cronies and unscrupulous officials, among them the head of the
bureau: William Burns, the infamous private eye. After being
appointed director, in 1921, Burns had bent laws and hired crooked
agents, including a confidence man who peddled protection and
pardons to members of the underworld. The Department of
Justice had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue.
In 1924, after a congressional committee revealed that the oil
baron Harry Sinclair had bribed the secretary of the interior Albert
Fall to drill in the Teapot Dome federal petroleum reserve—the
name that would forever be associated with the scandal—the
ensuing investigation lay bare just how rotten the system of
justice was in the United States. When Congress began looking
into the Justice Department, Burns and the attorney general used
all their power, all the tools of law enforcement, to thwart the
inquiry and obstruct justice. Members of Congress were
shadowed. Their offices were broken in to and their phones
tapped. One senator denounced the various “illegal plots,
counterplots, espionage, decoys, dictographs” that were being used
not to “detect and prosecute crime but...to shield profiteers, bribe
takers and favorites.”
By the summer of 1924, Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge,
had gotten rid of Burns and appointed a new attorney general,
Harlan Fiske Stone. Given the growth of the country and the
profusion of federal laws, Stone concluded that a national police
force was indispensable, but in order to serve this need, the
bureau had to be transformed from top to bottom.
To the surprise of many of the department’s critics, Stone
selected J. Edgar Hoover, the twenty-nine-year-old deputy director
of the bureau, to serve as acting director while he searched for a
permanent replacement. Though Hoover had avoided the stain of
Teapot Dome, he had overseen the bureau’s rogue intelligence