Within two weeks of taking office President John F Kennedy had declared “war on crime”.
He meant organized crime and his greatest impediment to the war on crime was the FBI director , J. Edgar Hoover.
John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, and Hoover’s relationship with the president faced a major challenge. JFK’s brother- Attorney General Robert Kennedy , Given JFK’s close relationship with his brother, Hoover could no longer bypass his boss and deal directly with the president, as he so often did in the past.
John F Kennedy, J,Edgar Hoover, Bobby Kennedy
Not seeing eye to eye with the Kennedys, Hoover became petty and cut back on volunteering political intelligence reports to the White House.
Instead, he only responded to requests, while mainly collecting information on JFK’s extramarital affairs.
J. Edgar Hoover originally was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigation — the FBI’s predecessor and was instrumental in founding the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the first director.
He remained in office for 48 years, from his appointment after the First World War (1924 )to his death in 1972, achieving fame and extraordinary power, yet he insisted on the incredibly bizarre claim for decades that there was no Mafia.
A first booby-trap bomb directed at assassinating Palmer was mailed by anarchists linked to Luigi Galleani. This first bomb was intercepted and defused, but two months later, Palmer and his family narrowly escaped death when an anarchist exploded a bomb on their porch. In total, April 1919 saw 36 dynamite-filled bombs mailed to other leading figures including justice officials, newspaper editors and businessmen
Appointed head of the General Intelligence Division , Hoover was assigned to monitor radical activities, culminating in the series of deportation raids subsequently dubbed the Palmer Raids during the Red Scare of 1919-1920.
The Palmer Raids were conducted by the United States Department of Justice under the administration of president Woodrow Wilson to capture and arrest suspected radical leftists, especially anarchists, and deport them from the United States.
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer purposefully exploited these raids to promote his unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, while Hoover was untarnished by the public’s subsequent reaction to revelations of the bureau’s abuses of power, which focused on Palmer.
Following Warren Harding’s election, Hoover’s administrative skills and diligence won him a key promotion and in 1924, Hoover was named head of the Bureau of Investigation. It was a dysfunctional government organization, which he quickly overhauled.
When the organization was restructured as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 Hoover remained at the helm. He set up professional standards and practices.
He created forensic methods to investigate crimes, and established the first FBI Lab.
He was also a force in standardizing law enforcement practices across the country; he set up the FBI National Academy.
Hoover’s “informants were nearly the only ones that paid the party dues.”
The FBI participated in the Venona Project, a pre-World War II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States.
They did not initially realize that espionage was being committed, but the Soviet’s multiple use of one-time pad ciphers (which with single use are unbreakable) created redundancies that allowed some intercepts to be decoded.
These established that espionage was being carried out.
Hoover kept the intercepts – America’s greatest counterintelligence secret – in a locked safe in his office.
He chose to not inform President Truman, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, or Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and General George Marshall while they held office. He informed the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) of the Venona Project in 1952
He also created the Public Enemy list, which eventually became the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Under his leadership, the FBI went after John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, Baby Face Nelson, and Al Capone.
Despite this, Hoover’s later years in office have been overshadowed by his blackmail tactics against anyone he perceived as an enemy whether they were a criminal or not.
These blackmail practices are how many experts think he was able to stay in power for so long. He was infamous for his wiretapping and surveillance practices.
In Robert Kennedy’s own words.
For three decades, whenever possible, Hoover ignored the Mafia,” But with the capture of nearly 60 mafia members at the Appalachian meeting, Hoover and the FBI could no longer avoid taking action against the Mafia, or deny its existence.
Still, Hoover built his FBI files into an intimidating weapon, not just for fighting crime but also for bullying government officials and critics and destroying careers.
The files covered a dizzying kaleidoscope of power including Supreme Court justices such as Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, movie stars Mary Pickford, Marilyn Monroe, even first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Physicist Albert Einstein, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III, Martin Luther King, Jr. among others — often replete with unconfirmed gossip about private sex lives and radical ties.
J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Kennedy,
The “secret files,” as they became widely known, would guarantee that Hoover would remain director as long as he wished. By 1960, the FBI had open, “subversive” files on some 432,000 Americans.
The most sensitive files were kept in his office and stayed under the watchful eye of his secretary of 54 yrs, Helen Gandy.
According to the FBI, only he and Gandy ever had access to the files.
Today, with few exceptions, Hoover’s FBI, files are open for any American to see at the National Archives.
They make fascinating reading and paint a a bewildering portrait of chaotic power.
None the less, Hoover ensued a duel of leaks, blackmail and power plays occurred against Kennedy ..
Despite, his absolute control of the FBI, Hoover never launched a formal investigation of the Mafia, until the 1957 .
The infamous Appalachian, meeting of the Dons was an absolute scandal.
62 top level mafia, arrested all due to an off-duty NY state Policeman who happened to notice a lot of out-of-state cars showing up in the rural village of Gangster’s Inc, NY.
According to Gangster’s Inc, inside info says some sources believe the meeting had originally been scheduled to take place in Chicago, but a number of the dons, thought this was unwise as the Windy City was feeling the heat that particular November because of a highly publicized IRS investigation into the finances of Chicago boss Tony “The Big Tuna” Accardo.
Stefano Magaddino, the Buffalo boss, suggested the Apalachin location, owned by Joe Barbara, who Magaddino may have used as a middleman in shipping heroin along old bootlegger’s route from Canada to New York City.
However , those files were no more secret than any other bureau files.
But if you go along with the theory , the files kept in Hoover’s office to were to protect them from curious clerks, far more sensitive files containing top-secret information on pending espionage cases were kept in the central files.
So, if Hoover truly was concerned about information getting out, he should have been more worried about the highly classified information in those files.
After Hoover died , Gandy set about destroying a lot of files.
When Mr. Hoover died, Clyde A. Tolson, his deputy and suspected lover , was acting director of the FBI for a few days.
Tolson called Gandy’s private number with the news of Hoover’s death along with orders to begin destroying the files. Within an hour, the destruction began.
While there is ample evidence that Hoover used the information in his files for blackmail, there was usually no need for it.
Simply, the perception that he had such information was enough to keep politicians in line.
In the end, the answer to why Hoover did not go after organized crime until he was forced into it, is the same reason he maintained files on members of congress.
Above all, Hoover wanted to keep his job.
Many members of congress—not to mention powerful local politicians—had ties to organized crime and might try to unseat him if he went after the Mafia. The Mafia was more , or as powerful as the president. Moreover, as a egoist, Hoover did not want to risk losing a case against a powerful figure.
For purposes of prosecution, Hoover would not investigate corrupt politicians.
As FBI director, Hoover had an obligation to go after both Mafia figures and corrupt politicians.
Yet until he was pressured into investigating organized crime, those two targets were sacrosanct.
Leaks, blackmail and power plays occurred against the backdrop of President Kennedy ‘s excess and pathos.
The stakes were higher than the individual fortunes of Hoover or Kennedy.
America was racked with crisis: the civil rights movement was challenging the nation’s conscience, a war was growing in Vietnam and an arms race was threatening nuclear war.
Bobby may have had presidential prerogative on his side, but Hoover could wield files full of allegations about Jack and others.
How this pas de deux played out helped define the nation and a new era , yet ultimately both never saw the final outcome and both died in office.
Not until after Hoover’s death did Americans learn of his abuses of authority.
Reform followed.
Because Hoover essentially abused the power his role afforded him, FBI directors can now only serve a maximum term of 10 years; Hoover was in as director for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972.