Hiring Special Agents – Lewis C Taylor Part 1

Posted by Paul Cool on Apr 1, 2011 in The War Begins | Comments Off on Hiring Special Agents – Lewis C Taylor Part 1

As FBI Assistant Director Harold “Pop” Nathan explained in 1934, the Division of Investigation (later renamed the FBI), “First and foremost… selects its personnel with the greatest care from the best available material.” The applicant’s record and associations should be “rigidly scrutinized” all the way back to his school days. Higher education, agency testing, and hiring interviews ensured that the prospective law enforcement officer possessed the required “resourcefulness, aggressiveness, tact, energy, and the like.” The hiring of Special Agent Lewis Charles Taylor, the lead agent in Tucson during the first months of the June Robles kidnapping investigation, provides an example of how these requirements of Director J. Edgar Hoover were put into practice not long after he assumed leadership.  Taylor was a 24-year-old law student at the University of Colorado at Boulder when he applied for the position of...