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

by Beverly Gage

In response to the great moral challenge of the new decade, he fought to maintain limits rather than to push boundaries, to indulge his own prejudices rather than challenge them.

Hoover approached the King investigation with his prejudices intact, including the racism that often made him see calls for justice as a threat to national security.

Levison proved particularly valuable as an emissary to Northern white society, helping King to craft messages and speeches that would strike the right political notes.

Hoover’s was in part a generational lament, the commentary of a man born in the late nineteenth century, increasingly baffled by modern ways and manners.

According to aides, he liked to crack jokes about Hoover’s masculinity, scoffing at the director as a “fucking cocksucker” who preferred to “squat to pee.”

But it is also possible that Hoover sympathized in some small way with the president, a powerful man made vulnerable by unruly and unconventional desires.

Birmingham also showcased Hoover’s preferred approach to policing, in which conservative race politics and modern police methods went hand in hand.

This would soon become a standard portrait of those first awful minutes: Hoover stoic and uncaring; Bobby racked by grief, panic, and fear.

Throughout the country, news of the president’s death brought routines to a halt. At the Bureau, by contrast, Hoover’s great bureaucratic machine shifted into high gear.

It was too soon to speak of politics, or to acknowledge that the assassination, for all its present horror, might be a good thing for both Hoover and Johnson.

A Marine guard carried the casket into the room, now lit by candles in homage to those critical hours when Abraham Lincoln’s body, similarly pocked by an assassin’s bullet, had lain there a century earlier.

Now there would never be a confession, or even a chance to ask basic questions. And there would be no trial, no public sifting of evidence, no impartial jury to weigh the facts and come to a court-sanctioned decision. When Hoover awoke that morning, it had all seemed surprisingly simple: a suspect was in custody, his rifle and bullets at the lab, the background evidence building nicely. Now the Kennedy assassination was no longer a criminal matter but a fast-evolving source of speculation, uncertainty, and finger-pointing.

Warren made this shift of attitude known in a press conference immediately after the meeting. Speaking from outside the commission’s meeting room, Warren said that the FBI’s much-hyped report had arrived in “skeleton form,” raising more questions than it answered. “In order to evaluate it,” he explained, “we have to see the material on which the report was based.” Without contacting Hoover, he announced that the commission would be demanding the “raw” materials from the FBI investigation. And they wanted such materials immediately.[14] Hoover reacted as if he had been punched in the face. “This statement by the Chief Justice I felt was entirely unwarranted and could certainly have been phrased better so as not to leave the impression, at least by innuendo, that the FBI had not done a thorough job,” he complained to colleagues.

Hoover’s worry about Tolson, combined with the stress of the Warren Commission, made him even more volatile than usual—quick

Nobody else in American government could strike quite the same balance: at once an emissary of federal power and an icon of Old South culture and values.

And when Rowe finally testified in federal court, something incredible happened: a jury of white men convicted three fellow white men of violating the civil rights of a protester.

Even as he delivered what appeared to be hard facts, criminologists and social scientists pushed back with the same analysis that they had offered in the 1930s: Hoover’s great crime wave was partly a fiction, a matter of manipulation and distortion on the part of the FBI.

Indeed, what mattered, politically speaking, was not whether the statistics were true but whether the public believed them—whether the numbers that Hoover was describing, and the narrative he assigned to explain them, seemed to accord with Americans’ lived experience.[9]

Some of Hoover’s top aides shared these views, worried that an aging Hoover was relying too heavily on old approaches and methods.

“Hoover was afraid people were going to say he did it. So he was all out for finding the killer.”

Kennedy died at the hospital in the early morning hours of June 6, the latest of Hoover’s enemies to be brought down by an act of violence that seemed to symbolize everything wrong with America.

Oswald’s shooting had shown the world what could happen when police mismanaged a high-profile prisoner. Both then and since, Hoover had criticized the Dallas police for negligence. Now his top priority was to make good on those claims by ensuring that Ray survived the journey from London to Memphis and from federal to local custody.

In one tragic incident, the Bureau spread the false rumor that the white Hollywood actress and Panther supporter Jean Seberg was bearing the child not of her husband but of a Panther. Humiliated by the sensational media coverage, Seberg went into premature labor, lost the baby, and years later committed suicide.[9]

Hoover was hardly the only government official to vilify the Panthers in 1969. What set him apart was his ability to move beyond words and mobilize a well-trained, ideologically disciplined, professional corps to do his bidding.

He still forbade his own men from going undercover. “As long as I am director of the FBI, I’ll not have any agent wearing old clothes or long hair,”

The FBI contributed to the growing sense of desperation by stoking fear and disorder among activists, encouraging informants to embrace radical positions, and by showing young people—both overtly and covertly—that the authorities were, indeed, not to be trusted.

But Hoover’s volatile treatment of his subordinates suggests that he, too, needed an outlet for his frustrations.

After a lifetime of straddling the liberal-conservative divide, Hoover was now despised by one side and beloved by the other.

Even on occasions when Hoover’s words were carefully scripted, he showed increasing levels of vitriol and instability.

Among liberals and leftists, the release of the Media documents marked the end of whatever was still left of Hoover’s reputation as the limited-state, good-government figure that they had once embraced and admired.

“I don’t want yes men but I want men to give me their views, and, when I make a final decision, I want them to carry them out,” Hoover explained, apparently seeing little irony in the idea that Nixon might want the same thing from his own FBI director.

That afternoon, he sent Tolson a one-sentence telegram at home. “Lady Bird and I grieve with you,” he wrote, a familial gesture of respect toward the relationship that Hoover and Tolson had built together.

Whether liberal or conservative, though, nearly everyone agreed on one point: the outstanding feature of Hoover’s career was how long it had lasted.

nearly everyone who mattered in Washington seemed to be present—an unmistakable display, even in death, of Hoover’s power and influence.

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.[26]

Hoover gave nothing to his nieces and nephews, or to any blood relative, the final indignity in a lifetime of unraveling family relations.

Before Hoover’s coffin was lowered into the ground, the honor guard removed the American flag draped across the top and folded it into a crisp-cornered triangle. Then they handed it to Tolson, in quiet acknowledgment of his forty-four years at Hoover’s side.

Despite their differences over the past few difficult years, Nixon clung to the idea of Hoover as a true loyalist and ally, the one dependable soul in a city of feckless men.

After years of anguish and disillusionment over Vietnam, Watergate unleashed a new age of cynicism about government conduct and about the men and women who chose to make politics their profession.

When the final moments came, it was the attempt to interfere with the work of the FBI that helped to bring Nixon down.

The Church Committee hearings remain the single most significant inquiry ever undertaken by Congress into the conduct of the nation’s intelligence agencies. And unlike so many of the controversies over civil liberties during Hoover’s lifetime, they resulted in real reform.

Lost in the wave of condemnation was one of the central facts of Hoover’s life: whether or not they knew every detail of what he was up to, millions of people, from presidents down to the smallest of small-town editors, had always aided and supported him—not despite but because of his willingness to target those who challenged the status quo.

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.

Whatever else he may have been, Hoover exerted unparalleled influence over American politics and society for more than half a century, as a committed conservative and as a government servant, as a single-minded bureaucrat and as a confused, sometimes lonely man.