not. Hoover affinity transcends ee: lines: he is drawn as if by a magnet to the phi- losophy of ultra-conservatism, where patriotism is de- 70 RAMPARTS e MARCH 1965 DocId: 32245514 Page 31 fined in jingoistic platitudes, xenophobia is the one true religion, and the tides of social reform are inevitably tinged Red. Over the years Hoover has amassed a fiercely loyal ower bloc in Congress formed of men of like persua- sion: Karl Mundt of South Dakota, the late Styles Bridges of New Hampshire (Bridges’ secretary later became an influential FBI official), Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin and James O. Fastland of Mississippi. it is not a merely doctrinaire coalition, rather it practices political give-and-take. It is no secret that data from confidential FBI files has occasionally leaked to a fa- vored Congressional few. In 1957 Republican Kenneth Keating of New York sponsored an FBI-sought bill that rebuffed the Supreme Court decision in the Jencks case; in 1962 Keating was acclaimed a prophet for breaking the news of Soviet missile sites in Cuba before the Ken- nedy administration decided to release it — the existence of the sites was known to the FBI through its seat on the high-echelon United States Intelligence Board. The solidarity of Hoover’s alliance with Souther archconservatives was sharply illustrated following a critical radio broadcast by former FBI agent Jack Le- vine in 1962. Over the Pacifica network, a three-station hookup noted for its unexpurgated programming, Le-_ vine leveled a broadside of charges at his erstwhile boss, Hoover, alleging everything from procrustean personnel management and a heavy list to the political right, to inertness in civil rights investigations. Such impertinence was not to go unpunished. Sen- ator Eastland, the eminent segregationist, launched what was called in the newspapers a “Red probe” of Pacifica, the vehicle being his own Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Outwardly, the Subcommittee was troubled over the fact Pacifica had extended air time to Mrs. Dorothy R. Healey, Communist Party chairman for southern California. However, Eastland’s sudden concern over this exercise of free speech was innately curious: Mrs. Healey had been broadcasting intermittently for three years as an open Communist _ spokesman. More to the point was that Eastland called the probe only a month after Levine’s dissent, and did it so swiftly and secretively that several Subcommittee members learned about it in the newspapers. As Ernest Besig, Northern California director of ‘the American Civil Liberties Union, aptly put it: “One of the sacred cows of the Internal Security Committee was sinned against and now somebody’s got to pay the piper’ The Subcommittee went ahead with its ritual. About the only fresh fact it unearthed was that George Lin- coln Rockwell, the American Nazi Fuehrer, and John Birch Society zealots also had their say over Pacifics airwaves. But the Red brush had been swiped ove! Pacifica and, inferentially, over Levine, perpetuating the shabby myth that criticism of Hoover and the Bureau is always engineered by the radical left. Shackled tc FBI has inter} and failed to : refers to FBI _ kidnappings, t has the direct: under whose a erous shifting Indeed, it ma) forty years’ s M. Dirksen oj term of future vision of the | be confirmed | The same s Hoover's paro erated serious the past decac viewed with n grown more d) sensitive to his problems of tt As historical dition, a cult the director. T require the ins: has been their grass roots and Thus “embarra Edgar Hoover” of committing t formed the Bu paranoiac. Ever for example, ver when a bank ro facing a gunma: with potential o; agent has seen it a hand in the ( and transferred that the Warren was blameless. As each agent capable men lost knows, anything him a “disruptiv a bureaucracy. A afford to see the shut at Hoover’s to the quick, the expression. I one members of Cong disposition was th of Washington: ‘ such sweeping I anything about it’