(J. Edgar Hoover-R- and close friend Clyde Tolson).
Well, all right. Missed a couple days, but we are back on track, and back in what used to be the District of Columbia. I told you we were going to spin a tale on the way to completing a tour of the 40 Stones of the District of Columbia, and it is Argo’s fault. I wake up every couple years, and get re-energized on visiting the Stones, or the locations where the Stones once were, and this is going to be one the two wildest ones. So far, anyway. And if it was not for Argo’s energy, it never would have been completed.
So, it was easy enough to get access to the two Stones on the Dalecarlia Reservations, which meant a diversion into the unique contributions to the Capital of General Montgomery Meigs, Quartermaster General of the United States Army. I never would have imaged where the quest for SE8 would lead our merry band of explorers and urban adventurers as the ranks swelled.
This part of the story take us from the dark year of 1941 and the front offices of aristocratic Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Adolph Hitler’s military intelligence Abwehr, through the frantic bustle in the huts filled with mathematicians located on the grounds of stately Bletchley Park in the UK and onward to the temporary buildings erected behind the lofty columns of Arlington Hall across the street from Big Pink.
It will include, of course, the surveying team of Major Ellicott in 1792 and some real Nazis, as opposed to the sissy-Nazis of latter days like George Lincoln Rockwell and his Arlington Stormtroopers. We will also visit legendary G-man J. Edgar Hoover and his Federal Bureau of Investigation in an embarrassing moment, and some odd corners of the human experience at the DC impound lot.
The tale of SE8 will include U-boats and Military tribunals, rapid executions and numbered (but unmarked) graves.
(Some Nazi swag confiscated by the FBI in 1942 in an attempt to demonstrate how prepared we were to take action against potential domestic insurgents. Photo Getty Images).
All this stuff really happened, and if history does not repeat itself, as Mark Twain said, “It does rhyme.”
We are going to wind up in the woods adjacent to the old Almshouse in SE Washington DC, across the Boss Shepherd Parkway and cracked concrete of I-295 from the gleaming new tower of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where the Spooks fled in the from placid Arlington to take up the nation’s analytic burden in 1984.
There are a lot of ways to approach this thing, since we are looking for a Stone that has been lost and found and raised and buried. But at the heart of this chapter of the story it is the ambition of one man, and his unflinching drive for political and organizational power.
J. Edgar Hoover is a real presence in the life of the Baby Boomers. He was the gray eminence of a paranoid Washington that did not know what to do with the Woodstock Generation. We called him “Jedgar,” marrying the initial of his first name (John) with the middle name he preferred.
The man is both smaller and larger than life, as befits someone who stayed in office from 1924 to 1972- the Paleozoic era of the capital right up to the epoch of Richard Millhouse Nixon. Hoover was the founding Director of the Bureau of Investigation, and powered by a public relations machine second only to that of the Marine Corps, he built the bureaucratic titan that is the operational enforcement arm of the Justice Department.
The Bureau has an interesting challenge on its hands at the moment, and how they handle a sensitive case will tell us a lot about how the organization has done since they had to execute six Germans to maintain the pleasant fiction that America was safe from the danger posed by roving bands of saboteurs. Sort of like today.
When it all began, there were only two organizations in town that had “intelligence” operations. Both were Cabinet-level agencies: the Department of War and the Department of the Navy.
Hoover changed all that, and it is only to be expected that some crockery (and lives) were broken or lost along the way.
When I give tours of DC, and we pass the massive pink-tinged concrete of the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, I often joke that it is the largest federal building named for a transvestite that we know of.
(This is among Washington’s memorable Stones. it does not have a number or a direction, but well worth seeing).
I think it is a joke. I don’t know. I know that Hoover’s legacy is still a matter of conjecture to this day.
I visit his last resting place sometimes over at the Congressional Cemetery. There is a fancy metal fence around it, donated by former Special Agents, and a stone bench where you can sit and contemplate the life of the former Director-for-life. His constant companion, Associate Director Clyde Tolson, lies not far away, and both are just up the hill from the last resting place of Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, the first openly gay member of the military, whose epitaph is still haunting:
“A Gay Vietnam Veteran
When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”
Matlovich chose not to have his name on his stone. J. Edgar chose to have no stones at all placed over the Germans he had executed in 1942, which makes finding them where they rest not far from SE8 a bit of a challenge. But as an aside, I highly recommend Congressional Cemetery for a visit. They have got some stones there.
It is tempting to drift off into the various scandals that go along with life in the District, and I am going to try to stay focused on the Stones, rather than the place where there are none. But trust me, part of this story revolves around those six graves out in the woods near Blue Plains. We will get to big sleek machines and acts of war and betrayal along the way. Maybe we will take a shot at Jedgar, too, because it is almost impossible to resist, even now.
We all had a personal relationship with him, after all.
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303