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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."