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Seated in deep comfortable armchairs across the room were William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services; and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both wore dark suits and ties. They stood up.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” the President said.
“Good evening, sir,” they replied almost in unison.
The valet said, “Please, let me know if I can be of further service.”
“See that we’re not disturbed,” Roosevelt replied.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
The valet went out the main door and it quietly clicked closed behind him.
Roosevelt—without a suit coat but in pants, white dress shirt, and a striped bow tie, and with a cigarette holder clenched in his teeth—rolled his wheelchair over to where Donovan and Hoover stood.
“Please, sit,” he said.
The FBI and OSS heads shared a New Year’s Day birthday, a fervent sense of patriotism, and, to varying degrees, the ear of the President—but that was it.
There was not any sort of animosity between them—in fact, they thought well of one another—but there was certainly a difference in both how they perceived their missions and how they carried them out.
The FBI head saw things in black and white, while the OSS chief acknowledged the many shades of gray.
Hoover, forty-eight years old, had been head of the bureau for just shy of nineteen years. He devoutly believed that the law was the law—period—and ran the FBI with an iron fist.
There was no questioning his competence and his success. The FBI under his leadership had become an extremely efficient law enforcement agency.
The most efficient one, the brash Hoover would be first to say. And he unapologetically corrected anyone who thought otherwise.
The FBI director had the habit of seeking out the limelight in the interest of making himself—which was to say the bureau, since Hoover was the FBI—look better.
In the 1930s, he had made a name for himself and the bureau by going after the mob—“the despicable thugs who threaten our law and order and, in turn, our very civilization,” he declared.
He assigned special agents to spend whatever was necessary—months, years, and who knew how much money—to hunt down such vicious gangsters as “Pretty Boy” Floyd and “Machine Gun” Kelly.
When the agents found a mobster, Hoover swooped in on the night of the bust, and was there, front and center, when the press’s camera bulbs popped.
It actually was brilliant PR—at which Hoover proved to be a very clever player—because the better his FBI looked in the eyes of the public, the more it helped to get money and other considerations from his connections on Capitol Hill and Roosevelt’s inner circle at the White House.
And Hoover had his ways to get what he wanted.
Among other things, he kept secret dossiers on anyone he thought to be (a) suspicious and possibly dangerous—subversive or worse—to the United States, and (b) possibly dangerous—now or in the future—to Hoover and the FBI.
The head of the FBI enjoyed his high profile and power and let nothing threaten it. If he had to go public with information—for the good of the country of course—he did so.
And if just the threat of going public served the same purpose, so much the better.
Conversely, as fast as Hoover ran to the klieg lights—in the process making grandstanding an indelible hallmark of the FBI—Donovan went to the safety of the shadows.
Donovan, twelve years Hoover’s senior, had long worked quietly—and extremely effectively—behind the scenes for Roosevelt.
After Donovan had returned from the First World War a hero and then run a successful Wall Street law firm, Roosevelt, who was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy, secretly attached him to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Thus began Donovan’s long and secret service of quietly gathering intel at Roosevelt’s request.
As this was happening, it came time to clean up what had become a corrupt Bureau of Information—what in 1935 would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and heading the list of candidates was one William Joseph Donovan.
But Donovan, still the soldier spy in the shadows and wanting to stay there, quietly campaigned for a young Justice Department lawyer named John Edgar Hoover to get the job.
Donovan’s behind-the-scenes hand in Hoover landing the position was not lost on Hoover. He was grateful, and came to consider him a friend and mentor.
