At my office during the course of a week there are sometimes three or four callers who have to be taken to a Hospital because of their mental condition. They claim they are being persecuted by radio beams and they want to see me or the President to have those beams stopped. Now you never know what tangent they are going to take. If such a person is living in some part of the country where the President may be going his name would be furnished to the Secret Service.
One car last year, I think, crashed through the gates of the White House; the person driving wanted to see the President. The guard wouldn't let him in and so the car crashed through and got within 20 feet of the first door. The guards, by that time, had their revolvers out and took him into custody.
Last year a gentleman drove all the way from Arizona to see me. He drove up the marble steps of the Department of Justice, and by that time the guards had come out and took him into custody. I think he was incarcerated in Arizona.
People of this type are among those we would have furnished to the Secret Service. They have the potential to harm somebody.
We get names from members of Congress, of people who come to the Capitol and try to threaten them or harass them. They let us know about it, and we make the investigation or advise the police. If we can get the family to have the person put into an institution, we try to do so. If they don't, we may take steps to have him incarcerated through other legal means.
Mr. Dulles. How many names, Mr. Director, in general, could the Secret Service process? Aren't their facilities limited as to dealing with vast numbers of names because of their limited personnel?
Mr. Hoover. I think they are extremely limited. The Secret Service is a very small organization and that is why we are fortifying them, so to speak, or supplementing them by assigning agents of our Bureau which is, of course, quite a burden on us. Our agents are assigned about 24 to 25 cases per agent and cover such involved matters as bankruptcy and antitrust cases.
Now, the Secret Service has a very small group and I would estimate that the names we have sent over number some 5,000. I would guess there are about another 4,000 that will go over in the next month to them. Frankly, I don't see how they can go out and recheck those names. We keep the records up to date; if additional information comes in on these names we furnish it to the Secret Service. They will have to call upon the local authorities, unless the Secret Service force is enlarged considerably so that they can handle it entirely on their own. I think the Secret Service is entirely too small a force today to handle the duties that they are handling. The great crowds that are at the White House all the time, around the gates, that go to church where the President goes, all of those things, of course, have to be checked over by them. They always check in advance and just recently, a few Sundays ago, they found some individuals in the basement of St. Mark's church in Washington, where he was going to attend on Sunday morning. His arrival was held up until they could ascertain who they were. They were deaf mutes whose identity had not been cleared with the Secret Service.
Now, the Presidential party was delayed about 5 or 10 minutes in reaching the church by reason of the radio call to the White House to hold it up.
We are giving to Secret Service more and more names. The total, in addition to the names they already had, will reach 10,000. I don't see how they are going to be able to handle the situation as they would want to handle it. They have to depend upon local police organizations. Many local police departments are capable and efficient; some are not. Many have good judgment and some have not. Wherever you have a police department of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 men you are bound to find a few who will just barge in and do something which better judgment would dictate should not be done, as in the incident which occurred in the Midwest where they placed people practically under house arrest. I think it was very bad judgment and should not have been done but the Secret Service, of course, turned the names over to the local authorities, and the local authorities do what they think is right.