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

by Beverly Gage

In 1975, in the midst of the Church Committee’s investigations, President Gerald Ford dedicated the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, a hulking brutalist monolith built as the FBI’s stand-alone headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Today the building is slated for likely demolition, with a new headquarters to be constructed somewhere less conspicuous, perhaps in Maryland or Virginia. That building will no doubt bear a different name—and it should, for Hoover does not deserve the honor. But ceasing to honor him should not mean forgetting the complexities of his life and legacy. 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. We cannot know our own story without understanding his, in all its high aspiration and terrible cruelty, and in its many human contradictions.[22]