A law, after all, is only a collection of words, and not always very clear words at that. So was passage of the Lindbergh Law, spurred if not inspired by the murder of a golden child, a good thing or not? Better to ask was it always used appropriately? The answer is no, as the execution of the hapless Arthur Gooch demonstrated. Did the Lindbergh Law deter some would-be kidnappers? Impossible to say. How much did the FBI contribute to solving kidnapping cases in which it played a secondary, even marginal, investigative role? Again, impossible to say. The Lindbergh Law was a reaction to a crime wave, a wave that some public officials rode to power. No one rode this wave more skillfully than J. Edgar Hoover, who survived early blunders by his agency, blunders that would have doomed a less skilled, less ruthless bureaucrat. Perhaps he could have built his FBI without the Lindbergh Law, as Congress responded to the Depression-era crime wave by federalizing various interstate offenses. But it was the kidnapping epidemic of the 1930s, most infamously the Lindbergh tragedy, that inflamed public sentiment and paved the way for a national police force.
After the thirties passed into history and the kidnapping epidemic subsided, there was a new mission for Hoover, one that involved the very security of the United States: hunting down Nazi spies and saboteurs. In 1942, his men caught eight Nazi agents who had been put ashore on Long Island and the coast of Florida from German submarines. They were carrying explosives they planned to use to sabotage American factories. Six of the Nazis were soon executed; the remaining two were sentenced to long prison terms.
During the Cold War, as the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb and loomed as the new menace, Hoover’s men pursued Communist spies. But as the threat from the Kremlin subsided or at least seemed less existential, Hoover’s zeal was unabated. He saw Communist threats behind civil rights demonstrations and antiwar protests. He even viewed the Communist Party of the United States as a security threat, while virtually everyone else saw it as a tiny collection of harmless and naïve idealists.
That was quintessential Hoover: stuck in amber, forever seeing America and the world through his personal lens.
Hoover built the FBI into a modern crime-fighting force, with a laboratory relied upon by lawmen across the country and a police academy that has sharpened the skills of legions of local police officers. Along the way, he trampled on individual liberties and intimidated politicians with his collection of secrets. While he acted the part of a strict moralist, he had no compunctions about spending bureau money and using bureau people for strictly personal ends—improvements to his Washington home, for example.
And no wonder he felt so entitled. From the day he took office, May 10, 1924, until the day of his death, May 2, 1972, at the age of seventy-seven, the name J. Edgar Hoover was synonymous with the FBI. No director since has achieved such power and inspired such fear, and none ever will again. Since 1968, Senate confirmation has been required to seat an FBI director, and his term is limited to ten years.
How many Americans could name the present director? (At the time of writing, Christopher Wray.)
It is remarkable, even amazing, how time changes images. The building that houses the Department of Justice, the FBI’s parent agency, is named after Robert F. Kennedy. When Robert Kennedy became attorney general in 1961, it was because his brother, President John F. Kennedy, wanted someone in his cabinet whom he could trust totally—a consigliere, if you will. Robert Kennedy was thirty-five when he became attorney general. He had a law license. Otherwise, he had no qualifications, save one: his last name. The appointment of Robert Kennedy was shameless nepotism. Yet today, he is respected, even revered.
The building that has housed the Federal Bureau of Investigation since 1974 is named after J. Edgar Hoover. There are still people who admire him and what he stood for. There are many others who would like to take a crowbar, pry Hoover’s name off the building, and rename it for almost anyone else.
Today’s FBI is still struggling with “his complex and enduring legacy,” as the agency acknowledges on its website.199 “Fairly or unfairly, Hoover was criticized for his aggressive use of surveillance, his perceived reluctance to tackle civil rights crimes, his reputation for collecting and using information about U.S. leaders, and his seeming obsession with the threat of communism.”** Fairly or unfairly? I’d say fairly.
The post-Hoover FBI has had its triumphs. One notable one came in 1994 when agents caught Aldrich Ames, a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency who for years had been passing secrets to the Kremlin and living the good life with payoffs from Moscow. Ames pleaded guilty and was sent to prison for life.
Then there was the disgraceful episode of Robert Hanssen, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent who was arrested in 2001 for passing secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia. Like Ames, Hanssen was motivated by greed, impure and simple. He, too, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life behind bars.
Had a Judas like Hanssen been caught while Hoover was still in power, the director probably would have erupted into purple-faced, spittle-flying rage. He also would have been heartbroken to see his beloved bureau exposed for what it had always been: human and imperfect. It would have been small consolation to Hoover that the FBI itself nabbed the traitor in its midst.
The other giant figure whose image was sullied with the passage of years was Charles Lindbergh, who suffered mightily because of his fame.
Charles and Anne Lindbergh were hounded so mercilessly by reporters and photographers that in 1935, months after Bruno Hauptmann was convicted, they fled to Britain with their son, Jon, who had been born on August 16, 1932, and for whose safety they feared in America. (The Lindberghs eventually had two other
