Hoover Remade the FBI in the1930s ... A Good Blueprint for Today

Bryan Burrough, in the NYT (May 14, 2004):

As cherry trees blossom along the Potomac, members of Congress are castigating the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its inability to reign in heavily armed attackers who have struck at the heart of America. Critics say the bureau is incapable of discerning where the attackers may strike next, unwilling to work with rival agencies and unfit to fight what appears to be a new kind of modern war. Some call for its wholesale reorganization. The embattled director of the bureau pleads for more resources to combat the rising threat.

This may sound like May 2004, but in fact it was the crisis that gripped Washington 70 years ago. In May 1934, the armed attackers were not international terrorists but homegrown kidnappers and bank robbers: John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and Bonnie and Clyde. It wasn't the war on terrorism. It was the so-called war on crime, and for the F.B.I., it was going very badly....

Today critics are calling for the F.B.I.'s reorganization to combat international terrorism. During the war on crime, the bureau underwent two separate reorganizations, one trumpeted in headlines, the other quiet and internal. Both were badly needed.

At the time of the Kansas City Massacre, the F.B.I. was an obscure arm of the Justice Department struggling to shake an unsavory past riddled with scandal. It had the task of handling a grab bag of minor federal crimes, including crimes committed on Indian reservations and the capture of escaped federal prisoners. Hoover's agents, most of whom were lawyers and accountants with little law enforcement experience, were not allowed to carry firearms or make arrests; if an agent wanted a suspect taken into custody, he was obliged to have a local policeman do it for him.

In the initial 1933 reorganization, Hoover radically altered the bureau's focus. Dozens of new agents were hired, given guns and sent in search of Midwestern bank robbers and kidnappers. With the exception of Machine Gun Kelly's apprehension in Memphis in September, the results were underwhelming. As the crimes of Dillinger and his peers increased in audacity, F.B.I. agents too often arrested the wrong people and allowed the criminals they did find to escape; at one point, Dillinger managed to elude the F.B.I. five separate times in a 25-day stretch....

On the surface, the F.B.I. appeared to dodge calls for a second reorganization that May. Behind the scenes, however, Hoover began a sweeping overhaul of key personnel, details of which have emerged only with the release of F.B.I. files during the last decade. The lesson of Little Bohemia, Hoover decided, was that his men were unsuited for modern gunfights. When an aide canvassed 50 F.B.I. offices nationwide to identify agents"particularly qualified . . . for work of a dangerous character," he came up with exactly 11 names. In desperation, Hoover turned outside for help, hiring skilled marksmen from police departments in Texas and Oklahoma.

To supervise his new gunslingers, Hoover replaced Melvin Purvis, the senior agent supervising the Dillinger and other manhunts, with a sad-eyed desk man named Samuel P. Cowley. Assuming command of the flagging war on crime on June 2, Cowley produced fast results with his deft coordination of far-flung agents, informants and investigations....

Defeating international terrorists in 2004 is certainly a far more complex mission than defeating bank robbers in 1934. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and their fellow travelers won't be stopped by better snipers or managers. Still, the challenge the F.B.I. faces today is much the same it confronted 70 years ago: finding a way to retool an underperforming government bureaucracy to combat an intimidating new danger to the public. The bureau did it to significant effect in 1934, and with luck, it will prove just as nimble again.