Mr.
Schiff: Hi, welcome to "FBI 100, A Closer
Look." I'm Neal Schiff of the Bureau's Office
of Public Affairs along with FBI Historian Dr.
John Fox. John, the FBI has a lot of major successes
over the years that it has served the American
public, but sometimes we make mistakes…
Dr.
Fox: "Sure Neal. Any agency that's lasted
as long as the FBI and has done as many things
as it has, is going to make mistakes. Perhaps
our biggest one was our involvement in the Teapot
Dome Affair in the mid 1920s."
Mr. Schiff: That was a political scandal,
wasn't it, John?
Dr. Fox: "At the time Warren Harding had
been our President. He had brought in a number
of his political cronies into office. And one
of them, Albert Fall, the Secretary of the Interior,
was actually involved in a big bribery scandal
and the Bureau was investigating it. But the problem
was, at the time, the Bureau wasn't what it is
today. In many ways, it was more of a political
organization. People were appointed because of
patronage. And its Director, William Burns, had
deep connections to a private business he was
running, and often mixed the two."
Mr.
Schiff: Now,
Warren Harding, though, had died as this was breaking
out in the news. What did the new president do?
Dr.
Fox: "Mr. Harding, of course, had died of
food poisoning as some of this was getting going.
And Calvin Coolidge came into office and had to
face a political scandal. He asked the Attorney
General to resign; he ended up firing William
Burns who was Director of the Bureau, and had
to appoint someone basically to clean house."
Mr.
Schiff:
And what impact did that have on the FBI?
Dr.
Fox: "It led to, among other things, the
appointment of John Edgar Hoover, who then served
as Director for 48 years. And Hoover was given
very strict marching orders on how to reform the
Bureau by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone
who came in to clean house. Hoover immediately
began to purge the roles of political appointees.
He reinstituted very strict hiring criteria for
new agents to ensure that the training of those
agents was very strong and basically revamp the
entire way that the Bureau did business. It was
a series of changes that really set the Bureau
on the road to its emergence in the 1930s during
the whole gangster era that we've talked about
a couple of times. And the FBI's emergence as
a professional law enforcement and national security
agency."
Mr.
Schiff:
From the FBI's Public Affairs office, along with
Bureau Historian Dr. John Fox, I'm Neal Schiff
with "FBI 100, A Closer Look."
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