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

by Beverly Gage

Hoover’s own father died of “melancholia” and “inanition” (what we today might describe as severe depression), disappearing first into sadness and rage and, later, losing the desire to eat or live.

The closest Hoover ever came to acknowledging a less than perfect childhood was in 1938, a few months after his mother’s death, when he published an unusually personal article speculating about what might happen “If I Had a Son.” In that article, he noted that boys want to worship their fathers “as head of the house, a repository of all knowledge, the universal provider, the righteous Judge.” Such admiration became impossible when parents relied on “half-truths” to lull their children into a false sense of security.

longue,

lounge

Washington has often been described as a citadel of segregation, with white blocks neatly separated from Black. But segregation was a process rather than a social fact in the late nineteenth century, and during Hoover’s childhood that process was still underway.

“One to-day is worth two tomorrows.”

Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West.

As the praise continued to roll in, Hoover believed he had hit upon a magic formula, one that might be endlessly repeated. “The raids . . . certainly met with unusual success,” he wrote in a late February memo, boasting that they had been “conducted so far as I know with no adverse criticism.” As it turned out, he simply wasn’t paying attention.

Despite the vast number of cases sent his way, Post charged, he had run across only a handful of men and women who posed any danger to society. “As a rule the hearings show the aliens arrested to be working men of good character,” he declared. Post’s words reflected the human sympathy missing from Hoover’s late nights checking lists, reading manifestos, and assembling affidavits. “It is pitiful to consider the hardship to which they and their families have been subjected,” Post mourned, all “for nothing more dangerous than affiliating with friends of their own race, country and language.”

And yet the later stereotype of Hoover as a bully and purveyor of gossip only begins to capture the range of methods he developed during these first years of fame to promote and enforce his views.

In depicting the coming showdown, Hoover drew upon the same imagery he had once used to characterize political radicals: criminals were vicious animals, their sympathizers feminized weaklings or deluded eggheads.

If anything, Hoover’s rhetoric escalated throughout the summer of 1935, even as he and Tolson spent more time at places like the Stork and 21. He seemed to thrive on the attention accorded his remarks, growing ever more outspoken in his denunciations of “human rats” and the “gutter scum” who helped them.

In the Hoover lexicon, criminal defense attorneys were henceforth to be identified as “shyster lawyers” and “legal vermin,” while parole advocates were “sob sisters,” “intruders,” “convict lovers,” and “fuss-budget busybodies.”

the corruption and double-dealing of Versailles,

Hoover concluded his letter to Stone by affirming the public’s right to criticize “any Governmental Bureau or official”—the very essence of democracy. But he also suggested that such open dialogue could be dangerous, and might need to be contained. “When it gets into the realm of imagination and suppositions, then I think it does a real harm, not only to the agency against which it is directed, but to the welfare and security of the nation.”

Hoover spoke out against thinking of the war in racial terms. “No man should be suspected simply because he is foreign-born or has a foreign name or accent,” he wrote in the summer of 1941. “Americans, unlike other nationals, are not a race. Americanism is an idea.” He also had a legal argument: while noncitizens could be detained, the federal government had no constitutional right to detain U.S. citizens without due process, even in a time of war.

“The great American crime is toleration of conditions which permit and promote prejudice, bigotry, injustice, terror and hate,”

“Hoover is a great politician,” Philby concluded. “His blanket methods and ruthless authoritarianism are the wrong weapons for the subtle world of intelligence. But they have other uses.”

At Crime Records, Sullivan helped to write the book, drawing upon much of the information he had gathered for his secret background memo early in COINTELPRO. Though Hoover did not write the words on the page, there can be no question that the book, like so much of what came out of Crime Records, reflected his concerns and worldview. Masters of Deceit repeated many of his familiar bromides.

Though produced in full public view, Masters of Deceit was itself a counterintelligence operation of sorts, aimed at discrediting the party.

As a child of wealth, Bobby knew instinctively that power could be exercised not just by imposing rules, but by flouting them.

W. Cleon Skousen published The Naked Communist

Paul and Marion Miller made their own bid for fame with the 1960 publication of Marion’s memoir, I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife.

Many of their reports came to focus on Vietnam, where the Soviets found Johnson’s actions “very serious and very dangerous,” all but devoid of “long-range” thinking.

Far from embracing communism, a new generation of activists was starting to rethink its views on war and peace, civil rights and civil liberties, the Soviet Union and China and Vietnam. They called themselves the New Left.

Questioned by reporters about his connections to communism, Carmichael labeled the allegations “infantile,” the sort of simplistic claptrap that had long been Hoover’s stock-in-trade.

In October 1967, thousands of anti-war protesters staged a march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon, where they were photographed slipping flowers into soldiers’ rifles in the name of peace.

Johnson recalled a “sick feeling” as his great political city descended into something approaching a race war. He thought of the stories he had heard about federal troops patrolling the capital during the Civil War and “wondered, as every American must have wondered, what we were coming to.” Hoover had a more personal cache of memories on which to draw. To him, the events of 1968 may have evoked the riot of July 1919, during his first month as head of the Radical Division. Back then, it had been white mobs inflicting much of the violence, seeking to install and enforce Jim Crow through racial terror. Now the country was witnessing a form of Black rebellion against the vestiges of that racial system.

Reader’s Digest, the dependable old warhorse of American conservatism.

“The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence,” he declared.

And then there was Nichols, the link between the Nixon campaign and the backroom expertise of the FBI. Most of his energies went into campaign security, known euphemistically as “poll-watching.” In October, he helped to recruit a hundred former FBI agents, along with an alleged hundred thousand “trained volunteers,” to run surveillance at polling locations deemed particularly susceptible to anti-Nixon sentiment. Speaking with the press, Nichols insisted that some three million votes would be at stake on Election Day due to Democratic “miscounting, ballot tampering and ‘ghost’ voting.” Some reporters saw less lofty ideals at work. Rather than attempting to protect electoral integrity, they suggested, the goal was to intimidate Democratic voters.

Despite what Hoover claimed, the young revolutionaries of the late 1960s stood for ideas shared by many Americans: that the country’s progress on racial justice was too slow and insufficient, that the war in Vietnam was a painful and deadly mistake. Their turn to violence hurt rather than helped their case, but Hoover would have come for them anyway, just as he had once targeted the nonviolent civil rights movement.

“We have moved from the ‘student activism’ which characterized the civil rights movement in the early 60s through the ‘protest movements’ which rallied behind the anti-war banner beginning with the march on the Pentagon in 1967 to the ‘revolutionary terrorism’ being perpetrated today,” he read from talking points written up in advance of the meeting.

One sign of his declining support among liberals came from former attorney general Ramsey Clark, who wrote of Hoover’s “petty and costly” style of leadership and “self-centered concern for his reputation” in his new book, Crime in America, published in the fall of 1970.

The protesters themselves could not help but point out the day’s strange math, with “a handful” of Americans mourning the deaths of some forty-eight thousand soldiers while “thousands” showed up to pay their respects to a single federal servant.

In death Hoover ended up as the nation’s greatest political villain, his name forever linked to the worst and most sordid aspects of the FBI’s history, and to the idea that the government could not be trusted to protect the rights of Americans.

During his lifetime, Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking racial and social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.

One tragedy of Hoover’s life is that he became what he swore he would never be, and thus undermined the very ideals that he had found so captivating as a young man.

The greatest repository of records on Hoover is still the FBI itself. The Bureau makes available hundreds of FBI files on famous individuals and major subjects. Researchers may consult such files through the FBI’s online reading room, The Vault.

I supplemented the FBI’s publicly available material by filing dozens of FOIA requests on subjects ranging from FBI personnel (Harold Nathan, Guy Hottel, Dan Smoot) to important political allies (Barry Goldwater, James Eastland, Hoover’s stable of ex-agents in Congress) to right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society and Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. FOIA was also crucial in instances where The Vault provides only partial or limited versions of investigative or personnel materials.

On the Klan and COINTELPRO–White Hate, the research of David Cunningham and John Drabble is useful.