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

by Beverly Gage

From the Soviet Union, Philby looked back with contempt at all of Hoover’s posturing and missteps as an intelligence chief. But he gave Hoover credit for savvy political judgment—for knowing when to fight and when to fold, when to keep secrets and when to reveal them. “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.”[36]

In any event, Hoover’s curiosity about psychoanalysis seems to have produced no great transformation of the mind or soul, no new spaciousness within the tightly bound world he had created for himself. If anything, he renewed his determination to maintain the idealized image he had long projected, eliminating those traces of open affection and feminine grace that had occasionally surfaced at the FBI.

Though framed as a matter of science, his testimony may also have served a more personal agenda: if one did not commit an overt act in a public place, nobody had the right to ask too many questions.[25]

Hoover had long shared Eisenhower’s belief that the law of God and the law of man should be made one.

During his first summer in office, as if to demonstrate Elson’s claims, Eisenhower convened his cabinet to sign a document declaring that the United States drew its strength and vitality from the Bible. The following year, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and put “In God We Trust” on the nation’s postal stamps (and, later, its paper currency).