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

fraternity with origins at William and Mary College in Virginia – alink he would maintain long after his student days were over. GWU graduates, and especially Kappa Alpha men, were to be among his closest associates at the FBI.
    A photograph from those days shows Edgar at the center of a group of students, hands thrust deep in pockets, a flower in his buttonhole, a grave expression on his face. ‘He was slim, dark and intense,’ a classmate recalled. ‘He sat off by himself against the wall, and always had the answers. None of us got to know him very well.’
    As manager of his fraternity house, Edgar proved to be a budding despot. He reportedly ‘took a dim and moral view of such chapter-house capers as crap games, poker and drinking bouts.’ He ‘located our contraband,’ recalled Dave Stephens, who had also been at Central with Edgar, ‘and destroyed it by sending it crashing to the concrete areaway.’ ‘Speed chastised us with his morality,’ recalled actor William Gaxton.
    While the nickname Speed stuck, some students hit on a crueler one. ‘We men who received C’s,’ said GWU alumnus C. W. Collier, ‘called Hoover, who received A’s, “Fatty-pants.”’
    Edgar had no time for the slew of writers and thinkers then changing social and political attitudes around the world. Not for him the ideas of Freud and George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx and John Reed, Pankhurst or Bertrand Russell. His favorite poets, he let it be known, were Edgar Guest and Vash Young and Robert Service, the he-man poet who told America that:
    â€¦ only the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the weak shall perish, and only
the fit survive.
    Edgar received his Bachelor of Law degree, without honors, in the summer of 1916. America, meanwhile, was moving closer to entering the war in Europe. There were problems at home – anarchist bombs, strikes, workers’ demands for shorter working hours. Henry Ford was forcedto agree to equal pay for women – $5 a day – and a woman was elected to Congress for the first time. President Wilson promised that all women would soon get the vote. Then, on April 6, 1917, after he had told Congress ‘the world must be made safe for democracy,’ the United States declared war on Germany.
    That same day, his mental health now seriously impaired, Edgar’s father gave up work for good. Though Edgar was now the highest-paid youth in his grade at the Library of Congress, the family faced penury. On July 25, when he learned he had passed his bar exams, Edgar quit the job at the Library. The next day, for a few dollars more, he began work at the Department of Justice.
    Edgar would in future imply that he got the government job on his own initiative. In fact he almost certainly got it thanks, once again, to Bill Hitz. Hitz, by then a judge, had clout. He counted the President and Supreme Court Justice Brandeis among his friends, and himself held a senior post at the Justice Department. With connections like that, it was easy to find a place at Justice for a needy young relative.
    Edgar would say his first post had been a ‘clerkship.’ His personnel file describes him as having been a ‘Special Employee.’ In fact he worked in the mail room. Bruce Bielaski, a senior official, recalled how – on the trolley to work one day in 1917 – he found himself talking shop with his neighbor, mail room chief George Michaelson.
    Michaelson dropped the name of a young lawyer he had sorting mail, ‘one of the brightest boys around.’ ‘You don’t need anybody with brains doing that,’ said Bielaski. ‘If you want him,’ Michaelson replied, ‘you can have him.’
    That conversation on the trolley was a fateful one for America. Bruce Bielaski was Director of the Bureau of Investigation, direct forerunner of what we know as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI.
    The Bureau had