Free Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner Page A

States, and it held that distinction for the next seventy-five years.
    Minutes before the explosion, three blocks away, a postman had emptied a mailbox. He found five crudely misspelled pamphlets, handmade with rubber stamps and red ink. “Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you,” they said. They were signed “American Anarchist Fighters.”
    The Wall Street bombing was almost surely an act of revenge for the indictments of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged five days before in the murder and armed robbery of a shoe-factory paymaster and his guard outside Boston. Hoover pushed the investigation to no avail. No suspects were ever brought to justice.
    “We’ll get them,” vowed Hoover’s boss, Bill Flynn. But the Bureau never did.

6

    UNDERWORLDS
    “ I AM NOT FIT for this office and should never have been here,” President Warren G. Harding lamented in the White House. His judgment, for once, was sound.
    Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher who had risen beyond his station in life as a Republican U.S. senator from Ohio. When he became president on March 4, 1921, he brought his crooked friends with him to Washington. The closest was his campaign manager, Harry M. Daugherty, who became the attorney general of the United States.
    Two prominent Republican senators strongly warned Harding against the nomination. “Daugherty has been my best friend from the beginning in this whole thing,” the president-elect replied. “He tells me he wants to be Attorney General and by God he will be Attorney General! ” A skilled political fixer, Daugherty had spent years twisting arms as a lobbyist in the Ohio statehouse; his specialty was killing legislation opposed by big companies. He cut deals between businessmen and politicians with common interests in money and power. His reputation preceded him to Washington. Once he arrived, Daugherty grew in office. He became one of the nation’s leading white-collar criminals.
    Though the Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation would fall into deep dishonor during the Harding years, J. Edgar Hoover would thrive.
    Hoover won promotion to the number-two position at the Bureau of Investigation at the age of twenty-six. His reputation was unblemished, his aptitude for infighting undiminished, his focus on the Red threat unrelenting, his expertise unquestioned. He saw no great distinction among American radicals—Communists, Socialists, anarchists, pacificists. They were enemies of the state.
    While Hoover took care of the war on communism, Harry Daughertytook care of his friends. The new attorney general placed an old pal, William J. Burns, in charge of the Bureau in August 1921. Hoover, by now an accomplished cultivator of his superiors, assured Burns that the Bureau had been infiltrating the ranks of American radicals for years. “We made an effort to have an informant in every one of the leading movements of the country,” he said, and the General Intelligence Division was on guard against new threats from the Left.
    Burns, at the age of sixty, was America’s most famous private detective. His talent for self-promotion was impressive. After gaining notoriety as a jury-tampering federal investigator in the 1905 land-fraud cases championed by President Theodore Roosevelt, he had won acclaim by tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms to convict two labor racketeers in the 1910 dynamite attack on the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times , which had killed twenty-one people. He came close to going to prison himself in 1915 for stealing documents from a New York law firm. Hours after the 1920 Wall Street bombing, Burns publicly announced that the Communists were behind the attack and vowed to bring them to justice. He offered a $50,000 reward on behalf of the W. J. Burns International Detective Agency for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bombers. Now, as the Bureau of