FedBlog Book Club: Public Enemies

I'm currently reading Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies, his history of the Midwestern crime wave during the 30's that included criminals like John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd, and that led to the transformation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'm about a third of the way through it, and what's striking is how incompetent the FBI, and in particular, J. Edgar Hoover, was. Originally, the bureau didn't have arrest powers, and had an informal policy forbidding its agents to carry guns. Melvin Purvis, the agent who would later catch Dillinger, once missed a chance to catch Machine Gun Kelly because he FORGOT ABOUT A TIP. Hoover came close to losing his job as head of the FBI when Franklin Roosevelt appointed a senator who didn't like him to head the Justice Department, and his job was saved when the senator died on his honeymoon with a much younger woman, presumably after a too-vigorous bout of sex.

That a credible law enforcement agency emerged from this muck of self-parody is astonishing. But it's a useful reminder that even though the government faces substantial challenges today, we could be starting from a lot further back. The Department of Homeland Security is about infinitely more functional now than the FBI was at the same point in its own history. Fixing what's broke is one thing. Starting from nothing is another. In any case, the book is highly engaging both as a bureaucratic adventure, and as a series of interconnected heist tales, and worth reading before the movie of the same title bows later this summer.