Two exciting memoirs about history and law enforcement
July 21, 2024
Elisabeth Sherwin -- ensherwin@gmail dot com
Columnist
I should have been a cop. Or maybe I should have married a cop. Or maybe I should have been a special agent for the FBI. Whatever.
The very fact that I’m thinking about career paths I didn’t take indicates that I’ve recently read two compelling memoirs: “Blue on Blue: An Insider’s Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops” by Charles Campisi and “The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover” by Paul Letersky.
Campisi was chief of New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau for 18 years, from 1996 through 2014. During that time, the number of New Yorkers shot, wounded or killed by cops each year declined dramatically. Not by almost 90 percent as it says on the book jacket, but from about 1,000 to 335, which just goes to show what a free-for-all it was before he remade the Internal Affairs Bureau.
His book, published in 2017, reads like a TV cop show except in most of these cases the cops are the bad guys. They steal drugs, they plant drugs, they steal money, they sell drugs. (A side note, Campisi says he never had proof that a cop ever threw a suspect out of a window or off the roof of a building – a popular accusation at one time.)
Campisi credits Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for creating an IAB that drafted cops into its service, in other words, giving them no choice about serving there for at least a couple of years. This helped reduce but not eliminate the “rat” stigma. Campisi’s reputation as an honest cop and his hard work increasing the budget and size of his department made a huge difference in the culture of the NYPD and in the lives of New Yorkers.
“Blue on Blue” is a great read.
More surprisingly, perhaps, “The Director” also is a great read. Like most Boomers, I was no fan of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, during his lifetime. And after reading Letersky’s memoir about working for Hoover, I am still no fan. But I understand Hoover a little more and I learned some interesting things about him.
That he wore a dress on occasion? No. It is sad to say that every person I talked to about this book immediately asked if Hoover was a cross-dresser. According to Letersky, who addressed this rumor unhappily near the end of the book, Hoover was not. It was a malicious rumor, never founded, that caught the imagination of a great many people who didn’t like Hoover. It stuck. And stuck. Hoover died in 1972, more than 50 years ago, and it’s still the main thing people of my generation remember about him.
They don’t know, for instance, that he argued with President Roosevelt against the internment of Japanese citizens during Word War II and that, years later (he was the FBI director for a long, long time) he refused to find a vast conspiracy behind the anti-war Pentagon Papers case. He told President Nixon that it would be difficult to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for stealing the papers and there was no huge left-wing conspiracy. If Nixon had only listened to Hoover! Instead Nixon launched his own investigation which led to the Watergate break-in and ultimately the end to his presidency.
Letersky, who published his memoir in 2021, was a civilian clerk in Hoover’s Washington, D.C., office for two years in the mid-1960s. He was going to law school at night and looking forward to the day that he would become an FBI special agent. He was on the director’s personal staff, working with Hoover’s secretary, Miss Helen Gandy, screening phone calls, visitors and answering mail. (It was the uber-faithful Gandy who destroyed many of Hoover’s “secret files” immediately after his death.)
For much of Hoover’s career he was a popular and well-respected man doing a job that Americans totally approved of. He was fighting crime and he was fighting Communism. He was an effective leader, just like Campisi and like Campisi, Hoover took a weak and under-funded collection of losers and created one of the most efficient law enforcement agencies in the world.
But his counter-intelligence programs in the 1970s got him in trouble with a substantial part of the country. It was OK for Hoover’s men to go after Communism and the Ku Klux Klan, but when the FBI went after college students, college professors and largely harmless hippies protesting the Vietnam War, it was too much.
“The public outrage would be deep and long-lasting,” wrote Letersky. He was right.
Both of these memoirs are compelling in that they are about strong men leading law enforcement agencies. But there is more to it than that. Both books were written with the talent and assistance of journalist Gordon Dillow. I knew Gordon in the 1980s when we worked at the late Los Angeles Herald-Examiner newspaper. I was a copy editor, he was a reporter.
Each author’s name is followed by the words “with Gordon Dillow” which doesn’t explain what Gordon did exactly, although Campisi thanks him for providing focus and coordination of thoughts.
Letersky thanks him for historical research but also refers to him as “my talented collaborative writer.” In tone and style the books are very similar and I have to think that Gordon was responsible for that.
Both books are great reads.
-- Reach Elisabeth Sherwin at ensherwin@gmail.com
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