White recognized that he wasn’t much of a writer, and by 1958 he
had teamed up with Fred Grove, an author of Western novels who
was part Osage and who, as a boy, had been staying in Fairfax at
the time of the Smith explosion, an event that haunted him. As
Grove worked on the book, White asked him, in a letter, if the
narrative could be told in the third person. “I would like to keep
the big ‘I’ out of it all I can, because I don’t want it conveyed that I
am the whole story,” White explained. “If it had not been for the
good agents I had on the job we could never have made it. Then
too our boss man J. Edgar Hoover, the directing head of the F.B.I.,
is to be reckoned with.”
In a letter to Hoover, White asked if the bureau would release to
him some of the old case files to help him prepare the book. He
also inquired whether Hoover would write a brief introduction. “I
hope this will not be asking too much of you,” White said. “I feel
that this would be invaluable to us all who were then and are now
vitally interested in our great organization, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. You and I are about the only ones of the originals
left now.” In an internal memo, Clyde Tolson, the associate
director of the bureau, who had become Hoover’s longtime
companion, spawning rumors that they were romantically
involved, said, “We should furnish only limited, routine material,
if any.”