Read Online Official and Confidential by Anthony Summers - Free Book Online

his mother’s expectations and more. In November 1918, two months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, he had been elevated to the grade of Special Attorney, with a salary of $2,000 a year – as much as his father had earned at sixty.
    Though still a lowly unknown, Edgar was already working on his image – by altering the way he styled himself. Until now he had initialed documents ‘JEH’ or signed himself ‘J. E. Hoover,’ with a flourish to the loop of the ‘J.’. That, apparently, would no longer do. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ the name that was to become part of the American lexicon, was about to be born.
    Edgar would claim he first changed his signature in 1933, after being refused credit at a clothing store because another John E. Hoover had failed to pay his bills. Like so much of the past according to Edgar, this was not true. It was on December 30, 1918, two days before his birthday, that the young man’s pen hovered over an otherwise dull memorandum for John Lord O’Brian. He signed it, with a truly enormous flourish, ‘J. Edgar Hoover.’
    Perhaps, just weeks after his humiliation at the hands of Alice, Edgar simply needed to give his ego a boost. The man who headed the Bureau of Investigation at the time, and who had advanced Edgar’s career, styled himself A. Bruce Bielaski. Looking back, waspish Justice Department veterans concluded that Edgar – already imagining himself at the top of the bureaucratic pecking order – was aping Bielaski.
    O’Brian, who also propelled Edgar on his path to power, spoke cautiously about him while he was alive. He survived, however, to the great age of ninety-eight, outliving Edgar by a few months. Before his own death, O’Brian was asked about his role in furthering the career of the youth who became J. Edgar Hoover.
    â€˜This,’ the old man admitted, ‘is something I prefer to whisper in dark corners. It is one of the sins for which I have to atone.’

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    â€˜I always worry when I see a nation feel that it is coming to greatness through the activities of its policemen.’
    Cyrus Eaton, industrialist and critic of J. Edgar Hoover
    T he elevation of Edgar came thanks to an opportunistic Attorney General and his anti-Communist witch-hunt. Were it not for chance, and an odd combination of circumstances, it might never have happened at all.
    As America celebrated the end of the war, Edgar’s future was uncertain. With the War Emergency Division about to be disbanded, he started looking for a new job. He applied to join the Bureau of Immigration, was turned down, then went to his boss, John Lord O’Brian, and asked for a transfer to the Bureau of Investigation. He did not get that either, but O’Brian mentioned his name to the Attorney General-designate Mitchell Palmer, the ‘Fighting Quaker.’
    A clutch of senior officials, including O’Brian, quit the Bureau as soon as possible once Palmer was named for the post. During the war, when he had been Alien Property Custodian, millions of dollars in seized German assets had ended up in the hands of Palmer’s Democratic cronies. He had ambitions to be President and saw the Justice Department merely as a stepping-stone. Just when he needed one, a political bandwagon appeared – in the shape of a wave of hysteria about Bolshevism.
    Palmer took office in spring 1919, as Lenin was calling for world revolution. After months of horror stories about socialist upheaval in Europe, the American middle classeswere shocked by waves of strikes at home – 3,000 that year alone. Then a bombing campaign began, including a midnight attack on the home of the new Attorney General. The Senate called for a probe into an alleged plan to overthrow the government, and Congress funded an all-out investigation of radical groups.
    The great Red scare had begun. Palmer hired William Flynn, former Chief of the Secret Service, to head the Bureau