Born in
Washington, D.C., the son of Edwin J Atherton and Mary Agnes McCarten. Atherton studied law at
Georgetown University (1914) for only four months. After leaving Georgetown, he was a clerk in a bank and then entered the consular service (January 1916) where during
World War I he served in
Genoa,
Italy, followed by
Bulgaria, and
Jerusalem. After the war, Atherton served in
Canada, then resigned from consular duties, March 13, 1925, and served the Department of Justice from 1925 to 1927. He served in New York, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles and headed the Department of Justice office in
San Francisco,
California. His service in the BOI (later
FBI) was notable for his having worked on the 1924 capture of a neo-revolutionary army of Mexican nationals under the leadership of General
Enrique Estrada at Engineer Springs on the California border. He resigned from the BOI in 1927 and started a private investigating firm in
Los Angeles with another former special agent, Joseph Dunn, called Atherton and Dunn. Atherton's firm was hired to investigate police graft and corruption and wrote the so-called "Atherton Report" on police corruption in the
San Francisco Police Department in the late 1930s. He was paid $40,000 to thoroughly investigate the Pacific Coast Conference in 1938. After two years and the submission of his extensive two-million-word report, he was immediately appointed to be High Commissioner of the Pacific Coast Conference in January 1940 to carry out his recommended reforms. ==Personal==