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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.