Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (45 page)

While the Bureau has been especially sensitive about the JFK assassination, it also has been unintentionally helpful. During the past twenty years,
nearly one hundred thousand pages of documents regarding the assassination have been released by the Bureau, often as the result of Freedom of
Information Act suits. The occasional nuggets of information buried in the
raw ore of these documents have helped piece together some of the more
mysterious aspects of the case.

Increasingly the Bureau has been called to task for its handling of the
JFK assassination. At least two government panels have chided the Bureau
for inadequacies in its assassination investigation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the Bureau ". . . failed to investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President. " Likewise
the Senate Intelligence Committee chastised the Bureau for shoddy work in
the assassination investigation.

Ironically, it was government corruption that prompted the creation of
the FBI in the first place. Just after the turn of the century, there was a
growing demand in Washington to combat the "public-be-damned" attitude of the giant trusts-later to become multinational corporations-and
corruption within a number of federal agencies. Such abuses were the
province of the Department of Justice, which Congress had never seen fit
to equip with investigators. When investigators were required, Treasury
agents were called in on a temporary basis.

In 1907, Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte, despite objections in
Congress, went ahead with plans to create an investigative force, stating:
".. . a Department of Justice with no force of permanent police in any
form under its control is assuredly not fully equipped for its work." With
the approval of President Theodore Roosevelt, Bonaparte issued an order dated July 26, 1908, creating an investigative agency within the Justice
Department.

Less than one year later, Bonaparte's successor, Attorney General George
W. Wickersham, gave the new agency a permanent position and a namethe Bureau of Investigation.

But the new Bureau could only enforce federal crimes and-outside of
counterfeiting-there were hardly any federal crimes at that time. The
Bureau had little to do.

But in 1910, Congress, pressured by a public that was shocked and
outraged by press accounts of world-wide prostitution, or "white slave"
rings, unanimously passed the White Slave Traffic Act. This law became
known as the Mann Act after its sponsor, Representative James Robert
Mann of Illinois. The law gave federal agents authority in any case in
which a woman was taken across state or national boundaries for immoral
purposes.

The Mann Act was loosely written, applying to crime-minded women as
well as innocent "slaves." In effect, it gave the fledgling Bureau an
excuse to intervene in any case in which a woman crossed state lines.

World War I boosted the Bureau into national prominence. During 1914
and 1915 explosions, fires, and other acts of sabotage occurred at several
war plants.

American public opinion slowly began shifting from neutrality to animosity toward Germany. The pace of this shift quickened in January 1917,
when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare on American shipping. War against the Central Powers, led by Germany, was declared by
Congress on April 6 and President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Bureau to
begin wartime activities.

Wisely noting that all Americans of German descent could not be
interred for the duration of the war, Wilson nevertheless required more
than one million "enemy aliens" to register. The Bureau, which had only
three hundred agents by then, was expected to enforce this presidential
edict.

The nation suddenly became aware of the danger of spies and a fullblown spy scare swept across the land-much of the suspicion directed at
labor unions and anarchists.

Badly undermanned, Bureau chief A. Bruce Bielaski was agreeable to a
suggestion by a Chicago advertising man that a private volunteer organization be formed to aid federal agents in national defense work. Thus was
formed the American Protective League, which eventually numbered more
than a quarter million members. These vigilantes carried hidden badges
that identified them as "American Protective League, Secret Service
Division."

The words "Secret Service" were dropped after Treasury secretary
William McAdoo complained that league members were being confused
with his Secret Service agents.

The league became the object of many complaints to Washington.
Suspected enemy sympathizers were beaten, some were killed, and many
people charged that the league was being used to intimidate labor
organizations.

Smarting under criticisms of its connection with the league, the Bureau
came under further attack after leading a roundup of "slackers," men who
failed to register for the draft. Responding to congressional calls for action
against slackers, Bureau agents had joined with local police and army units
to round up more than fifty thousand men off the streets of New York and
Brooklyn to check for draft registration papers in early September 1918.
The offensive was roundly criticized. Senator Hiram Johnson of California
told his colleagues, " . . . to humiliate 40,000 citizens, to shove them
along with bayonets, to subject them to prison and summary military
force, merely because they are `suspects,' is a spectacle never before
presented in the Republic."

The next year a bomb exploded at the home of the new attorney general,
A. Mitchell Palmer, killing the two bombers. Palmer was incensed and
immediately took action. He replaced Bureau director Bielaski with William J. Flynn, a former chief of the Secret Service. Palmer also created a
General Intelligence Division under the command of his twenty-four-yearold special assistant who had come to the Bureau fresh out of the George
Washington University Law School two years before-J. Edgar Hoover.

No one man has held so much power for so long in the history of the
United States as John Edgar Hoover.

In the 1950s, Hoover was an honors-encrusted hero, hailed as the
foremost defender of American freedom and democracy. By the 1970s, he
was being likened to Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's dreaded SS commander.

By the 1980s, knowledge of FBI abuses under Hoover's leadership had
become widespread although the major news media-perhaps recalling the
veneration it had lavished on Hoover for so long-seemed reluctant to
spotlight his darker activities.

The truth of Hoover's place in the still-untold history of modern-day
America lies in the man's background and motivations, about which much
is still unknown to most writers and researchers.

One reason so little is known about him is that for so long everything
printed about Hoover was either a product of FBI public relations or, at
least, was approved by Hoover or a subordinate. Newsmen, in order to get
any cooperation from the Bureau-a necessity for obtaining any information involving a federal investigation-were forced to stay on Hoover's
good side. Any story criticizing the director was an excuse to place the
writer on the Bureau's list of people to be ignored.

John Edgar Hoover entered the world on January 1, 1895, five years
before the twentieth century began. He was the youngest of four children.
Born in Washington, D.C., Hoover rarely left the city his entire life. Until
her death in 1938, he lived with his mother in the family home at 413
Seward Square. Afterward he continued living there with his constant
companion and the FBI's associate director, Clyde Tolson.

His father, Dickerson N. Hoover, was a minor bureaucrat who served as
chief of the Coast and Geodetic Survey's printing division. His mother,
Annie M. Scheitlin Hoover, was a plump housewife who faithfully instilled American middle-class virtues and Lutheran Christianity in her
children.

As a schoolboy delivering groceries, young Hoover discovered the
quicker he delivered, the more trips he could make, which meant more
money. He soon was given the nickname "Speed." Active in athletics,
Hoover was once hit in the nose by a baseball-the basis of his bulldoglike
appearance. After graduating from Washington's Central High School,
Hoover got a job as a clerk in the Library of Congress. At night he began
attending George Washington University Law School, where he obtained
his law degree in 1916 and a master of law in 1917.

With the world at war, there was frantic activity in the Department of
Justice. Jobs were opening up every day.

On July 26, 1917, Hoover joined the department and was placed in the
enemy alien registration section. Earning a reputation as a diligent and
efficient worker, Hoover soon became an assistant to the attorney general,
who placed him in charge of the General Intelligence Division. Soon after
taking charge of the division, Hoover was instructed by Attorney General
A. Mitchell Palmer to make a study of subversive groups within the United
States. Hoover went at it with zeal.

As Hoover studied the background of Communism, he came to a studied
conclusion-the teachings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Nikolai
Lenin encouraged a worldwide revolution by the workers. If this was taken
literally and since the American Communist Party (actually there have
been several) agreed to follow the dictates of the Soviet leadership in
Russia, the Communists were guilty of advocating the violent overthrow of
the United States government.

From that time onward Hoover fought an unyielding war against what
he perceived as communist penetration of America.

In 1919, Hoover presented this argument with the aim of deporting
several persons believed to be Communists:

American Communists supported the Third International which was
run by Soviet Communists who advocated the violent overthrow of the
U.S. Government. Therefore American Communists were advocating
the violent overthrow of the government and could be deported as
"enemy aliens."

Two of the "enemy aliens" rounded up by Hoover's men in 1919 were
the famous anarchists Alexander Beckman and Emma Goldman. Beckman
had shot steel magnate Henry C. Frick during the 1892 Homestead Steel
strike, blaming the industrialist for the deaths of ten workers. Goldman, a
vibrant orator who is said to have influenced such notables as writers
Henry Miller, George Orwell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, was Beckman's
lover. Furthermore, Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William
McKinley, stated he had been greatly influenced by Goldman's talks.
Beckman and Goldman, along with many Russian immigrants who had not
applied for citizenship, were shipped to Russia aboard a ship dubbed "the
Soviet Ark" in December 1919.

Their exile marked the beginning of the famous "Palmer raids," in
which the legal cases were prepared by Hoover. Early in 1920, at the
orders of Attorney General Palmer, the Bureau launched a series of raids
on Communist meeting places in thirty-three cities, rounding up more than
twenty-five hundred aliens. These raids drew both praise and condemnation. U.S. District Court Judge George W. Anderson, hearing one of these
cases, stated:

... [the Communist Party's] whole scheme is for propaganda by
words, not by deeds. No weapons of the cutting or exploding kind, with
which . . . revolutions are carried on, were found in this raid. There is
therefore not a scintilla of evidence warranting a finding that the Communists are committed to the "overthrow of the Government of the
United States by violence" . . . it is notorious that political platforms
generally adopt the language of exaggeration. . . . Here . . . freedom
and a saving sense of humor and of proportion, have, until recently,
saved us from being frightened by crusaders' rhetoric.

However in another federal court, U.S. District Judge John C. Knox saw
things quite differently, stating:

I am of the opinion that the manifesto and program of the Communist
Party, together with other exhibits in the case, are of such character as
to easily lead a reasonable man to conclude that the purpose of the
Communist Party is to accomplish its end, namely, the capture and
destruction of the State as now constituted by force and violence . . .

These opposite views of two judges looking at the same evidence is
indicative of the split in American opinion over the danger presented by
communists. It is a divergence of opinion that persists today.

Whether there was a real danger or not, the Palmer raids drove the
American Communist Party underground and reduced its membership from
an estimated sixty thousand to a hard core of about ten thousand.

Through the years, Hoover continually used the communist threat to great personal advantage, even to putting his name on a popular book,
Masters of Deceit, which helped fan the fires of the 1950s communist
scare.

Was there any real threat from American Communists? In his resignation letter to Hoover, William C. Sullivan, at one time third-ranking
official at the FBI, wrote:

In the mid-Forties when the membership of the Party was about 80,000
and it had many front organizations, you publicized this widely month
in and month out. In fact it was far too widely publicized to the point
where you caused a Communist scare in the nation which was entirely
unwarranted . . . I am just as opposed to Communism as you but I
knew then and I know now that it was not the danger you claimed it was
and that it never warranted the huge amounts of the taxpayer's dollars
spent upon it . . . What happened when the Communist Party went into
a rapid decline? You kept the scare campaign going just the same for
some years. However, when the membership figures kept dropping
lower and lower you instructed us not to give them to the public any
more and not even to the Justice Department . . . At the time of my
leaving the Bureau [ 1971 ] . . . the membership figures of the Communist Party are down to an amazing 2,800 in a nation of over 200 million
people and you still conceal this from the people.