If ever the mandarins of Whitehall are tempted to come clean and offer up a Freedom of Information Act in this country, they need only look westwards to Washington to remind themselves of the endless pain this will cause them. The terrible tale of J Edgar Hoover is a case in point.
All through the 48 years – from 1924 to 1972 – for which he ran the FBI, Hoover succeeded in concealing himself behind veils of myth. The innermost veil was a personal one. He was, by nature, a shy and neurotic man, so obsessed with his fear of germs that he had a custom-built toilet designed to keep rats away, so tangled in emotional dependence on his mother that he never succeeded in forming a sexual relationship in his life. To conceal all this, he constructed the myth of the G-Man with himself as its courageous, clean-cut archetype.
He instructed his agents to call him in on any big arrest so that he could personally clip on the cuffs and take the credit. (Through an intermediary, he persuaded Louis “Lepke” Buchalter of Murder Incorporated to surrender to him in person in exchange for keeping him out of the electric chair; then he let him go to the chair anyway.) He hired a hack crime writer, Courtney Ryley Cooper, to ghost-write stories about his adventures. He made swaggering speeches about the criminals who lived in fear of him. “At heart, they are all rats, dirty, yellow rats,” he said, apparently oblivious to the psychological clue he was offering.
But most of the veils were manufactured for political reasons. Back in his first days in the job, Hoover was told by the then US Attorney General Harlan Stone that he was to desist from investigating political radicals. Hoover did not want to desist. So, he collected all kinds of information on radicals and claimed to be obeying his Attorney General on the flimsy grounds that since the FBI was merely the passive recipient of all this material, it was not really running “investigations”. After a few months of succeeding with this little lie, he went for a bigger one and instructed his men to conduct active investigations but to file phoney reports in which they attributed their own work to non-existent confidential informants.
Later, when Congress passed section 605 of the Communications Act, forbidding any person to tap telephones, Hoover carried on tapping on the grounds that the FBI was not “any person”. When he was caught compiling a Custodial Detention list of American citizens he wanted to arrest in the event of a national crisis, he agreed to cancel the project. But secretly, he maintained it and simply changed its name to comply with the order. Learning by experience, he then set up a massive bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, arranging for two filing systems for every FBI agent in the country, one which contained information which would be disclosed to prying Congressmen and the other which contained the illegal stuff and which, officially, did not exist.
Every so often, some errant Congressman or journalist would start tugging at the veils. Hoover would rub them out. For example, there were the civil libertarians who tried to hold a conference in 1971 to discuss FBI abuses. Hoover and his aides despatched draft speeches to “our friends” in Congress and background reports on “this group of anti-FBI bigots” to “some of our good friends in the news media” and were duly rewarded by seeing the conference drenched in controversy.
Enter the US Freedom of Information Acts of 1966 and 1974. Athan Theoharis, a professor of modern history, and John Stuart Cox, a journalist, have spent 12 years using the Act to uncover Hoover’s secret world. To begin with, they were effectively playing darts in the dark, guessing at the location of documents and frequently drawing no response from an agency which was happy to use Hoover’s old skill at providing the absolute minimum required of them by any law. After a while, they started to hit the target, and so the Hoover myth is destroyed.
Here is Hoover the common criminal, setting up burglaries, tapping telephones, bugging bedrooms, opening letters – all in blithe indifference to the constitution he claimed to be protecting. And Hoover the Victorian moralist with his Obscene File full of smut, damning Martin Luther King as “a tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges”, spying on Eleanor Roosevelt with her lover, sniffing round Eisenhower and his secretary, lecturing the American people about “mortal enemies of freedom and deniers of God Himself”.
Here is Hoover the wheeler-dealer, making a friend of Franklin Roosevelt by spying on his critics and sorting out his cousin’s venereal disease, winning favour with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by checking out his daughter’s boyfriends, endlessly using his secret files to lever Congressmen on to his side.
But here, most of all, is Hoover the secret policeman, who spent decades sabotaging trade unions, blacklisting liberals and reformers, ruining the personal lives of anyone he deemed to be a “Commonist”, redefining democracy in the image of his own ideology to the point where Theoharis and Cox suggest that McCarthyism is a misnomer for what should rightly be remembered as Hooverism.
For Americans, all this has now become public knowledge. Whether they have the political will to prevent the rise of new Hoovers is another question and one which has become more tangled after eight years of leadership from a former actor who gave new powers to the FBI and who, we now know, was himself a long-term FBI snitch. At least, in America, they have some facts to deal with. Hoover’s counterparts in London still have their many veils and they will keep them for as long as the mandarins of Whitehall have their way.
