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

by Beverly Gage

In Hoover’s view, the FBI already knew how to function under peacetime conditions and had a corps of professional men in place to perform any necessary tasks, unlike the ill-trained and erratic OSS.

As Truman would later admit, Roosevelt had not told him much about the war, up to and including details of the country’s top-secret nuclear weapons development program.

Despite his official mantra that “the FBI is a WE organization,” over the next few months Hoover personally accepted much of the credit for the Bureau’s success.

With the stroke of a pen, the president split peacetime intelligence into two separate spheres: with the FBI on the domestic side and the CIG on the global.

After two decades of constructing and expanding the FBI, Hoover was forced to dismantle something he had built.

As an outspoken foe of vigilantism, he had little patience for violent crowds who acted on their own authority, whether they came in the form of lynch mobs or anti-German “vigilance committees.”

Many Black leaders looked to the end of the war with a sense of optimism, hopeful that the fight against fascism, with its policies of racial genocide, might make Americans think twice about their own history of segregation, violence, and white supremacy. But far from launching an era of peaceful coexistence in American race relations, the first months of 1946 produced what the NACCP’s Walter White characterized in a letter to Hoover as a “well-organized campaign of terrorism.” Some of the worst attacks were aimed at Black veterans, who returned home to a heightened atmosphere of racism, hostility, and violence.

They also expressed contempt for the Bureau as an invading federal force with no right to interfere in Southern affairs.

Hoover wrote back an apologetic but indignant memo, suggesting that “the president has reached this conclusion” only because “he must have been misinformed as to the facts and record.” Then the FBI continued what it was doing.

It also reinforced Hoover’s impression that the president did not appreciate or respect him.[13]

Three days later, he died of a heart attack at his New Hampshire farm, a tragedy that many attributed to the stress and harsh treatment he had faced before HUAC.

HUAC investigators soon traipsed out to Chambers’s Maryland farm, where he led them to his pumpkin patch and handed over several rolls of microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

It is hard to exaggerate Hoover’s outrage at this decision, the first time that he was forced to turn over confidential FBI documents in open court—and this at a moment when he had thought the FBI had finally won.

Deep down, the FBI director was not just a bureaucrat or anticommunist or law enforcement professional, but a passionate and devout Christian.

“In short,” Hoover explained, “I believe in God because God believes in me.”

As Hoover framed it, one of the chief benefits of religious faith was its prescriptive nature: the Bible could tell Americans how to live.

Catholic priests, like FBI agents, operated in a world of male sociability, set off from society at large as an especially worthy and disciplined elite. Rumors of homosexuality (some of them quite plausible) followed figures like Spellman, just as they followed Hoover. Within their respective organizations, though, such talk was denounced as itself a form of immorality and corruption, an effort to destroy otherwise heroic leaders.

Many of Washington’s leading figures would soon come to embrace Hoover’s overt religiosity, with its blend of familial, spiritual, and political themes.

Many politicians, especially Republicans, blamed Truman’s alleged softness on espionage for this dramatic turnaround in communist fortunes.

On June 19, 1953, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted just before sundown—first Julius, then Ethel—without ever naming names or disclosing to the FBI what they knew.

When La Follette killed himself several years later, his friends and family blamed it on McCarthy’s nastiness during the campaign, and on La Follette’s dismay at the culture of lies and demagoguery that their primary contest helped to unleash.

McCarthy turned out to be noisy and reckless, a talented showman and propagandist. But he never had Hoover’s political skills, or his interest in the slow, difficult work of institution building.

“McCarthyism,” the word that came to capture the sordid side of anticommunist politics, would turn out to be mostly a surface phenomenon, a wild media drama of accusation and counteraccusation, of truth and lies. “Hooverism,” the less popular term, came first, lasted longer, and mattered more.[5]

By the time the program closed in 1955, the FBI had disseminated information on more than nine hundred people, most of them teachers, librarians, professors, and university administrators. Of those, more than half either lost or left their jobs. Like the collaboration with SISS, it happened largely without public notice—in stark contrast to the antics of Joe McCarthy.[26]

While he had warned early and often about communism, he rarely spoke in public about homosexuality. It is not hard to imagine why. Nobody had ever accused Hoover of being a communist.

Even a casual observer could see the ways in which Hoover’s life and history conformed to certain categories that were fast becoming suspect: his bachelor status, his devotion to his mother, his preference for spending time around other men.

When Hoover did venture out, he found Washington a changed city. It was no longer the boom-time free-for-all of the New Deal and the war, but instead a community seized by suspicion and fear.

Given their tight bonds and shared secrets, Hillenkoetter warned, homosexuals had the potential to function as “a government within a government,” sealed off from scrutiny by outside parties, talking mostly with each other.

Even as he gathered sexual secrets on thousands of government employees, he professed to disdain the proliferation of Washington gossip.

As the Lavender Scare accelerated, reports of suicide became another part of the Washington whisper chain, desperate acts undertaken by those who felt they had nowhere else to turn.

Throughout the 1950s, figures of real stature around Washington—men who knew Hoover personally—began to crack under the pressure of the Lavender Scare. In one tragic incident, Washington police arrested Lester C. Hunt Jr., son of Wyoming senator Lester Hunt, for soliciting sex from a man in Lafayette Park. After his son’s humiliating trial, Senator Hunt withdrew his reelection bid, then shot himself in the head in his Senate office.[30]

Hoover’s willingness to act on McCarthy’s behalf indicates he may have sympathized with the senator’s plight.

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).

In one of the most contentious political spectacles in American history, Hoover’s supposed greatness emerged as the one point of consensus.

In popular memory, the Army-McCarthy hearings mark the dismal climax of the Red Scare, the moment the country definitively rejected anticommunist hysteria in favor of more restrained methods and attitudes. In truth, the months following the hearings produced some of the most draconian anticommunist legislation in American history, much of it justified as a way to support the FBI and push back against McCarthy.

The decision launched Warren’s reputation as one of the century’s great liberals, the towering giant of rights-based jurisprudence. For Hoover, it meant a growing conflict between his duties as a federal lawman and his conservatism on matters of race and social protest.

He had come of age in largely segregated institutions, from his elementary school to his high school and university, and on up to the FBI itself. The Stork Club, Harvey’s, the Mayflower, the Del Charro—all were restricted to primarily white clientele, though Black waiters, dishwashers, and maids often kept the businesses afloat.

Taught as a young man to regard segregation as a bedrock of the social order, he did not simply abandon those ideas when the Supreme Court declared otherwise.

If anticommunism fed Hoover’s suspicion of civil rights organizations, it also pushed him to act against the most egregious forms of racial injustice as a way of defending America from its ideological enemies.

Like nearly everyone in Washington, Marshall described himself as a devout anticommunist. Under the pressures of the moment, he and other NAACP leaders went out of their way to show that they, too, could be relied upon to do their part.

In retaliation for registering to vote or attempting to attend white schools, the Citizens’ Councils recommended boycotts of Black-owned stores, the firing of Black employees, and the calling in of debts.

Of all his civil rights initiatives during these years, Hoover’s decision to investigate the Citizens’ Councils is perhaps the most surprising. The councils advertised themselves as the law-abiding, respectable wing of massive resistance. Given his well-known sympathies with white Southerners, Hoover could well have accepted this at face value and looked the other way, as many Southern leaders chose to do. That he took a different path says less about his personal sympathies than about his fury at those who would defy federal law, and about his expanding definition of justifiable domestic intelligence.

The Till murder made the summer’s violence in Mississippi into a national and even international story, the case that finally prodded many white observers to grapple with the brutality and senselessness of the state’s racial regime.

In November 1955, a new county grand jury refused to indict on kidnapping charges in the Till case, sparking another round of outrage and recrimination over federal impotence.

In the end, though, he was far more lenient toward the South’s segregationists than toward civil rights groups on the other side.

At the same time, he conceded that the federal government had a duty to enforce the law, whether the white South liked it or not. The question was how.

Toward John Kennedy himself Hoover seems to have devoted little time or attention. As a congressman, Kennedy developed a reputation as a playboy but also an intellectual, known to dabble in book-writing and other highbrow pursuits. It seemed inconceivable to Hoover, as to most Washington players, that this skinny, boyish Ivy Leaguer would ever become much of a national force.

To a man who craved order, Bobby’s spontaneity was disorienting.

The Bay of Pigs debacle fit well with Hoover’s evolving assessment of the Kennedy brothers as young and arrogant and ill-prepared for the hard work of running the country.

Beginning in the 1940s, however, Connor had turned on Hoover, concerned with the rise in lynching investigations and the enforcement of civil rights. From that point on, he had refused to enroll Birmingham police officers at the FBI Academy, shipping them off instead to a Louisville, Kentucky, training school that specialized in “Southern” police techniques. By the late 1950s, with civil rights conflicts in full bloom, he had taken to openly denouncing the FBI as a tool of Northern liberals.