8 DEPARTMENT OF EASY VIRTUE

One day in the summer of 1925, Tom White, the special agent

in charge of the Bureau of Investigation’s field office in Houston,
received an urgent order from headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The new boss man, J. Edgar Hoover, asked to speak to him right
away—in person. White quickly packed. Hoover demanded that his
staff wear dark suits and sober neckties and black shoes polished
to a gloss. He wanted his agents to be a specific American type:
Caucasian, lawyerly, professional. Every day, he seemed to issue a
new directive—a new Thou Shall Not—and White put on his big
cowboy hat with an air of defiance.

He bade his wife and two young boys good-bye and boarded a
train the way he had years earlier when he served as a railroad
detective, riding from station to station in pursuit of criminals.
Now he wasn’t chasing anything but his own fate. When he arrived
in the nation’s capital, he made his way through the noise and
lights to headquarters. He’d been told that Hoover had an
“important message” for him, but he had no idea what it was.

White was an old-style lawman. He had served in the Texas
Rangers near the turn of the century, and he had spent much of
his life roaming on horseback across the southwestern frontier, a
Winchester rifle or a pearl-handled six-shooter in hand, tracking
fugitives and murderers and stickup men. He was six feet four and
had the sinewy limbs and the eerie composure of a gunslinger.
Even when dressed in a stiff suit, like a door-to-door salesman, he
seemed to have sprung from a mythic age. Years later, a bureau