Next FBI head should mirror the first
The nation will be well-served if the next individual selected to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation embodies the same high character as the first founder of the agency.
That man was a Baltimorean whose courage, integrity and honesty would be profound in this day and age and were quite extraordinary for a man in his place and time in history more than a century ago. His name was Charles Joseph Bonaparte. In 1908, as attorney general of the United States under President Theodore Roosevelt, Bonaparte hired 10 investigators to work with the chief examiner unit of the Justice Department known as the Bureau of Investigation. (The name would be changed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 under J. Edgar Hoover, who embodied far less high-minded qualities.)
Born to wealth and prominence in Baltimore in 1851, Mr. Bonaparte could have idled away his life in the pursuit of pleasure and frivolity but devoted himself instead to political reform, human rights, honesty in government and business, help for the poor and racial integration.
It is impossible to write about him without explaining why he was named Bonaparte, so here, briefly, is that fascinating piece of history. Charles Bonaparte’s grandmother was a Baltimore belle of the early 19th century named Elizabeth “Betsy” Patterson; she was said to be one of the most beautiful women in America. She was the daughter of William Patterson, a Baltimore merchant and one of the country’s richest men at the turn of the 19th century.
In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother, 19-year-old Jerome, visited Baltimore, where he met and fell head-overheels in love with 18-year-old Betsy Patterson. Her father did not approve of Jerome, or, for that matter, of his Corsican-born older brother, who was so broke he was in the process of selling all French territory in America to the United States for $15 million (the Louisiana Purchase). Nevertheless, the couple were married on Christmas Eve 1803 in a Roman Catholic ceremony presided over by Archbishop John Carroll, the senior Catholic prelate in America.
Napoleon was furious when he heard of the marriage and threatened to cut off his brother entirely unless he returned to Europe alone. By then, Betsy was pregnant. The couple sailed to Europe hoping to convince Napoleon to change his mind. Jerome was permitted to land. Betsy was forbidden to set foot anywhere in Europe, most of which was under control of Napoleon’s armies. Napoleon demanded that Pope Pius VII annul the marriage; the Pope refused. So once he had installed himself as Emperor of France, Napoleon formally annulled the marriage himself, married his brother off to a German princess and named him King of Westphalia. Betsy Patterson and her infant son returned to Baltimore. Except for a chance encounter on one of her many trips back to Europe, she never saw Jerome again and referred to him simply as “The Bigamist.”
Her son, Jerome Napolean Bonaparte, nicknamed “Bo,” graduated from Mount St. Mary’s College in Western Maryland and earned a law degree from Harvard. He never practiced law, however, and lived out his life as a gentleman farmer. Bo’s best-known achievement appears to have been as a founding member and first president in 1857 of The Maryland Club, many of whose members, like much of Baltimore high society, sympathized with the South in the Civil War. Bo, a Republican and a Unionist married to a New Englander, actually resigned from the club, which had come to be viewed as a hotbed of sedition.
That spirit lived passionately in his son Charles, an ardent supporter of civil rights who in an article in The Evening Sun denounced segregationists as “those who would have the Negro inhabitants of Baltimore compelled to live in dark, dirty alleys and narrow and unhealthy courts and who … long to keep them, as far as possible, poor, ignorant, vicious, criminal and diseased and a menace to the health, morals and order of the entire community.”
Unlike his father under the influence of Betsy Patterson, Charles Bonaparte made no attempt to connect with the European Bonapartes. He led successful campaigns against the entrenched corrupt Democratic Party bosses who ruled Baltimore and Maryland. He took on cases of poor people without charge, often paying court costs out of his own pocket.
In the early 1900s a fellow Harvard law school graduate, President Theodore Roosevelt, embraced him, made him secretary of the Navy and later his attorney general to lead the fight against the trusts and monopolies against whom he railed in court, in writing and in speeches — once even suggesting that lynching might be appropriate for some of the worst perpetrators.
Eulogizing Charles Bonaparte after his death in 1921, this newspaper praised “his sane idealism, his fearlessness and his utter integrity. He may have been wrong in some of his opinions, but no one ever doubted his honesty and conviction. In the advocacy of his beliefs he never appealed to an unworthy motive. He never insulted the intelligence of his hearers with demagogic arguments.”
I take back what I said in the beginning of this column. We don’t just need a person of such integrity to run the FBI; we need such people to run the rest of the country, from the presidency on down — individuals of utter integrity who will speak with courage, honesty and conviction.