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

by Beverly Gage

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.