division, which had spied on individuals merely because of their
political beliefs. Hoover had also never been a detective. Never
been in a shoot-out or made an arrest. His grandfather and his
father, who were deceased, had worked for the federal
government, and Hoover, who still lived with his mother, was a
creature of the bureaucracy—its gossip, its lingo, its unspoken
deals, its bloodless but vicious territorial wars.
Coveting the directorship as a way to build his own bureaucratic
empire, Hoover concealed from Stone the extent of his role in
domestic surveillance operations and promised to disband the
intelligence division. He zealously implemented the reforms
requested by Stone that furthered his own desire to remake the
bureau into a modern force. In a memo, Hoover informed Stone
that he had begun combing through personnel files and
identifying incompetent or crooked agents who should be fired.
Hoover also told Stone that per his wishes he had raised the
employment qualifications for new agents, requiring them to have
some legal training or knowledge of accounting. “Every effort will
be made by employees of the Bureau to strengthen the morale,”
Hoover wrote, “and to carry out to the letter your policies.”
In December 1924, Stone gave Hoover the job he longed for.
Hoover would rapidly reshape the bureau into a monolithic force—
one that, during his nearly five-decade reign as director, he would
deploy not only to combat crime but also to commit egregious
abuses of power.
Hoover had already assigned White to investigate one of the
first law-enforcement corruption cases to be pursued in the wake
of Teapot Dome. White took over as the warden of the federal
penitentiary in Atlanta, where he led an undercover operation to
catch officials who, in exchange for bribes, were granting prisoners