Hoover on his balcony, high and distant and quiet, watching with
his misty kingdom behind him, going on from President to
President and decade to decade,” a reporter for Life magazine
wrote. The many details of Hoover’s abuses of power would not be
made public until after his death, in 1972, and despite White’s
perceptiveness he was blind to the boss man’s megalomania, his
politicization of the bureau, and his paranoid plots against an ever-
growing list of perceived enemies, among them American Indian
activists.
Over the years, White wrote periodically to Hoover. Once, White
invited him to a relative’s ranch: “We do not have to rough it on
his ranch, for he has every convenience except air cooling and you
don’t need that.” But Hoover politely declined. He was too busy
now and had to be prodded to take note of his former star agent.
When White, at the age of seventy, stepped down as warden of La
Tuna in 1951, Hoover sent him a card only after another agent
reminded him how much White would “appreciate a personal note
from the director on his retirement.”