G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

by Beverly Gage

Since taking over the Bureau in 1924, Hoover had cultivated a particular type of man as his ideal agent: tall, white, conservative, athletic, always in a dark suit and spit-shined shoes, either a lawyer or an accountant by training.

Instead, he stayed on through the 1960s and emerged as one of history’s great villains, perhaps the most universally reviled American political figure of the twentieth century.

As FBI director from 1924 until his death in 1972, he was the most influential federal appointee of the twentieth century,

He also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. Far

The truth is that Hoover stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing.

The truth is that power does not simply arrive. It has to be created, policy by policy, law by law, step by excruciating step.

With good reason, Hoover expected that everything the FBI did would remain secret unless he dictated otherwise.

he might have been forced to step down a few years later, at the mandatory federal retirement age of seventy. He was saved from this fate by two friends who happened to end up in the White House.

Kennedy squeaked through with 49.72 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.55 percent (303 to 219 in the electoral college), one of the closest elections in presidential history.[9]

Hoover had reached out with the news that young John, then a naval lieutenant, seemed to be embroiled in a sexual affair with Inga Arvad, a married Danish journalist and suspected Nazi spy. The Bureau never proved the espionage charges, but they did overhear the couple making love in a South Carolina hotel room. Acting on Hoover’s tip, Joe pressured his son to end the relationship.

Just three months before the Democratic convention, the Bureau received reports that Kennedy and Sinatra spent the night with “show girls from all over town” at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, a known hotbed of organized crime.

congressman from East Texas, Johnson had purchased a home on Hoover’s block of Thirtieth Place. Since then,

election underway, he went so far as to support a bill guaranteeing Hoover a lifetime sinecure: the full payment of the FBI director’s salary until the day he died, whether or not he remained on the job. The bill had to be rushed through in the ten days before Congress recessed. Johnson pulled out all the stops to make it happen.[16]

Bobby had gotten his start in Washington on McCarthy’s committee, where as Roy Cohn’s assistant and then as Democratic counsel he had shown himself to be a formidable anticommunist brawler.

In 1938, after his mother’s death, Hoover bought a house in the newly developed neighborhood of Forest Hills, near Chevy Chase. The flyer advertises that the property is “safely restricted to assure a permanently desirable environment,” a euphemism for the racial covenants that prevented Black homeowners from purchasing homes in the neighborhood.