Branding Hoover's FBI

How the Boss's PR Men Sold the Bureau to America

Matthew Cecil

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780700623051
  9780700623051
• eBook ISBN:
  9780700623068
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: History

Hunting down America’s public enemies was just one of the FBI’s jobs. Another—perhaps more vital and certainly more covert—was the job of promoting the importance and power of the FBI, a process that Matthew Cecil unfolds clearly for the first time in this eye-opening book. The story of the PR men who fashioned the Hoover era, Branding Hoover’s FBI reveals precisely how the Bureau became a monolithic organization of thousands of agents who lived and breathed a well-crafted public relations message, image, and worldview. Accordingly, the book shows how the public was persuaded—some would say conned—into buying and even bolstering that image.

Just fifteen years after a theater impresario coined the term “public relations,” the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover began practicing a sophisticated version of the activity. Cecil introduces those agency PR men in Washington who put their singular talents to work by enforcing and amplifying Hoover's message. Louis B. Nichols, overseer of the Crime Records Section for more than twenty years, was a master of bend-your-ear networking. Milton A. Jones brought meticulous analysis to bear on the mission; Fern Stukenbroeker, a gift for eloquence; and Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, a singular charm and ambition. Branding Hoover’s FBI examines key moments when this dedicated cadre, all working under the protective wing of Associate Director Clyde Tolson, manipulated public perceptions of the Bureau (was the Dillinger triumph really what it seemed?). In these critical moments, the book allows us to understand as never before how America came to see the FBI’s law enforcement successes and overlook the dubious accomplishments, such as domestic surveillance, that truly defined the Hoover era.

Chapter One

From Corrupt to Indispensable

On January 2, 1951, Caroline P. Chambers of St. Cloud, Florida, wrote to Director J. Edgar Hoover at FBI headquarters in Washington. “In case of any injury to me—look up [name redacted] in the vicinity of [city redacted], Florida. This is urgent.”¹ When the letter arrived at headquarters, it was routed to the Bureau’s Crime Records Section, responsible for the agency’s public relations, and landed on the desk of Milton Jones.

By 1951, Jones was seven years into a twenty-eight-year stint as chief of the Crime Records Section. A Kentucky native and Harvard Law graduate, he was once described by his boss, Assistant Director Louis Nichols, as the best researcher and writer in the history of the FBI.² Jones’s relationships with top-level FBI officials such as Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson, however, were much more contentious. After reviewing Chambers’s letter, Jones ordered a name check of FBI files and, finding nothing on the writer, turned the letter over to his Correspondence Unit, a team of about a dozen special agents and more than a hundred stenographers responsible for producing the tens of thousands of routine letters mailed from Bureau headquarters each year. “From the information you have furnished,” Special Agent Eugene F. O’Keefe wrote to Chambers over Hoover’s automated signature, “. . . there is no indication that a matter within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI is involved. It is suggested that you rely upon your local law enforcement agency.”³

A second letter from Chambers, also dated January 2, 1951, was addressed to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and was forwarded to the FBI a few days later: “Immediate investigation Needed [sic]. Life in danger.”⁴ This time, O’Keefe referred that letter to a special file maintained by Crime Records for keeping track of correspondents who were likely suffering from mental illnesses. He marked the letter “Mental—No ack.”⁵ The “Mental” file, Jones later reported to Nichols, included more than 5,000 correspondents in 1951.⁶

Chambers’s pleas for help were forgotten, swallowed up in a never-ending blizzard of PR matters handled by the five units, dozens of agents, and more than 1,500 stenographers and clerks that comprised the Bureau’s Crime Records Section. Two months later, however, Miami police chief Clio Hancock contacted the FBI’s Washington headquarters and spoke to Nichols. Hancock reported that Chambers had been brutally murdered on March 15, 1951, tied up, soaked in gasoline, and burned alive in her bed.⁷ Moreover, Hancock noted, Miami police were told by Chambers’s sister that Caroline had been corresponding with the FBI, her letters pleading with Hoover for protection.⁸ A flurry of memoranda and meetings in the Washington headquarters, referred to as the Seat of Government within the FBI, followed the revelation of Chambers’s violent death. Nichols requested memoranda of explanation from Jones, O’Keefe, and an unknown stenographer unlucky enough to have typed O’Keefe’s dictated letter to Chambers. Nichols then reported his findings to Tolson, the director’s closest confidant and the one person, other than Hoover, who was part of the Bureau public relations decision-making team from its beginnings in the mid-1930s right up until Hoover’s death in 1972.

There is no record in the half dozen FBI documents related to the matter that anyone suggested in hindsight that officials should have responded to Chambers’s pleas by intervening in some way. At no point did anyone suggest that O’Keefe might have followed up his letter to Chambers, in which he suggested that she call her local authorities, with his own phone call to St. Cloud police. Instead, as Jones noted in his explanation to Nichols, the sole focus of concern was public relations and the potential for the Bureau to be embarrassed should Chambers’s urgent letters and the agency’s boilerplate response become public. “From your memorandum of April 9 and from your conversation this morning,” Jones wrote to Nichols, “ . . . I received the distinct impression that you felt I showed a lack of interest in protecting the Bureau.” Jones continued, “As soon as I saw the incoming letter, as indicated, I realized the possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau. . . . I want to emphasize that I do not think there is ample justification to accuse me of being oblivious to the possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau.”⁹

In fact, the “Don’t embarrass the Bureau” principle was ingrained in all FBI special agents’ psyches during the Hoover era. The mantra, often attributed to the director himself, was part of the informal indoctrination of special agents, absorbed as if via osmosis through daily immersion in field office politics. The phrase was even immortalized as the title of a novel by former FBI agent Bernard F. Conners that was published the year Hoover died.

For failing to protect the Bureau from embarrassment (rather than for failing to intervene to protect Chambers), Jones and O’Keefe were censured and placed on administrative probation.¹⁰ Censure notices remained in agents’ personnel files, and probation meant they could not receive raises or commendations for the duration of the punishment. Though the FBI detected no media coverage that mentioned Chambers’s correspondence, the incident had embarrassed the Bureau by exposing the oversight to an outsider, Sheriff Hancock, a local law enforcement official and thus a member of a key audience for Crime Records PR messages. In the aftermath of the tragedy, there was no change in Crime Records Section correspondence policy. Instead, the incident was viewed as an error caused by the huge volume of correspondence that passed through the section. Rather than treating the woman’s plea for protection and her subsequent murder as a law enforcement failure worth investigating further, FBI officials considered the incident only in terms of public relations and protecting the Bureau from embarrassment.

To avoid such embarrassments and promote a particular image of the Bureau, Hoover began building a public relations agency within the FBI in 1935. For nearly forty years under his leadership, hundreds of agents and thousands of clerks in the FBI’s Crime Records Section labored to promote the Bureau and avoid PR embarrassments.¹¹ Crime Records encompassed several distinct units. The Correspondence Unit handled a massive volume of correspondence during an era when much business, routine and otherwise, was handled via mail. The Publications Unit produced the FBI’s magazines, including the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, which was distributed to local police organizations and other law enforcement officials throughout the United States, and the Bureau’s internal newsletter, the Investigator. The Research Unit produced lengthy monographs on special topics for internal and sometimes external consumption, eventually becoming the ideological and “academic” center of the FBI’s anticommunist crusade. The Library Unit was the institutional memory of FBI public relations, storing clippings and other information that officials used to assess the value or utility of relationships built by the work of the Crime Records Section. And the Special Projects Unit managed Bureau media relations, a particularly important aspect of FBI public relations. Over the course of its nearly forty-year history, which corresponded with Hoover’s tenure as director, the Crime Records Section produced an astonishing volume and variety of PR materials, ranging from television and radio scripts to books and magazines, press releases, letters to correspondents, and even comic books.

In essence, the agents and officials of the Crime Records Section managed a decades-long public relations campaign, producing targeted messages and evaluating feedback provided by special agents in charge (SACs) and others around the country, then adjusting the message if need be and starting again. The FBI’s preferred image of itself was built and maintained through stories in the news and entertainment media and through special agents in charge who painstakingly developed and managed relationships with local opinion shapers—individual members of key Bureau stakeholders in the media, government, the clergy, local law enforcement, and business. The FBI’s adoption of sophisticated image-making and myth-enforcing machinery occurred early in the modern history of public relations, beginning just a few years after Edward Bernays coined the term and helped professionalize the practice in the early 1920s. It is significant that Hoover, director of the FBI for forty-eight years, had no training in PR, yet his Bureau practiced, at an early stage in the development of the field, sophisticated public relations techniques on a nationwide scale to build and maintain a myth that sustained public support for the organization for decades.

Public relations, perhaps merely coincidentally, became the answer to an ongoing crisis faced by Hoover’s FBI from his earliest days as director. Hoover was tapped as director in 1924 following a series of overreaches and scandals that had shaken public and, more important, congressional confidence in the agency. Congress had opposed the formation of a bureau of investigation when it was initially proposed in 1908, fearing that a centralization of investigatory power within a federal agency would create the potential for abuse of that great power for political or other purposes. Once the Bureau was created by executive action, critics predicted that the federal investigative agency would succumb to corruption and political manipulation. They were right. By 1924, the Bureau of Investigation’s reputation was badly tarnished by its involvement in the Teapot Dome political scandal and by public perceptions of cronyism. Most of all, though, the Bureau’s reputation had been damaged by the nationwide Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, when thousands of alleged radicals and anarchists were summarily arrested and imprisoned. Most of those individuals rounded up would ultimately be released, but the public was left with the perception that federal agents knocked down doors and hauled people off in the night, acting as an American secret police. Hoover and his boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, appeared before Congress and grilled for days. News coverage decried the Bureau’s actions, and some called for Palmer’s resignation and the dismantling of the Bureau of Investigation. Oddly, the man selected to clean up the Bureau by the new attorney general, outspoken Palmer Raids critic Harlan Fiske Stone, was the same man who had coordinated those very raids, J. Edgar Hoover.

During Hoover’s first ten years as director, he maintained a low profile, an approach that is not surprising considering the battering the Bureau took in the early 1920s. From time to time, a news reporter would wander into the agency to write a story, and in 1929, the Bureau began issuing crime statistics annually. But there was no public relations section within the agency, and Hoover (and Tolson when he arrived as a top administrator in Washington in 1930) managed media relations on an ad hoc basis.

For example, on February 14, 1934, Brooklyn Eagle reporter Henry Suydam inquired about writing an article on the Bureau (then called, briefly, the Division of Investigation) for Forum magazine. Tolson met with Suydam and referred him to the technical laboratory and to Hoover for a short interview.¹² The resulting article was effusive in its praise for the agency and for Hoover. “What is it that enables the federal authorities to succeed where state and municipal authorities so often fail?” Suydam asked. “To what is the phenomenal record of the Department of Justice in the apprehension of kidnapers to be ascribed?”¹³ Suydam credited Hoover’s “reorganization” of the Bureau in 1924 for its performance in the high-profile kidnapping cases of the early 1930s, and he attributed the agency’s success to its cooperation with local police, its training regimen, and its use of scientific law enforcement methods. “There is no magic in it,” Suydam wrote, “but rather the two qualities which are demanded of its men—imagination and common sense.”¹⁴ His staid prose and statistical analysis were hardly the stuff of later, highly dramatized stories on Bureau exploits, but they foretold the FBI’s public relations message of the mid- and late 1930s. Hoover ordered a copy of the article forwarded to the attorney general.¹⁵ In addition to foreshadowing the Bureau’s PR template, Suydam’s article had another bit of prescience. Six months after its publication, the reporter was named the Department of Justice publicity officer, ostensibly responsible for supervising public relations for the department and overseeing FBI public relations as well.

Hoover himself oversaw the Bureau’s limited media relations efforts from 1924 to 1930. During that time, the agency rarely appeared in the news. That low profile was in keeping with Hoover’s marching orders from Attorney General Stone in 1924. Stone told Hoover to remove corrupt agents and professionalize the Bureau. A low profile in the news media fit with that charge and also fit Hoover’s tentative approach when it came to media relations and his general preference for secrecy. During his first six years as director, he focused on reforming the Bureau, firing political appointees, establishing the emerging field of fingerprint science as a law enforcement tool, implementing a complex filing and indexing system, and creating a formal training regimen for special agents....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Defining a “Hoover Era”
• 1. From Corrupt to Indispensable
• 2. The Networker
• 3. Speaking with One Voice
• 4. The Editor and the Professor
• 5. Taming the Octopus
• 6. The Heir Apparent
• 7. An Empire in Decline
• 8. The Fall
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover