J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE FBI
A Better Bureau
During the 1950s, as for several decades before and several decades after, J. Edgar Hoover was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When he was named director of the national police agency in 1924, he was faced with the task of changing it from a corrupt and
inefficient organization to an effective one. He had demonstrated his qualifications for the job by overseeing the infamous Palmer raids against American radicals in 1919-1920. In short order the new director purged the bureau of its dishonest and incompetent agents and replaced them with qualified, loyal men.
Birth of the G-Man
Through the 1930s and 1940s Hoover and his reformed FBI became more and more popular with the American public. During the Depression the "G-men," as federal agents were called, consistently made headlines by capturing or killing gangsters such as John Dillinger, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, and Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd. Hoover shifted the bureau's focus to espionage and subversive elements in the tense years of World War II. As the cold war developed in the late years of the 1940s, Hoover considered Communists and Communist sympathizers to be risks to the nation's security and, therefore, to be the FBI's highest priority.
The Battle against Disloyalty
By 1950, then, Hoover had positioned himself and his bureau as the country's main protectors against subversion. In Hoover's mind the importance of this mission ultimately put the FBI's activities beyond the scope of the president, Congress, or the country's courts. The basis of the FBI's power was the files it maintained on tens of thousands of Americans
who by the FBI's standards were not sufficiently loyal citizens. Often the information in the files had been gained by unwarranted and even illegal invasions of privacy. Hoover jealously guarded the secrecy of these files but would leak information in them to allies in the war against subversion, such as his personal friend Sen. Joseph McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In this way Hoover kept the bureau above the political squabbling that characterized congressional smear campaigns, but at the same time he helped discredit American Communists.
The FBI Picks Congress
As a subdivision of the Department of Justice, the FBI is overseen by the attorney general and, ultimately, the president. Hoover, however, did not always feel bound to honor this official chain of command. In the early 1950s, for example, his relationship with President Truman was strained, largely because Hoover felt that Truman was soft on the issue of disloyal Americans. Consequently, in the bitter feud with Congress that marked Truman's last years in office, Hoover sided with HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) against the president.
Changing Sides
When Eisenhower took office in 1953, on the other hand, Hoover felt that he and the new president were much more in agreement on the loyalty issue. At the same time the congressional Communist hunters had several times revealed the source of their information, to the embarrassment of the FBI. When Senator McCarthy overreached and took on the army in 1954, his former ally Hoover helped to discredit him. Under Eisenhower, Hoover was relatively free to pursue his investigations.
Defenders of Freedom
Throughout this period Hoover and the FBI were enormously popular with the American people. Books such as Don Whitehead's The FBI Story (1956), which was made into a film starring Jimmy Stewart in 1959, portray FBI agents as heroic, but average, defenders of American freedom. Masters of Deceit (1958), ironically credited to Hoover but written by FBI employees, chronicles the bureau's running battle against subversion. More-critical works on the bureau, such as Max Lowenthal's The FBI (1950), were squelched by Hoover and the critics themselves denounced as disloyal.
A Threat to the Establishment
In the late 1950s Hoover's chief concern was no longer the rest of the country's. A variety of factors—including a temporary easing of tensions in U.S.-Soviet relations and the civil rights movement—pushed the issue of domestic communism into the background. Hoover hated civil rights activists for the threat they represented to established authority, and he tried to smear them as Communist dupes. He also withheld FBI resources in the investigation of racially charged crimes in the South.
UNFRIENDLY SKIES
During the 1950s several incidents pointed to a lack of proper security precautions in the nation's airline industry. In 1950 thirty-one-year-old John Henry Grant took his wife and two children to Los Angeles Municipal Airport to load them onto a passenger plane for San Diego. He also included in their baggage a homemade time bomb, set to explode while the plane was in flight. At the airport Grant bought twenty-five thousand dollars worth of insurance on his family. Grant was foiled, however, when the rigged suitcase burst into flames while being loaded. He confessed that he was seeing another woman on the side and paying child support to a third. Blowing up his family seemed like the best way to uncomplicate his life.
The passenger's on a DC-6 B plane leaving Stapleton Airport in Denver on 1 November 1955 were not as fortunate. On that date John Graham loaded twenty-five sticks of dynamite on to the plane with his mother, who was traveling to Alaska. Ten minutes into the flight the plane crashed in flames, killing all forty-four persons aboard. Graham drew attention to himself by nervously buying insurance at the airport; after an investigation the FBI found material to make a bomb in Graham's home. He was executed for the mass murder on 11 January 1957.
In the 1960s, spurred by these and similar events and a rash of "skyjackings," airlines and airports began to pay more attention to security. Passengers and their carry-on items had to pass through metal detectors, and any bags were X-rayed before they were loaded into the luggage compartment.
Source:
Time, 1 May 1950, p. 20; Car ! Sifakis, The Encyclopedia of American Crime (New York: Facts on File, 1982).
The FBI versus the Court
Hoover saw the national strife over racial justice to be largely the fault of the Supreme Court, whose 1954 Brown decision destroyed the legal basis for segregation. He maintained throughout the rest of the decade that the Warren court's liberalism was eroding the government's authority. After the "Red Monday" decisions of 1957 reversed many of the
worst excesses of McCarthyism, Hoover recorded in a memo that the "Party as a whole is jubilant over these decisions." When the Court ruled in Jencks v. United States (1959) that accused Communists were entitled to see the FBI file on them to help in preparing their defenses, Hoover contended that it struck at the heart of the bureau's effectiveness. "The courts themselves must eventually … join all forces for good in protecting society," he cautioned.
Out of Step
As the decade closed Hoover could perhaps feel the nation leaving him behind. The election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960 underscored the country's new, progressive mood. Compared to the Kennedys (the president and his brother Robert, the new attorney general), Hoover seemed stodgy and old. The 1960s would find Hoover and his bureau increasingly out of touch with American society, a far cry from the celebrity and influence he had commanded in the 1950s and before.
Sources:
Fred J. Cook, "The FBI," Nation, 187 (18 October 1958): 221-280;
Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press / Macmillan, 1987);
Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
