How Hoover became Hoover

Another J. Edgar Hoover?
The Red scare spawned the tyrannical FBI chief; will a similar
homegrown villain emerge from the war on terror?
By Kenneth D. Ackerman, KENNETH D. ACKERMAN is author of "Young J.
Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties."
June 14, 2007


WHAT created J. Edgar Hoover? He reigned with an iron fist as director
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, until the day he
died in 1972. By then, Hoover had evolved into an untouchable
autocrat, a man who kept secret files on millions of Americans over
the years and used them to blackmail presidents, senators and movie
stars. He ordered burglaries, secret wiretaps or sabotage against
anyone he personally considered subversive. His target list included
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, even Eleanor
Roosevelt.

Yet when Hoover showed up for his first day of work at the Department
of Justice in June 1917, he was a bright 22-year-old, just out of law
school. He still had boyish good looks and was cocky and driven. The
country had just entered World War I, and Hoover had avoided the
wartime draft. Instead, he was ready to help win the war at home, to
save the country from spies and subversives.

What changed this young eager beaver into the crass, cynical tyrant of
later years?

The fact is, Hoover learned his attitudes and worldview from teachers
at the Justice Department during his early years there, when the
country was going through a period much like today's war on terror.

In March 1919, Hoover landed a dream assignment on the staff of new
Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer just in time to participate in the first
Red scare, in 1919-1920, and its signature outrage, the notorious Red
Raids, also known as the Palmer Raids. For Hoover, it would shape his
outlook for life.

On the night of June 2, 1919, bombs exploded in nine cities across the
United States, leaving two people dead, including one of the bombers.
One of these bombs destroyed Palmer's Washington home, almost killing
him, his wife and his teenage daughter.

These bombs capped months of escalating upheaval during which the
country convinced itself that we sat on the verge of a Russian-style
socialist revolution. The first Red scare came on the heels of
multiple traumas: World War I, the Russian Revolution and subsequent
Bolshevik uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Argentina.
In the United States, the economy had collapsed, prompting waves of
strikes, riots and political violence.

Americans vowed vengeance after the June 2 bombings, and the targeted
Palmer pledged to crush the reign of terror. He ordered a massive
preemptive strike, a nationwide roundup of radicals. To manage the
operation, Palmer chose his talented new staff counsel, young J. Edgar
Hoover.

Hoover seized the opportunity. With Palmer's blessing, he laid plans
for a series of brutal raids across the country. Backed by local
police and volunteer vigilantes, federal agents hit in dozens of
cities and arrested more than 10,000 suspected communists and fellow
travelers. They burst into homes, classrooms and meeting halls,
seizing everyone in sight, breaking doors and heads with abandon. The
agents ignored legal niceties such as search warrants or arrest
warrants. They questioned suspects in secret, imposed prohibitive bail
and kept them locked up for months in foul, overcrowded, makeshift
prisons.

It turned out that virtually none of these prisoners had anything to
do with violent radicalism. Nearly all were released without being
charged with a crime. Palmer's grand crackdown was one big exercise in
guilt by association, based primarily on bogus fears of immigrants
being connected to vilified radical groups such as the recently formed
American Communist Party.

Still, Hoover relished his moment on the national stage. He appeared
twice at Palmer's side during congressional hearings, and he faced off
against future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in a Boston
courtroom in raid-related cases. Behind the scenes, Hoover demanded
more arrests, higher bail and fewer rights for prisoners.

Ultimately, the public recoiled in disgust at the excesses and
illegality of the raids, and Palmer saw his political career
destroyed. But his young assistant fared much better.

Hoover never lost his anticommunist religion, nor his disdain for and
distrust of "liberals" who defended "subversives" on grounds of free
speech and civil liberties. He also never lost his sense of
entitlement to bend the rules, either to protect the country or to
protect himself.

Almost 90 years later, today's war on terror exists in an echo chamber
of the 1919 Red scare. The federal government demands more powers at
the expense of individual rights: secret CIA prisons, enhanced
interrogation techniques, suspension of habeas corpus. Even the
president openly claims powers that are beyond the reach of laws such
as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The same kinds of teachers who transformed the straight-laced, young
Hoover in 1919 seem to be on the loose again in Washington. And that
raises a troubling question: Are we today creating a whole new
generation of young J. Edgar Hoovers, dedicated government agents
learning the wrong lessons from the war on terror, who will stick
around to haunt us for decades to come?

copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

G-HE... RemoveThis @webtv.net wrote:

> As usual, Carnahan politcizes this
> newsgroup.

There's some excellent, fully-documented reporting about Hoover and
his not-very-effective FBI in Bryan Burrough's superb book PUBLIC
ENEMIES: AMERICA'S GREATEST CRIME WAVE AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI,
1933-34. It's not a hatchet job; the book makes it clear that Hoover's
greatest problems were skimpy funding and inadequately-trained agents.
But even in the early years of the FBI, Hoover was obsessively
compiling as much information as possible about as many public figures
as possible, seemingly with an eye towards quantity over quality.

Speaking of newsgroups, there's a troll named "Dwight Frippery"
who's once again posting nonsense in the silents group. He posts from
a WebTV and tends to end his sentences with a comma. Now who...
*who*... could that possibly be?



--Shush--