Official and Confidential by Anthony Summers Read Free Book Online Page A

to a crossroads, and you’vegot to go one way or the other.’ The other road beckoning, he claimed, was the Church. In the months before he left school, he said, he was preoccupied with the idea of becoming a minister.
    FBI propaganda solemnly repeated this story, portraying a youth who had struggled to choose between one path of good, the Church, and another, the Law. According to this version, Edgar the FBI Director remained a regular churchgoer, a boss who kept a well-thumbed Bible on his desk, who took his religion very seriously indeed.
    Some of this was simply untrue, some of it the truth stretched beyond recognition. Relatives recalled no family talk at all about Edgar being ‘torn’ between religion and law. It was the elder brother, Dickerson, not Edgar, who faced such a dilemma.
    Edgar did not fully exploit the ‘call of the Church’ gambit until after the death, in 1944, of the brother who might have contradicted him. In 1990, however, a member of Dickerson Jr.’s family emerged to set the record straight. ‘That thing that keeps coming up about Edgar wanting to be a minister,’ said Dickerson’s daughter-in-law Virginia Hoover, ‘it just isn’t true. In our family, we’ve always known that.’
    Was Edgar at all religious? As a child, certainly, he was a zealous leader of Sunday school class. He went on teaching, quirkily dressed up in his high school cadet uniform, well into his teens.
    According to the propaganda, this was the start of a lifetime of regular worship. A Bureau-approved article in 1960 would report that he ‘walks down the aisle of Washington’s National Presbyterian Church each Sunday morning at precisely 9 o’clock.’ It was not true. ‘Mr Hoover,’ the church’s former pastor Dr Edward Elson admitted in an interview, ‘was not regular in his attendance … was present at mainly seasonal affairs.’
    Leo McClairen, a former FBI agent who acted as Edgar’s chauffeur whenever he traveled south, did not remember hisboss having gone to church once – in twenty years of Christmas visits to Florida.
    Edgar’s public piety was a sham – as was his version of his decision to go to law school. ‘We have no lawyers in our family,’ Edgar said, ‘and I don’t recall that I knew any. But suddenly I took the turn, and knew that’s what I wanted to be – an attorney.’
    In fact, Edgar had a cousin, another John E. Hoover, who was a lawyer, a clerk to five Supreme Court justices and a longtime Justice Department attorney. The family also boasted another very successful lawyer: Annie Hoover’s cousin William Hitz was a senior Justice Department attorney. He was quite close to Edgar, according to yet another lawyer relative, Harold Burton, who was to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
    George Washington University Law School, where Edgar enrolled in 1913, did not have the prestige of other local universities. It offered, however, a respectable conservative law program, a solid grounding in the nuts and bolts of the legal system. For Edgar, a key advantage was that the course consisted of evening classes, leaving time for wage-earning during the day.
    The purse strings at home were tight now, with the two elder children burdened with family commitments. Soon, as their father’s health declined, they would be even tighter. Edgar was the man of the house at the age of eighteen, and he needed a job. Annie’s cousin William Hitz found him one – as a thirty-dollar-a-week junior messenger in the order department of the Library of Congress.
    Every day for the next four years, Edgar would walk the few blocks from Seward Square to his day job at the Library. He studied at the law school from five until seven, then went home to study some more. He kept his twenty-six law notebooks, filled with neat script, all his life.
    He became a member of Kappa Alpha, a southern