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explanation was true, according to Francis Gray, a surviving classmate tracked down for this book. ‘We calledhim Speed Hoover because he talked fast. He was so fast, talked fast, thought fast …’
    The extraordinary rapidity of the adult Edgar’s voice would be one of his hallmarks. ‘Machine gun,’ ‘staccato,’ ‘like a teamster’s whip when aroused’ are typical descriptions of the way he talked. ‘I can take two hundred words a minute,’ one court reporter was to protest, ‘but that man must be talking four hundred a minute.’
    William Sullivan, an FBI Assistant Director who served Edgar for thirty years and then broke with him, had an unkind explanation. ‘He didn’t want a man to ask him any questions,’ said Sullivan, ‘so he’d keep talking right up until the last and then all of a sudden break off the interview and shake hands with the fellow and send him on his way.’ 2 Sullivan’s complaint was to be echoed by dozens of newspaper reporters. Edgar the FBI Director did not talk with people. He talked at them.
    Even as a teenager, Edgar’s mind was closing on the issues that would dominate his times. Seen with hindsight, his performance in the school debating society is revealing. Cuba, then as now a political irritant, was regularly in the news. In the debating society Edgar argued and won the motion that ‘Cuba should be annexed to the United States.’ ‘Neg.,’ for negative, he wrote in his Debate Memorandum Book next to the proposition that capital punishment should be abolished. He reasoned:
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    1.  The Bible stands for Capital Punishment.
    2.  All Christian Nations uphold it.
    3.  The abolition of it would be deplorable in effect on a country. (Brief made).
    Edgar would remain in favor of capital punishment for the rest of his life.
    One issue Edgar fought and won in the debating societyinvolved women’s rights – specifically, whether women should be given the vote. Edgar was against it – vociferously so.
    Not everyone took him as seriously as he took himself. ‘My speech is too long. I must condense it,’ Edgar was heard to say after working late into the night preparing for a debate. ‘You can condense steam, Hoover,’ retorted Jeff Fowler, editor of the school magazine, ‘but not hot air.’
    At seventeen, Edgar’s glittering scholastic progress continued. His report cards show that he scored ‘Excellent’ in almost every subject. As he carefully figured out for himself, his average grade was 90 percent or higher. He missed school only four times in four years.
    Edgar simply could not bear to come second. Another contemporary, David Stephens, remembered his reaction when, as a Captain in the Cadet Corps, Edgar’s company failed to win the drill competition. ‘As we marched off the field,’ Stephens recalled in a letter to Edgar forty years later, ‘I wondered if you were crying because you were mad or were mad because you were crying.’
    In March 1913, Captain J. E. Hoover led his company down Pennsylvania Avenue in President Wilson’s inaugural parade. Sixteen years of Republican government were coming to an end, and America was entering a period of upheaval. While revolution and war overwhelmed Russia and Europe, labor unrest had become a major issue in the United States. Nearly half the working population was toiling excessive hours in appalling conditions, going home to filthy slums at night. The United States was about to experience a wave of strikes, and a million American socialists would demand the overthrow of capitalism.
    Soon company guards would be gunning down workers in Ohio. Members of one union, the Industrial Workers of the World, would be lynched. Others would be jailed. Their right to protest at all was questioned by those who asserted that they, and they alone, were ‘100 per cent