Helen Gandy - Career

Career

Gandy briefly worked in a department store in Washington before she found a job as a file clerk at the Justice Department in 1918. Within weeks, she went to work as a typist for Hoover, effective March 25, 1918, having told Hoover in her interview she had "no immediate plans to marry." She, like Hoover, would never marry, both being completely devoted to the Bureau.

When Hoover went to the Bureau of Investigation (as it was then known) as its assistant director on August 22, 1921, he specifically requested Gandy return from vacation to help him in the new post. Hoover became director of the Bureau in 1924 and Gandy continued in his service. She was promoted to "office assistant" on August 23, 1937, and "executive assistant" on October 1, 1939. Though she would receive promotions in her civil service grade subsequently, she would retain her title as executive assistant to her retirement on May 2, 1972, the day Hoover died. Hoover said of her "if there is anyone in this Bureau whose services are indispensable I consider Miss Gandy to be that person." Despite this, Curt Gentry wrote:

Theirs was a rigidly formal relationship. He'd always called her 'Miss Gandy' (when angry, barking it out as one word). In all those fifty-four years he had never once called her by her first name.

Hoover biographers Theoharis and Cox would say "her stern face recalled Cerberus at the gate," a view echoed by Anthony Summers in his life of Hoover, who also pictured Gandy as Hoover's first line of defense against the outside world. When Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Hoover's nominal boss, had a direct telephone line installed between their offices, Hoover refused to answer the phone. "Put that damn thing on Miss Gandy's desk where it belongs," Hoover would declare.

Curt Gentry would describe her influence:

Her genteel manner and pleasant voice contrasted sharply with this domineering presence. Yet behind the politeness was a resolute firmness not unlike his, and no small amount of influence. Many a career in the Bureau had been quietly manipulated by her. Even those who disliked him, praised her, most often commenting on her remarkable ability to get along with all kinds of people. That she had held her position for fifty-four years was the best evidence of this, for it was a Bureau tradition that the closer you were to him, the more demanding he was.

William C. Sullivan, an agent with the Bureau for three decades, reported in his memoir when he worked in the public relations section answering mail from the public, he gave a correspondent the wrong measurements for Hoover's personal popover recipe, relying on memory rather than the files. Gandy, ever protective of her boss, caught the error and brought it to Hoover's attention. The director then placed an official letter of reprimand in Sullivan's file for the lapse. W. Mark Felt, deputy associate director of the Bureau, wrote in his memoir that Gandy "was bright and alert and quick-tempered—and completely dedicated to her boss."