Vic Socotra

28 August 2009

The More Things Change

(J. Edgar Hoover as Self Caricature)

Well, all right. I told you we were going to spin a tale this cycle, and it is going to be a wild one.

The bulldozers attacking what is left of the row of Buckingham garden apartments are making noise like thunder this morning. One part of history is departing, even as another will be uncovered. Our story will take us from the front offices of aristocratic Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Adolph Hitler’s military intelligence Abwehr, through the frantic bustle in the huts located on the grounds of Bletchley Park in the UK and onward to the temporary buildings erected behind stately Arlington Hall across the street from Big Pink.

It will include real Nazis and sissy-Nazis of later days here, and have some odd corners at the corners of the human experience.

It will include U-boats and Military tribunals, rapid executions and numbered graves. If you hear some echoes of elder times that resonate today, so be it.

All this stuff really happened, and if history does not repeat itself, as Mark Twain said, “It does rhyme.”

We are going to wind up in the woods adjacent to the old Almshouse in SE Washington DC, across the Boss Shepherd Parkway and cracked concrete of I-295 from the gleaming new tower of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where the Spooks fled from placid Arlington.

There are a lot of ways to approach this thing, but at the heart of it is the ambition of one man, and his unflinching drive for political and organizational power.

J. Edgar Hoover is a real presence in the life of the Baby Boomers. He was the gray eminence of a paranoid Washington that did not know what to do with the Woodstock Generation. We called him “Jedgar,” marrying the initial of his first name (John) with the middle name he preferred.

The man is both smaller and larger than20life, as befits someone who stayed in office from 1924 to 1972. The founding Director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, he build the titan that is the operational arm of the Justice Department:

When it all began, there were only two organizations in town that had “intelligence” operations. Both were Cabinet-level agencies: the Department of War and the Department of the Navy.

Hoover changed all that, and it is only to be expected that some crockery (and lives) were broken along the way.

When I give tours of DC, and we pass the massive pink-tinged concrete of the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, I often joke that it is the largest federal building named for a transvestite that we know of.

I think it is a joke. I don’t know. There is a controversy over the current President’s birth certificate that will presumably be ignored for the rest of this term. J. Edgar did not file a copy of his until he was 43 years old. The controversy over his lineage (his dad may have been African American) and his orientation (the Director in the embrace of rapid Republican operative Roy Cohen) are still echoing today.

I visit his last resting place sometimes over at the Congressional Cemetery. There is a fancy metal fence around it, donated by former Special Agents, and a stone bench where you can sit and contemplate the life of the former Director-for-life. His constant companion, Associate Director Clyde Tolson, lies not far away.

It is tempting to drift off into the scandals that go along with the man, and I don’t have time for them right now. But we are going to have to deal with them tomorrow, and why he was so hot to claim the credit for something that could have undermined the biggest secret of World War Two.

To do so, we will have to talk about the cultures and organizations of Law Enforcement and intelligence, and why they are dramatically different. We will have to talk about the birth of the modern intelligence community as well.

But trust me, it all revolves around those six graves out in the woods near Blue Plains. We will get to big sleek machines and acts of war and betrayal along the way. Maybe we will take a shot at Jedgar, too, because it is almost impossible to resist, even now.

We all had a personal relationship with him, after all.

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