JOHN EDGAR HOOVER'S death at 77 refreshed memories of an extraordinary fund of Americana—a long, single-minded and complicated life that became a unique national presence. Hoover and the FBI were one—creator and creation. He served eight Presidents as the world's most powerful policeman. With a genius for administration and popular myth, he fashioned his career as an improbable bureaucratic morality play peopled by bad guys and G-men. The drama worked well enough when everyone agreed on the villains—"Pretty Boy" Floyd, John Dillinger, Nazi agents—but finally curdled somewhat in more ambiguous days.
Almost no one ever challenged Hoover's personal ethics, only the truculently moralistic and political code he followed and the methods he sometimes used to enforce it. Even at the end, he was a difficult target, for the vast police organization that he built almost singlehanded, which today has 19,401 employees, including 8,586 special agents, has over the years been astonishingly uncontaminated by outside political influence. The number of FBI agents convicted of a crime: none. Hoover's bureau set the standard and wrote the rules for effective law enforcement throughout the world. No criticism could detract from his extraordinary achievement—the difficult establishment in a turbulent democracy of a national law-enforcement agency that was honest, expert and free from partisan taint.
Hoover once considered becoming a Presbyterian minister, but he obviously had a vocation elsewhere. The son of a Washington civil servant, he worked as a Library of Congress clerk while taking night courses at George Washington University. He earned a law degree in 1916 and a master's a year later.
His bureaucratic rise was rapid. He joined the Justice Department in 1917, and two years later was head of a new general intelligence division ordered to study subversives during the "Palmer Raids," an anti-Bolshevist dragnet that made McCarthyism a generation later seem a model of tolerance. It was Hoover's first encounter with Communism, which all of his life he regarded as "the greatest menace free civilization has ever known."
Vintage Year. In 1924, Attorney General (later Supreme Court Justice) Harlan Fiske Stone offered to make Hoover director of the department's Bureau of Investigation, then a slovenly, corrupt outfit. Though only 29, Hoover insisted that he would take the job only if the bureau were divorced from politics and the civil service. He established an absolute authority at the beginning. He demanded that his agents have either a law or an accounting degree, resisted any and all political pressures. Hoover turned the bureau into the world's most efficient crime-fighting apparatus, with an elaborate fingerprint library and crime laboratory. In 1930, the FBI became the clearinghouse for national crime statistics, reported by state and local authorities.