The Streetcar Conductor's Son Who Ran the Pentagon
F. Edward Hébert was born in New Orleans in 1901, the son of a streetcar conductor and a schoolteacher, and he grew up to become one of the most powerful men in Washington without ever losing the accent or the attitude. For thirty-six years he represented Louisiana's 1st Congressional District, and for a stretch of those years he chaired the House Armed Services Committee, which meant that essentially nothing involving the American military happened without Eddie Hébert's say-so. Not bad for a kid who lost sight in one eye in a shooting accident at age nine.
That childhood injury shaped everything. Unable to play sports, young Hébert did what any competitive New Orleans kid would do — he found another way in. He became a team manager at Jesuit High School, then talked his way into being the assistant sports editor at The Times-Picayune before he'd even graduated. By the time he enrolled at Tulane, he was already working as a journalist, and he became the first sports editor of the university's student newspaper. He graduated in 1924 and dove straight into the deep end of Louisiana politics as a reporter and political editor.
It was in that role that Hébert made his name. He covered the rise of Huey Long, watching the Kingfish build his machine from up close, and in 1939 he broke the story that became known as the Louisiana Scandals — a web of corruption that took down Governor Richard Leche and LSU President James Monroe Smith. The investigation was the kind of dogged, old-school reporting that wins awards, and it did. It also made Hébert famous enough to run for Congress.
He won his seat in 1940 and kept it for eighteen consecutive terms. In Washington, Hébert found his calling on the Armed Services Committee, which he joined in 1948. He was a Cold Warrior through and through, a hawk who believed that American military strength was the only thing standing between civilization and chaos. He pushed for bigger defense budgets, more weapons systems, and better care for servicemembers. His signature achievement was founding the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, a military medical school in Bethesda, Maryland, that still bears his name and still trains military doctors today.
But Hébert was also a man of his era in ways that don't age well. He was a segregationist who resisted the civil rights movement, and his views on race cast a long shadow over his legacy. When Tulane University reconsidered the building named in his honor, they added historical context about his positions — a diplomatic way of saying the man did important things but also believed terrible ones.
His chairmanship of Armed Services ended in 1975, when a wave of post-Watergate freshmen Democrats — the famous "Watergate babies" — stripped power from old committee chairs who'd held their positions through seniority alone. Hébert didn't help himself when he reportedly addressed the new members as "boys and girls." He also made Pat Schroeder and Ron Dellums share a single committee chair, telling them they were only worth half a normal member. Washington had changed, and Eddie Hébert hadn't changed with it.
He died in 1979, and his legacy in New Orleans is complicated. He was a streetcar conductor's kid who became one of the most powerful people in American defense policy. He was an investigative journalist who brought down a corrupt governor. He was also a man who stood on the wrong side of the most important moral question of his century. New Orleans produces people like that — people who are simultaneously impressive and infuriating, whose accomplishments and failures exist in the same sentence, and whose stories resist the easy categories that other cities might try to impose.
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