American scoundrels, Clyde Anderson Tolson, the man behind the man behind the bureau.

Washington, D.C. May 4, 1972.

The day of J. Edgar Hoover's funeral and the second most powerful law enforcement officer in the United States

submitted his letter of resignation. He'd held the job for 44 years. He lasted in it exactly

two days after Hoover stopped breathing. That morning, Clyde Anderson-Tolson drove to the Capitol,

watched the casket of the man who'd been his entire world rolled through the rotunda,

accepted the folded American flag from the pallbearers, and went home, not to his own home,

to Hoover's home, because Hoover had left him the house, the furniture, the bank accounts,

and the files, especially the files, and Tolson had been heading there for

four decades anyway.

He resigned, he said, citing ill health.

He had been in ill health since a stroke in 1964.

Hoover had kept him on the payroll anyway, past the mandatory retirement age because Hoover

needed him, or needed what Tolson represented, which was

something close to a wife in all but legal standing, and something close to a silent partner in the

machinery of American institutional abuse. Clyde Tolson was born on May 22, 1900 in Laredo, Missouri,

Grundy County, farm country, the son of a man who worked the land and guarded railroad freight, hard-edged practical work, the kind of life that teaches a young

man that the difference between comfort and struggle is proximity to power. Tolson learned that

lesson early and never forgot it.

He enrolled in Cedar Rapids Business College, graduated in 1918, and headed straight to

Washington as a war department clerk.

He was a confidential secretary to three secretaries of war over nine years.

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