J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets by Curt Gentry

President McKinley.
    Hoover learned his lessons well. Two years later, in 1919, when the aging anarchists emerged from prison, Hoover would be waiting, with new warrants for their arrests. In their subsequent “trial,” Hoover involved himself in every aspect of their prosecution. Using Conant’s tactics, plus some of his own, he even bettered his model: garnering far bigger headlines, he succeeded in having Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and 247 others, deported from the United States.
    Hoover’s rise was rapid. That Justice was understaffed, many of its bright young men having enlisted, was only part of the reason. Far more important was Hoover’s ability. “From the day he entered the Department, certain things marked Hoover apart from scores of other young law clerks,” Jack Alexander wrote in a 1937 New Yorker profile which drew heavily on interviews with people who recalled Hoover’s early years at Justice. “He dressed better than most, and a bit on the dandyish side. He had an exceptional capacity for detail work, and he handled small chores with enthusiasm and thoroughness. He constantly sought new responsibilities to shoulder and welcomed chances to work overtime. When he was in conference with an official of his department, his manner was that of a young man who confidently expected to rise. His superiors were duly impressed.” 13
    So impressed that less than three months after his arrival, in 1917, he was promoted. And then, three months later, promoted again. Because of the mammoth number of new cases brought by the war, Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory appointed John Lord O’Brian, a progressive Republican from Buffalo, New York, as special assistant to the attorney general for war work. It didn’t take O’Brian long to notice Hoover, for he was ever present. He alone seemed to know where things were, how to get something done quickly and well. “I discovered he worked Sundays and nights,” O’Brian later recalled. “I promoted him several times, simply on merits.” 14 Picked by O’Brian as one of his assistants, Hoover was placed in charge of a unit in the Enemy Alien Registration Section.
    At age twenty-two John Edgar Hoover had found his niche in life. He had become a hunter of men.
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    * One of Hoover’s early ghostwriters, Courtney Ryley Cooper—who wrote the FBI director’s first book, Persons in Hiding —adroitly handled both Hoover’s height and weight problems by describing him as “a well-built man, tall, but sufficiently well-proportioned to make his height less apparent.” 5

6
“Palmer-Do Not Let This Country See Red!”
    F or some the armistice meant not the end of the war but only a change of enemies. Those Americans fortunate enough to return from the European battlefields found their country more deeply divided than it had been at any other time since the Civil War.
    As in any war, there was violence.
    At about eleven-fifteen on the night of June 2, 1919, the new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, turned out the downstairs lights of his Washington residence and was walking upstairs to join his wife in bed when he heard something heavy thump against the front door. The blast that almost instantaneously followed shattered windows all over the neighborhood.
    Across Dupont Circle, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, had just returned home from a dinner party. Had they been one minute later, they would have still been outside, directly in line with the blast. After running upstairs to make sure his son James was all right, and stilling the cook—who kept shouting, “The world has come to an end!”—Roosevelt hurried over to see if the Palmers needed help. But first he had to step over the mangled bits of flesh that had landed on his front steps.
    Neither of the Palmers had been hurt, Roosevelt reported on his return. The only victim was the bomber himself, who had apparently stumbled coming up Palmer’s walk. But,