The Watchful Eye

(See Cover)

A Communist settled confidently into the witness chair in Manhattan's federal courtroom last week and started his familiar spiel. Witness Anthony Krchmarek, a minor Communist functionary from Ohio, had come to lend his assurance that the party would not harm even a flea, much less overthrow a Government. He soon found himself talking into the teeth of some expert testimony from a fellow Ohioan: William Cummings, a Toledo auto worker who had spent six years among the Communists as an undercover agent for the FBI.

This was getting to be a familiar experience for defense witnesses in the trial of the eleven top U.S. Communist leaders. U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey had kept another witness, Daily Worker Editor John Gates, squirming for six grueling days on that same stand.

After spinning a fine story of what a dedicated idealist he was, Communist Gates had been asked a few pertinent questions. He had testified, had he not, that he was born in New York? Yes. Then McGohey produced a relief application that Gates had once filled out in Youngstown, Ohio, giving Lakewood, N.J. as his birthplace. Had Gates been using that name since 1932? Yes. McGohey fished out a 1937 passport application in which he gave his name as Isriel Ragenstrich. Had Gates not gone to jail twice? Yes. McGohey confronted him with a previous sworn statement, declaring he had never been convicted of a crime.

Expendable Informer. The ordeal of defendant after defendant had become almost a ritual. Backed by the FBI's own underground and the bales of reports which the FBI had been collecting since before World" War II, Prosecutor McGohey often seemed to know more about the Communists and their allies than the 'Reds themselves.

How many more FBI agents were there in the Communist underground? That was left to the U.S. to guess at--and the Communists to worry about. Said an FBI agent last week: "You can be sure that the sources which were revealed at the Communist trial were those chosen because we could best dispense with future information from them."

But the U.S. had already become aware of a recurring national phenomenon. Like the trial of Alger Hiss for perjury and the trial and conviction of Judith Coplon for espionage, the Government's case in Foley Square hinged directly on the searching investigation of thousands of U.S. citizens made by the FBI under its director, J. Edgar Hoover.

Birds & Banks. There were few areas of the U.S. which did not come under G-man Hoover's watchful eye last week. In Georgia and Alabama, his agents scoured the wool-hat country, quizzing suspects and witnesses in the latest outbreak of the South's hooded raiders. In Chicago, other agents dug into the murder of two bank messengers and plugged away at the Government's fraud case against Automaker Preston Tucker (TIME, June 20). The FBI was also relentlessly at work on a backlog of continuing cases, including the nation's only two unsolved--and long-forgotten--kidnapings.* They were seeking 1,367 fugitives and 2,462 armed-forces deserters as well.

Murder, mayhem and treason were not the only business of the FBI. Its 4,100 agents also are responsible for enforcing more than 120 major federal laws--from crimes on the high seas to train wreckings (which usually turn out to be the work of thoughtless youngsters trying to flatten chunks of metal on the tracks). They hunt down such prosaic criminals as copyright violators and offenders of the laws protecting migratory birds. In March 1947, Harry Truman had given the FBI its toughest, most controversial assignment: to check the loyalty of 2,500,000 federal employees.

Last week the FBI, revered by many, feared by a few and respected by all, celebrated the 41st anniversary of its organization as the investigating arm of the Department of Justice. It was also the 32nd anniversary of the day a young law-school graduate named John E. Hoover reported for work in the department as a $1,200-a-year file reviewer.

Justice Under the Brim. This year a quarter of a million U.S. tourists will descend on the FBI's impressive, air-conditioned Washington headquarters to see for themselves how the FBI has grown. Not many will leave without the firm conviction that Director Hoover's G-man is still the scourge of the underworld, the snap-brimmed symbol of dauntless justice in a covert-cloth topcoat.

Neat, well-pressed guides direct the tourists to glass-enclosed trophies of familiar FBI triumphs. In the center of a cabinet is the death mask of onetime Public Enemy No. 1, John Dillinger, surrounded by the contents of his pockets on the night he was shot down near Chicago's Biograph theater: a pair of smashed steel-rimmed glasses, a cigar, a snapshot of a gum-chewing Dillinger moll.

With a fine sense of showmanship, the tourists are led through the department's law library (85,000 volumes) to a basement range where they are treated to an ear-splitting exhibition of FBI marksmanship with the service .38, the Tommy gun, the .357 Magnum revolver. They are shown spotless laboratories (where a crook can be traced by the sweat on his collar) and elaborate crime-busting files (2,500 kinds of auto paints, 3,000 designs of tire treads, 125 soil samples).

FBI men reassuringly point out that the bureau's file of 112,500,000 fingerprints (increasing at the rate of about two a second) is used to identify amnesia victims and mangled corpses as well as such underworld characters as Airbrake Smith and Rooster Face Fannie.

But what no tourist will see is the bureau's investigative file covering thousands of ordinary U.S. citizens.

Dossiers & Doubts. It was the existence of those files--important strands in the nation's gigantic net to catch a few disloyal citizens--which gave even the most ardent admirer of the FBI a slightly uneasy feeling. It was not that very many people objected to flushing out Communists and potential saboteurs. But it was a suspicion that any such collection was bound to damn the innocent as well as the guilty.

That feeling gained some respectability eight weeks ago when Federal Judge Albert Reeves ordered into the record the complete FBI reports which Spy Judith Coplon had hastily abstracted for her Soviet friends. The FBI had wanted to withdraw from the trial rather than let its reports be admitted into evidence. For one thing, innocent people were involved. To be sure, the FBI could (and did) explain that the reports--attributed to confidential informants identified only as ND-402, ND-305 and T-7--were unprocessed, unevaluated raw material. They were also, undeniably, a bewildering clutch of gossip, hearsay and trivia.

Informant ND-402 and friends had confided that Actress Helen Hayes had once performed at a benefit for Russian Relief just after the war and that New Hampshire's Republican Senator Charles Tobey had attended a leftist Madison Square Garden meeting on the atom bomb.

These tidbits confirmed the worst suspicions of those who fear or are dismayed by the FBI. How many yards of its magnificent files were filled with just such stuff, and the unsupported malice of gossipy neighbors who reported that the couple across the hall liked to run around in the nude, read the New Republic and entertain Negroes? In a nation where nobody loves a cop, much less a snooper or an informer, the further question arose: Had the U.S. created a budding Gestapo?

No Castor Oil. Put this way, as it often was, the question was ridiculous. Director Hoover's G-men were not a strong-arm squad of club-swinging blackshirts; nobody was fed castor oil, or taken off in the middle of the night to be liquidated. Certainly the FBI could not be accused of making reckless arrests.

Like two other able arms of the U.S. Government, the Treasury's T-men (who pursue counterfeiters, tax dodgers and dope peddlers) and the Post Office Inspectors, the FBI usually "gets" its man before it grabs him. In some 9,000 cases last year, the FBI got 97.2% convictions. Certainly, in other hands, the FBI was a potential danger to every free citizen. It had not proved to be so in the hands of John Edgar Hoover.

A man who has served successfully under six Presidents and twelve Attorneys General (and got a new boss this week--see The Administration), Hoover is above all else an extraordinarily competent and careful bureaucrat who runs his own show and has learned to perfection the art of survival in Government--even though, as a lifelong Washingtonian, he has never voted.

His father was a minor official in the Commerce Department's Coast & Geodetic Survey. His mother, descendant of Switzerland's first consul general to the U.S., was a strong-willed woman with a firm belief in the stern principles of Calvinism and a secure knowledge of what was right and what was wrong.

Steaks & Jokes. Annie Hoover has always been the biggest thing in J. Edgar Hoover's life. Until her death in 1938, the man most feared by mobsters had continued to make his home with her in the house where he was born, on Washington's Seward Square. Two years later he bought a $25,000 house near fashionable Rock Creek Park. But Bachelor Hoover has never been seen escorting another woman to this day. His constant companion on occasional trips to the ballpark or for a weekend in Manhattan is the handsome, snap-brimmed FBI No. 2 man, Clyde Tolson.

Hoover is married to his job, and finds it a jealous mistress. Every morning at 9:05 he is at his desk in the fifth-floor curved office which he calls "The Cave of the Winds," a squawk box at his left, a Dictaphone at his back. A framed copy of Kipling's If is on his desk; on the wall hangs a mounted sailfish Hoover landed in a seasick struggle off Miami in 1936. Lunchtimes, Hoover strides off to The Allies' Inn, with Tolson at his side, both of them unarmed and without bodyguards.

After work their ritual has the same practical efficiency as their workday: usually off to the men's bar of the Mayflower, for exactly one bourbon & soda, then down a few doors to Harvey's for a steak or roast-beef dinner, and perhaps a few practical jokes, directed against Restaurant Owner Julius Lully, a good friend. Hoover's practical jokes are basically hotfoots with a college education. Once he spoiled a party at Lully's Maryland farm by tacking up quarantine signs all around the grounds.

The passion for practical jokes is one of the few evidences of the policeman in John Edgar Hoover, onetime boy soprano in the Church of the Reformation choir, who for a time considered the ministry. He got his first Government job as a messenger in the Library of Congress at 18, and has drawn all his paychecks from the Government ever since. Nights he studied law, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees, then in 1917 took a "temporary" job in the Department of Justice.

John E. to J. Edgar. A born organizer and a bear for accuracy, Hoover was soon put in charge of a staff of 25, digging into the backgrounds of enemy aliens. By the time the armistice was signed, he had been appointed a special attorney, had changed his signature from John E. to J. Edgar (to avoid confusion with another Justice Department employee) and was plainly a young man on the way up.

He became a special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, "the Fighting Quaker." Hoover still remembers those years with considerable distaste.

In Palmer's infamous Red raids, more than 6,000 suspects were rounded up, houses were ransacked without search warrants. Hoover's job was to prosecute the deportable aliens scooped up in the net. One of them was Ludwig Martens, the unofficial Soviet ambassador, who financed his mission to the U.S. by peddling hot diamonds. Another was Emma Goldman, the famed anarchist, who thumbed her nose at Hoover as she boarded ship.

Then came President Warren Harding and Attorney General Harry Daugherty's spoils-hungry Ohio gang. Under Director William J. Burns, the old private eye, Bureau of Investigation badges were handed out to deserving politicians. The bureau's rolls were filled with unsavory characters and it seemed to operate on the principle that it takes a crook to catch a crook.

Hoover, who had become assistant di rector of the bureau, says of that dismal period: "In those days no one ever let on he was connected with the bureau. He'd have been ashamed to. Everybody would have set him down as a political hanger-on, or a crook."

Two Conditions. Such was the demoralized outfit that Assistant Director Hoover took over at 29, when the erupting scandals of Teapot Dome finally blew Daugherty out of office. Hoover told the new Attorney General, Harlan Fiske Stone, that he would take the job on two conditions: no politics and no outside interference. Said Stone: "Those, young man, are the only conditions under which I would give you the job."

Back came all the honorary badges; out went the political hangers-on and crooks. Director Hoover began to gather around him a new kind of cop: a bright young college graduate who owned either a law degree or a C.P.A.'s certificate. The first laboratory was set up, with one man and a few test tubes. The few scattered fingerprint files in existence were gathered together.

Hoover's men were trained to physical fitness, but spent most of their time digging through the dusty files of bankruptcy and antitrust cases. They had no power of arrest, no authority to carry guns.

The 21 Laws. One March day in 1932 a German-born carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann sneaked into a house in Hopewell, N.J. and kidnaped the 20-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh. Across the country the unchecked armed mobs of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and the Barker gang were leaving a trail of robbery, murder and kidnaping.

An angry nation and an aroused Congress demanded that the U.S. Government enter the gang-busting business. The Department of Justice stepped forward with 21 ready-made laws that would give Director Hoover the power he needed, and Congress quickly passed them.

"Don't Shoot." Within a year Kidnaper Hauptmann was arrested (though the credit belonged more to local police and T-men than the FBI). Pretty Boy Floyd was cornered on an Ohio farm and riddled with FBI bullets. Baby Face Nelson was trapped and shot down in a Chicago suburb. In January 1935 Ma and Fred Barker were killed after a two-hour FBI siege in the little Florida town of Oklawaha.

That year the bureau was officially renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the FBI men had already earned their more famous nickname. Trapped in the bedroom of his Memphis hideout, George ("Machine Gun") Kelly, kidnaper of Oklahoma Oilman Charles Urschel, cowered in a corner with his hands up, begging: "Don't shoot, G-men. Don't shoot."

By 1938 G-man Hoover could say that the day of the gangster was over. His G-men were the new popular heroes, immortalized ever since on the screen and on the air, and on a thousand box tops, bearing the morning cereal to American boys. The pursuers, not the pursued, had become the object of hero worshipers' affections.

Trick Mirror. From gangsters, the FBI graduated to bigger fish. Within 24 hours after 1125 p.m. on Dec 7, 1941, the FBI had put 1,771 enemy aliens behind bars. The FBI scored spectacular wartime coups: arresting ten German saboteurs who landed from submarines along the Atlantic coastline; trapping a 33-man spy ring in Manhattan with the help of movie cameras and a trick mirror. All through the war, FBI agents helped man a radio station which Nazi agents had set up on Long Island, and saw to it that Berlin received just the transmissions the U.S. wanted it to hear.

Less spectacularly, but just as efficiently, FBI agents recommended security precautions for thousands of U.S. factories, seized quantities of guns, charts and code books, rounded up more than 16,000 enemy aliens. So successful was the home-front campaign against saboteurs that not one case of enemy-directed sabotage was discovered throughout the war; this time there were no Black Tom explosions. Ranting Douglas Chandler, the "Paul Revere" of Radio Berlin, tried and convicted of treason, bitterly complained that his confession had been extracted by an FBI agent with "malign, hypnotic power."

First Pinch. Hoover had long since won over most of his earlier detractors. Even the local cops, who had once resented the G-men's headline-grabbing talents, were boosters now. The last time Congress even questioned an FBI appropriation was in 1936, when Tennessee's querulous Senator Kenneth McKellar wanted to know why G-man Hoover wasn't out risking his own neck. Hoover had to admit that he had never personally made a pinch.

Boiling mad, he returned to his office and demanded the latest reports on Alvin Karpis, the last of the Barker gang. Then he flew down to New Orleans, personally led the raiding squad into Karpis' hideout. Since then no one has ever questioned either Hoover's courage or his budget.

Witch Hunt? Sometimes, caught up as he is now in the pursuit of private beliefs, and the difficult measurements of loyalty, G-man Hoover looks like a man who longs for the simple combat of gangster days, when a criminal could sometimes be flushed out into the open and caught with a gun in his hand, instead of a lie on his tongue. But, conscientious cop and efficient public servant that he is, J. Edgar Hoover regards his new mission, and the attacks he receives because of it, as part of his job. He knows that he cannot afford to be too particular about the information he collects: 75% of FBI convictions began as tips. As for accusations that he is engaged in a witch hunt, he points to the FBI's record. If only 91 out of 2,597,000 Government employees checked by the FBI have been discharged for disloyalty, he argues, the FBI can hardly be accused of drumming up a reign of terror.

Except for the Communists in Foley Square, most of the U.S. seemed inclined to agree. As long as the U.S. felt the need to keep G-man Hoover checking up on its fellow citizens, the uneasy feeling was bound to persist. But without the assurance of the FBI's eternal vigilance, the U.S. might feel uneasier still.

* The 1936 kidnap-murder of ten-year-old Charles Mattson in Tacoma, Wash.; the 1938 kidnap-murder of twelve-year-old Peter Levine in New Rochelle, N. Y.

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