In this massive tome, a Yale professor of American history outlines the complicated life history of J. Edgar Hoover, the quintessential government man and Director of the FBI from 1924 at age 29 until his death in 1972. Her opus is even longer than the above pagination would suggest as the hardcover edition I read is set in a small font on 6” x 9” pages.
Hoover was the prototype Washington insider. Born there, he was educated at it’s elite, segregated, all white Christian schools, then at George Washington University where he led the Kappa Alpha fraternity which supported segregation and the KKK. He graduated in 1917, then worked for four years cataloging and filing at the Library of Congress. Thereafter that experience was used in the Justice Department where he quickly rose to the deputy and then full director positions at the new FBI. Obsessed with cataloging and files, he kept files on and prosecuted labor leaders and early on organized the secret detention and deportation of Germans. His illegal roundups and deportations included radicals and communists. He joined the Free Masons and admired the right-wing John Birch Society.
The remit of the FBI expanded in 1934 under Roosevelt, and it was involved in the capture of the notorious gangster John Dillinger. Killings and veiled authorization to torture captured suspects and witnesses and deny them legal representation became a secret but common modus operandi. Hoover developed a PR initiative with Hollywood moguls and newspaper editors, offering tours of HQ to offset his investigation of Hollywood stars and media types as communists. By1938 the FBI had secret authorization to collect information on American Nazis, Communists and fascists, with a fuzzy alliance with the ACLU and NAACP that gave it the facade of being apolitical. During WWII, there was a fourfold increase in personnel with extensive wiretapping and spying on innocent citizens that included Eleanor Roosevelt whose hotel room was bugged in an effort to discredit her liberal influence. A file on her alleged dalliances during her husband’s presidency was maintained.
In 1945 Hoovers authority was challenged when president Truman replaced Wild Bill Donovan’s Office Of Strategic Services for foreign intelligence, losing to the new CIA, but he managed to limit the later’s scope to foreign affairs, thus maintaining total control over domestic security services. After WWII, much of the focus of the FBI was on the perceived communist threat with exposure of of senior government men and Hollywood moguls as Soviet agents, trying to outdo the exaggerations of the danger to national security of flamboyant Senator Eugene McCarthy. He saw communists, Nazis, and insurrectionists, real or imagined, everywhere. He claimed to expose many senior government officials as Soviet agents with some success, with outing of Alger Hiss at the State Department, and collected information on Kim Philby, Donald McLean, Guy Burgess, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, often using secret and illegal means of obtaining the evidence.
The FBI also provided minimal results in a less-than-enthusiastic attempt to stop southern lynching and enforce voting rights because doing more conflicted with Hoover’s racism. But the failure of these efforts was also abetted by racist southern Democrats, police and judges.
Agents also provided duplicitous cooperation with the NAACP in the late 1950s southern integration dictates following the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, playing both sides, genuinely attempting to enforce federal law while trying to remain on friendly terms with southern segregationists. Hoover’s book, Masters of Deceit, an anticommunist manifesto was touted by William F. Buckley, the John Birch Society, and Barry Goldwater. Wild extremist conspiracy theories are not new, as amply documented by the Birch Society followers that Hoover had to reluctantly distance himself from in the early 60s. His two-faced endorsement of Johnson’s Civil Right’s Bill is typical of the ultimate political survivor and blackmailer. While seemingly enforcing the provisions for Johnson who had waived the mandatory retirement age for him, his racist misogynist conservatism ensured that he did as little as was politically necessary.
Hoover was overly antagonistic to to the Kennedy administration after supporting Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign but had enough dirt on the Kennedy clan to ensure that they would not fire him. The confusing role of the FBI in 1962 with the CIA and organized crime bosses Robert Maheu, and Sam Giancana to assassinate Fidel Castro, and their support for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was hidden from Hoover by his own agents at the time.
In 1963 Hoover publicly labelled Dr. Martin Luther King as “ the most dangerous Negro in America”, wiretapped his home, office, and numerous hotel rooms where he had many orgies.
Throughout his career he maintained rigid control over every aspect of the all male agent’s lives including work attire, hair length and much of their social lives. He was constantly at loggerheads with his younger boss, the Attorney General Bobby Kennedy in the Kennedy administration over these dictates. A Nixon pal and Johnson neighbour, he maintained his job by obtaining secret secure information on John Kennedy’s many affairs, some with women associated with gangsters.
In 1965 an aging Hoover could only think of the New Left antiwar students, the mostly white Students For A Democratic Society and Stokely Carmichael’s mostly black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as insurrectionist communists, and investigated them as subversives a la 1950’s McCarthy hearings. Later he targeted the Black Panthers, the only avowed Marxist group, with the same invective and subjected them to surveillance and repression with anonymous letters, press releases, bugging and outright lies to the media.
In later years, rising conflict with his ally Richard Nixon in his presidency centred on when he would retire and who would replace him. But Hoover also had the upper hand here as the master blackmailer, to remain in power and Nixon could not bring himself to fire his pal. He died suddenly while still in office in 1974. A whole chapter is devoted to the accolades of politicians, conservative allies and hypocritical liberal opponents alike after he died. This reminded me of Garrison Keilor’s humorous quip: “They say such kind things about people at their funerals that I am sorry that I will miss mine by a few days.”
During his entire his 44 years as Director the entire FBI maintained a misogynist and racist stance with women and blacks employed only in low ranking menial jobs. He also targeted gays and atheists even though he was himself almost certainly a closet gay, living his whole adult life with his Associate Director and constant companion, Clyde Tolson. It is true that in the past, gays were often at risk for blackmail by foreign agents, a phenomenon that fortunately has largely disappeared. But throughout history to the present day the most vehemently homophobic men, such as Hoover, are often themselves closet gays, and Hoover was one the most outspoken homophobic men of the century.
One remembers history more vividly if one has lived through it. I lived in the U.S. for three years, under three presidents- you can guess the years- and was acutely aware of the turmoil in their politics at that time. The atmosphere in New Haven where I lived and studied, in the aftermath of the murder trial of the Black Panther national chairman Bobby Seales there was tense, with lots of protests and violence and made me pay more attention to politics than I would have otherwise. But the account in this book is very different from what I recall in the news at the time, and undoubtedly more accurate. There is little doubt that if Hoover had been born in 1965 instead of 1895, he would now be an ardent Trump supporter.
This detailed scholarly dry account is very informative and provides important lessons for the current era, even though it is very American-centric. It is also, like this review, a bit chronologically disjointed. But I hope my sketchy review does not deter people who like history from reading it.
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Thanks, The New Yorker.
The Passionate Reader 