Read Official and Confidential for Free Online Page B

American.’
    At Central High, meanwhile, things went on as usual.Eighteen-year-old Edgar and his peers immersed themselves in the rites and celebrations of graduation year. Edgar Hoover, Francis Gray and their fellow cadets, splendid in blue-and-white uniforms, made their way to the Cairo Hotel for the regimental ball.
    â€˜We weren’t expert dancers,’ Gray recalled. ‘We all wore our sabers, and they got in the way.’ A dance in those days was a rigidly formal affair, and each young man came armed with a dance engagement book. There were spaces to fill out the names of female partners ‘engaged’ to dance the alternating waltzes and foxtrots, and spaces for the names of chaperones.
    Edgar’s dance book, which he kept all his life, shows that his parents came along as chaperones. The spaces for female partners, however, remain blank. If Edgar’s record is to be believed – and he usually recorded everything meticulously – he did not dance with a single girl.
    Francis Gray said Edgar ‘wasn’t a dater, didn’t go with girls.’ His relatives noticed it, too. ‘Edgar never had any girlfriends,’ said his niece Dorothy. ‘Never.’ Edgar’s male friends teased him, claiming he was in love only with the Cadet Corps. ‘He was,’ said Francis Gray, ‘just a fraternity man.’
    In his yearbook picture, Edgar looks more fragile than his broad-shouldered friends, his mouth pinched and humorless. The caption beneath his name praises him as ‘a gentleman of dauntless courage and stainless honor.’ Edgar was class valedictorian.
    â€˜There is nothing more pleasing,’ Edgar wrote in a final Cadet Corps report, ‘than to be associated with a company composed of officers and men who you feel are behind you heart and soul. The saddest moment of the year was when I realized that I must part with a group of fellows who had become part of my life.’
    Edgar the debater signed off with thoughts on the virtues of competition. Debate, he reckoned, was like life – ‘nothing more or less than the matching of one man’s wits againstanother.’ And so, armed with a curiously fixed set of certainties for a youth of eighteen, Edgar set forth into the adult world.
    As he did so, a family crisis was developing – a tragedy that must have been devastating to a young man coming of age. Edgar’s father began losing his mind.
    Edgar never discussed his father at all, not even with his closest friends. Surviving relatives, the generation that grew up during World War I, have only a blurred memory of Dickerson Hoover. To them he was ‘Daddy,’ a kindly man with a small moustache who liked to take children to the basement to sample his homemade ginger ale. Often, though, Daddy was not home at all.
    Dickerson, Sr., was away a lot because, sometime during the war, doctors sent him to an asylum at Laurel, some eighteen miles from Washington. Quite what was wrong with him was not discussed in front of the grandchildren. One of them, Margaret Fennell, remembered only that he ‘had a nervous breakdown.’
    Dickerson was fifty-six when Edgar left school. He still worked, as he always had, as a printmaker at the government mapmakers. He earned a living wage, but never enough to dispel the notion that his wife, Annie, had married below her station. He had always played second fiddle to Annie at home. Now, in middle age, Dickerson began to be troubled by depression and irrational fears. Repeated trips to the asylum failed to help, and he went steadily downhill.
    In the eight years that remained to him, Edgar’s father would become a pitiful figure. His death certificate, in 1921, would say he died of ‘melancholia,’ with ‘inanition’ as a contributory cause. Melancholia was the contemporary word for what doctors today call clinical depression. Inanition can be the outcome of extreme depression