Official and Confidential by Anthony Summers Page A

within a month. He confirmed the appointment of a third, Leonore Houston, following pressure from her Congressman, but she did not last long. FBI records say she ended up in a mental hospital, ‘threatening to shoot Mr Hoover as soon as she was released.’
    From then on Edgar brushed aside all talk of recruiting women, claiming that they ‘could never gunfight, and all our agents must know how to do that.’ He remained unmoved, nearly fifty years later, when two feminists sued the FBI, claiming that rejection of their applications violated their constitutional rights. As soon as he died, though, the policy was changed. Today there are nearly 900 female FBI agents, all fully trained in the use of firearms.
    To the women he did employ as clerical staff, Edgar behaved like a martinet. He had grown up in a time when women were arrested for smoking in public, so he forbade them to smoke in the office. He refused to let women wear pants to work until 1971. Only then, persuaded by his own secretary that women needed pants to keep warm in the winter, did he capitulate.
    Even at that stage, Edgar was still punishing employees for the way they behaved in private. ‘When a girl in the Fingerprint Section got pregnant without being married,’ recalled Miami Agent in Charge Kenneth Whittaker, ‘Hoover was furious. He wanted to know who investigated her before we hired her. Was she promiscuous? When hediscovered she was living with a guy, he fired her at once. He didn’t want word to get out that we’d hire girls who’d do that.’
    Edgar’s attitude filtered down to the ranks and generated crude contempt. Female employees were tolerated, said former Agent Cril Payne, ‘only to perform the boring clerical functions required to keep the Bureau paper flowing. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that it was perfectly all right to bullshit ’em and ball ’em; just don’t tell ’em any secrets …’
    Edgar was apparently prejudiced against Jews. In Miami Beach, where he stayed every Christmas, he invariably chose hotels that – until World War II – carried the sign NO JEWS, NO DOGS . He referred to the Irish leader Eamon de Valera, in an early report, as ‘a Portuguese Jew,’ and fifty years later dismissed Robert Mardian, an Assistant Attorney General during the Nixon administration, as ‘that Lebanese Jew.’ In fact, de Valera was part Spanish, but had no Jewish blood, and Mardian was a Christian, of Armenian descent.
    Over the years, two Jews became Assistant Directors. Jewish employees were given days off to observe religious holidays, and Jews once made up most of the FBI basketball team. Yet Jack Levine, a Jew who joined in 1960, calculated that only one half of one percent of Bureau agents were Jewish. He found pervasive discrimination, including a supervisor who said there was nothing subversive about the American Nazi Party, because ‘all they are against is Jews,’ and an instructor who described an expert witness as ‘a greasy-looking sheenie.’
    Edgar hired hardly any Hispanics. ‘The average Mexican,’ he said, ‘is a psychological [ sic ] liar … They have visions probably of making money.’ ‘You never have to bother about a President being shot by Puerto Ricans or Mexicans,’ he told an interviewer. ‘They don’t shoot very straight. But if they come at you with a knife, beware.’
    Edgar had no foreign friends, and had a knee-jerk distrust of anyone from a foreign country. Except for a couple of one-day excursions across the Canadian and Mexican borders, he never traveled outside the United States. He once ruled that Newsweek correspondent Dwight Martin was ‘not acceptable as an interviewer,’ because his Chinese wife, from Hong Kong, had met American naval officers while working as a tailor’s assistant.
    â€˜I guess he was afraid she was a spy,’ said