J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, occupies a pivotal place in the account of Harry S. Truman’s presidency: he pressed for sweeping loyalty investigations of federal employees, and his bureau secretly assisted Thomas E. Dewey’s 1948 campaign against Truman. These episodes show Hoover’s reach extending from the machinery of government into electoral politics, while also exposing Truman’s unease about the investigative power he was willing to authorize but did not want the bureau to wield without restraint.

Position and Political Context

Hoover appears chiefly through his institutional power and political interventions, rather than through a personal biography. In 1947, as anticommunism became a powerful theme in Congress, Attorney General Tom C. Clark and Hoover argued that disloyal employees posed a serious danger even if their numbers were small. Hoover warned that government workers sympathetic to a foreign ideological cause might influence American foreign policy in that country’s favor. The State Department, in particular, became a focus of suspicion among congressional Republicans and other critics.

The political context mattered to Truman. He considered the accusations of Communist penetration exaggerated and worried about the lengths to which the House Un-American Activities Committee might go. But he was also asking the country to adopt a harder policy toward communism abroad; he feared that accusations of softness at home could undermine that effort. The administration’s decision to establish a peacetime loyalty program therefore addressed both a stated security concern and an immediate political vulnerability. Hoover’s advocacy helped make the Federal Bureau of Investigation central to the program’s operation.

The Loyalty Program and Its Powers

Under Executive Order No. 9835, federal employees across the government were subject to loyalty investigations. The process drew on Federal Bureau of Investigation records and files from the House Un-American Activities Committee, while the Attorney General was authorized to compile a list of subversive organizations. An employee could lose a government job on the basis of reasonable grounds for believing that the person was disloyal, although the program did not define disloyalty. Those accused could not confront the people making allegations, and they might not learn either their accusers’ identities or the specific charges against them.

Hoover sought authority to remove from public service anyone whose views were politically suspect. His warning that such employees might affect foreign policy gave the demand a national-security rationale, but the breadth of the proposed power troubled Truman. Truman had accepted the need for a loyalty-review system under pressure from conservative critics and the recommendations of a special commission, Clark, and Hoover. He nonetheless feared that the bureau could become the foundation of a citizen spy system. In a private letter to Bess, he associated that danger with Hoover’s organization and made clear that he did not want such a system established in the United States.

Truman’s misgivings did not prevent the program from becoming extensive. The review system joined federal employment decisions to investigative files and an undefined standard of loyalty, while withholding important information from those accused. David Lilienthal worried that a hostile accuser could place a loyal government employee in jeopardy; he judged that the ordinary presumption of innocence had effectively been reversed. At the same time, Lilienthal acknowledged that some form of program might have been politically unavoidable. The system thus embodied a tension present from its creation: it was defended as a safeguard against disloyalty and unfounded accusations, yet its procedures offered limited protection against allegations that could not be tested openly.

Scale and Political Consequences

The investigations reached a vast federal workforce. The Federal Bureau of Investigation began conducting name checks on the two million people on the federal payroll. By 1951, over four years, the Civil Service Commission had investigated and cleared three million employees, while the bureau investigated another 14,000. Several thousand people resigned, but only 212 were dismissed for questionable loyalty. No one was indicted, and the investigations found no evidence of espionage.

The program also had an immediate political effect. Its announcement weakened Republican attacks that the administration was doing nothing about Communists in government, and it helped Truman’s opponents take him more seriously. That short-term advantage did not resolve the conflict between political reassurance and civil liberty. Years later, Clark Clifford described the program as a response to the temper of the times; Truman privately conceded that it had been a terrible mistake. His later defense was that the policy had been made as fair as possible under the prevailing climate of opinion. Hoover’s role therefore belongs to an episode in which the federal investigative apparatus expanded even as the president who authorized the system remained wary of the power it placed in the bureau’s hands.

Hoover and the 1948 Campaign

Hoover’s influence extended beyond loyalty investigations. He and Dewey were old friends, and Hoover had made Federal Bureau of Investigation resources available to Dewey months before the election. The account connects this assistance to the expectation that Dewey, if elected president, would appoint Hoover attorney general. During the campaign, bureau personnel searched files for information that could harm Truman. William C. Sullivan, an assistant to Hoover assigned to review those records, later recalled that the bureau gave Dewey what it had that might hurt Truman, although there was not much.

The material they used included Truman’s former association with Jim Pendergast, which the bureau sought to revive, along with efforts to portray Truman as too ignorant to handle the Communist threat. The bureau also prepared studies that were released under Dewey’s name, creating the appearance that Dewey and his staff had produced them. Hoover’s assistance was thus not merely a general expression of support: according to Sullivan’s account, it involved providing campaign information and helping construct political arguments against the incumbent. The episode links Hoover’s control of investigative resources to the partisan contest over who would occupy the presidency, and stands in sharp contrast to the loyalty program’s stated concern with protecting government from political subversion.