splendid results.”
But while the agents were supposed to be keeping Blackie under
close surveillance, they’d lost him in the Osage Hills. He then
proceeded to rob a bank. And kill a police officer. It took months
for authorities to apprehend Blackie, and, as Hoover noted, “a
number of officers had to take their lives in their hands to correct
this mistake.” So far, Hoover had managed to keep the bureau’s
role in the affair out of the press. But behind the scenes there was
a growing political uproar. The state attorney general had sent
Hoover a telegram indicating that he held the bureau “responsible
for failure” of the investigation. John Palmer, the tribe’s well-
known advocate, sent an angry letter to Charles Curtis, the Kansas
senator, insinuating that the bureau’s investigation had been
tainted by corruption: “I join in the general belief that the
murderers have been shrewd enough and politically and
financially able enough to have honest and capable officers
removed or sent to other parts, and also to quiet dishonest
officials whose duty it was and is to hunt the perpetrators of these
awful crimes.” Comstock, the Oklahoma lawyer who had served as
the guardian to several Osage, had personally briefed Senator
Curtis on the bureau’s catastrophic bungling.
When Hoover met with White, his grip on power remained
tenuous, and he was suddenly confronting the one thing that he’d
done everything to avoid since becoming director: a scandal. The
situation in Oklahoma, Hoover believed, was “acute and delicate.”
Even a whiff of misconduct coming so soon after Teapot Dome
could end his career. Only weeks earlier, he’d sent a “confidential”
memo to White and other special agents, stating, “This Bureau
cannot afford to have a public scandal visited upon it.”
As White listened to Hoover, it became evident why he’d been
summoned. Hoover needed White—one of his few experienced