FBI agent made ‘significant contributions’

By John Howell
The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday honored a Batesville native whose legacy with the bureau includes having coined its motto: “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.”
Walter Hugh Drane Lester grew up a prodigy in Batesville. Valedictorian and President of the Batesville High School Class of 1917, avid baseball player and reader, Lester entered Ole Miss where he excelled in academics and athletics, according to the 1987 Panola County History.
He won the Mississippi Inter-Collegiate Oratorical Contest during his freshman year and again three years later. He lettered in multiple sports and became devoted to the University during his undergraduate studies. He declined a scholarship to Harvard, and chose to remain in Oxford to complete studies for his master’s degree.
In 1922, Lester successfully applied for a Rhodes Scholarship in England, becoming Panola County’s second Rhodes Scholar. During his studies at St. John’s College in Oxford — the other one, in England — Lester teamed up with Ole Miss student  Louis Jiggetts, a staff member of the campus newspaper, to write fictional accounts portraying correspondence between a boy and his father. Initially The “Hayseed Letters” were published as a newspaper serial and later as a book and in a London periodical.
After earning a Bachelor of Civil Law degree at St. John’s, Lester returned to Ole Miss to earn his LL.B. He joined a Memphis law firm and later formed his own firm with three other young lawyers. His legal work soon attracted the attention of the FBI which he joined in 1932.
The Batesville native ascended quickly through the ranks as the FBI discovered his research and speaking skills. He spoke throughout the U.S. and in Europe, at one time delivering as many as 63 speeches per month. Lester was also active in the high profile investigations of the mid-1930s which raised the national prestige of the federal agency — the Lindbergh kidnapping, the arrests of the John Dillinger gang, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson and Alvin Karpis among them.
Extant press accounts referred to Lester as “the number two man to (FBI Director J. Edgar) Hoover,’” the Panola County History states.
But upon learning that his mother was ill with cancer, Lester resigned from the FBI in 1940 and returned to Batesville to care for his ailing parents.
Demand for Lester as a speaker continued following his resignation, and he remained active on a lecture circuit. En route to give a speech in Cincinnati in June, 1941, he was killed in a head-on collision near Elizabethtown, KY.
Active and retired FBI agents joined a small group of local residents yesterday under a hot September sun for a memorial wreath placement sponsored by the FBI’s Retired Agents Association.
“He made a number of significant contributions to the FBI in our history as an organization. He obviously was the face of the FBI across the country in a very difficult time in our agency’s development,”  retired agent Ed Worthington said.
When Congress in 1935 at Hoover’s request changed the agency’s name from Bureau of Investigation to Federal Bureau of Investigation, Lester “would recommend in a memo to Director Hoover that ‘FBI Agents’ be used informally as opposed to ‘g-men’ — government men — or ‘justice agents,’” Worthington said. “He additionally points out in that memo that the motto ‘Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity’ could be used. It was at that point that our motto became Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.’”