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

by Beverly Gage

Born and bred in Washington, D.C., he believed in the power of the federal government to do great things and fight great battles on behalf of the nation’s citizens. He also believed that there were certain groups—communists and racial minorities, above all—who threatened that project. His career reflected both themes: a faith in progressive, expert-driven government and a commitment to an avenging social conservatism. His genius came in amassing enough power to promote and enforce those ideas as he saw fit.

If Hoover had decided to step down at that moment in 1959, after thirty-five years at the FBI’s helm, we might remember him differently: as a popular and well-respected government official, often cruel and controversial but a hero to more Americans than not. Instead, he stayed on through the 1960s and emerged as one of history’s great villains, perhaps the most universally reviled American political figure of the twentieth century. His abuses and excesses, from the secret manipulations of COINTELPRO to his deep-seated racism, offer a troubling case study in unaccountable government power.

Hoover got to know nearly everyone who mattered in Washington and helped to influence an astonishing range of national events, from the New Deal “War on Crime” on up through World War II, McCarthyism, the Rosenberg and Hiss cases, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the civil rights and anti-war struggles, and the political machinations that led to Watergate.

While Hoover occasionally made common cause with liberals and civil libertarians, he found his deepest affinities among conservatives, men and women who shared his views on race, religion, and Reds, the three volatile R’s of mid-century politics.

The Boy Scouts, founded in 1910, promised to end “degeneracy” by transforming American boys from “flat-chested cigarette-smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” into “robust, manly, self-reliant” men.

Founded in 1865 to honor the defeated Confederate general Robert E. Lee, Kappa Alpha actively promoted the Lost Cause myth, in which a noble South had been defeated by Yankee interlopers and Black agitators who misunderstood its way of life.

Today, it is widely known that the United States sent more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II. Less recognized is that policy’s anti-German precedent, the program in which Hoover first began to experiment with administering and enforcing the law.

Millions of Americans had responded to his call by purging their communities of all things German: no more Beethoven or Wagner, no more German-language instruction, no more “sauerkraut” or “hamburgers” (instead, Americans ate “liberty cabbage” and “liberty sandwiches”).

“Shortly after 6 o’clock,” the New York Herald reported, “splashing and rasping in the silence of the empty bay, the anchors came up to the bow, the Buford’s prow swung lazily eastward, a patch of foam slipped from the stern and 249 persons who didn’t like America left it.” For Hoover, it was a stunning public triumph, the peak moment of a year already filled with so much change, drama, and success.

Until this point, he had always been a star, the boy who knew how to please his elders and win respect. His moments of difficulty had been private and internal, family secrets kept secret. The criticism brought out an ugly, vindictive side to Hoover’s personality—one that had always been there, perhaps, but had been controlled by a steady diet of praise and success. Rather than pause and consider what the department’s critics had to say, Hoover struck back, putting Justice agents to work digging into his critics’ backgrounds and personal foibles. His aggressive response to criticism would become a lifelong practice and ultimately a source of scandal, though nobody at the Justice Department in 1920 suggested the approach might be unbecoming of a government servant.

Hoover spent the Christmas season familiarizing himself with some of the more extravagant texts of the American left. Many foretold the coming destruction of capitalism, though they differed widely on the question of violence. “No lives need be lost, not one drop of blood need be shed, if the working class will rally to the I.W.W. with its program of peaceful evolvement,” promised The Red Dawn, one of the books on Hoover’s reading list. Hoover sought to persuade his superiors that communists actually embraced violence, however cagey their writings might be. By virtue of joining one of the two parties, he argued, members committed themselves to the armed overthrow of the government and the capitalist system.

Hoover had been trained throughout high school and college to do just that: to respond with discipline, fortitude, clear analysis, and good sportsmanship to the many challenges that life was bound to present. Instead he viewed Post’s challenge as a personal affront, to be crushed as swiftly and firmly as possible. For the first time, Hoover helped to mobilize federal agents to gather intelligence on his critics, a practice that would later become routine at his Bureau.

Observing this rush of approval, Felix Frankfurter once again wrote to Stone from Harvard to warn that “Hoover was too actively associated with the Mitchell Palmer deportation proceedings” to reform the Bureau effectively. In deference to the attorney general, Frankfurter acknowledged that Hoover “might be a very effective and zealous instrument of the realization of the ‘liberal ideas’ which you had in mind” as long as Stone remained in office. Frankfurter worried, though, that Hoover might revert to old ways under a less liberal and “energizing” boss. Stone argued that they would have to take “the fat with the lean”—and that for now, Hoover would do fine. Over the long term, though, it was Frankfurter who proved the more prescient of the two. Throughout his career, Hoover would often defer to his “liberal” bosses at the White House and the Justice Department, accommodating political reality as necessary and often earning their wholehearted support. But he would also build independent forms of power that insulated him from political pressure and allowed him to carry out his own agenda.

Despite its cumbersome name, bureaucratic autonomy is a simple concept: autonomous bureaucrats can do what they want, regardless of politicians’ needs or desires. As one scholar has noted, successful bureaucrats need at least three attributes to achieve true independence: a clear vision, a loyal popular constituency, and a reputation for attaining genuine results.

If Hoover had one great personal failing, it was perhaps not his inability to love, but his inability to establish relationships outside of formal and controlling hierarchies.

Hoover never spoke with Purvis again, an act of banishment that suggested not indifference but an ongoing intensity of emotion.

Beginning in 1935, he presented himself as an arbiter of these essential virtues, not merely a law enforcement expert but, increasingly, a judge of the nation’s soul.

Hoover later said that he liked dogs better than people. “They’re great company to me,” he told a reporter. “The less I think of some people, the more I think of my dogs.

The arrival of a new attorney general—the first since Homer Cummings’s appointment in 1933—only underscored the need to remain on the president’s side. Just five years Hoover’s senior, former Michigan governor Frank Murphy arrived in office known as something of a civil liberties advocate, the leader who had refused to call in troops on the sit-down strikers. Among his first acts at the Justice Department was the creation of a civil liberties unit based on the principle that “where there is social unrest . . . we ought to be most anxious and vigilant in protecting the civil liberties of a protesting and insecure people.”

Many of the letter writers had rallied behind aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had moved to Europe after his son’s kidnapping and murder only to return to the U.S. in 1939 with a medal from Hitler and an awestruck description of German air power. In a radio broadcast three days after Roosevelt’s address to Congress, Lindbergh denounced the “hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion” behind the president’s preparedness drive. That broadcast, combined with Lindbergh’s refusal to hand back his medal from the Third Reich, led Roosevelt to conclude, “Lindbergh is a Nazi.”

FBI investigations formed the basis for a “Great Sedition Trial” targeting more than two dozen leaders of fascist and other far-right organizations. (The trial collapsed after the judge died unexpectedly in 1944.)

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.

Over the next several months, Truman did what he could from the White House, issuing an executive order to desegregate the military and committing himself to a civil rights platform, even at the risk of costing him the next election. South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, the man who had invited Hoover to investigate the Willie Earle case, attempted to ensure that defeat by running for president on the new Dixiecrat ticket, hoping to pull white Southerners away from the Democratic Party in retaliation for Truman’s civil rights stance.[30]

Though Thurmond failed to make much of a dent in Truman’s campaign, Southern Democrats showed their political might by blocking anti-lynching legislation, dashing hopes for clear and unequivocal federal authority.

Our Inner Conflicts, first published in 1945, considered the dilemma of a man whose inner self and outer persona had become incompatible, his true identity and desires concealed from the world. One possible result of that conflict, Horney suggested, would be a series of “neurotic” behaviors not unlike those Hoover exhibited on a regular basis: “perfectionist drives,” “rigid self-control,” the “need for admiration,” “a compulsive craving for power and prestige.” Such patterns attempted to compensate for—or to avoid—an essential truth that might be shattering if faced head-on.

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).

The Eisenhower years would later be held up as an example of covert intelligence run amok: CIA-backed coups in Guatemala and Iran, a spy tunnel carved out beneath the city of Berlin, secret testing of LSD on unwitting subjects.

During the 1950 election, Clint Murchison had given McCarthy ten thousand dollars to defeat Millard Tydings, the senator who had sounded the alarm against McCarthy’s tactics. (Tydings lost after McCarthy’s staff distributed a fake, composite photograph showing Tydings with Communist Party leader Earl Browder.)

“You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

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.

In the fall of 1955, Hoover received a letter from Robert Patterson, founder of the Mississippi Citizens’ Councils, who accused the FBI of working in cahoots with the NAACP “to intimidate Southerners who will not submit to its radical integration aims.”

Through the academy, Hoover had built up a network of sympathetic policemen throughout the South, widely known as the least modernized and least professional of the nation’s law enforcement regions.

The chief goal of the Freedom Ride was to insist that the federal government enforce its own laws, to make it impossible for John and Robert Kennedy—and, by extension, Hoover—to sit on the sidelines. A full two weeks before departing, CORE sent letters to the FBI, the Justice Department, and the White House outlining the Freedom Riders’ itinerary and asking for federal protection. Receiving no reply, the group reached out again through journalist Simeon Booker, the FBI’s longtime contact at Jet magazine, who planned to ride along with the activists and document their journey. On May 3, Booker met briefly with Bobby Kennedy, who said that CORE should let him know if they ran into any problems. Booker also spoke with at least one FBI official. On the night before their departure, he called FBI headquarters to say that the Freedom Ride was preparing to head out and that they were concerned about the prospect of violence.[6]

Unlike Hoover, Bobby Kennedy would claim he “never knew [the Freedom Riders] were traveling down there . . . before the bus was burned in Anniston,” implying that if he had only known, he surely would have done something. In truth, he just wasn’t paying attention.[16]

Desperate to stave off a full-blown riot, the Justice Department attempted to mobilize a makeshift band of federal “marshals”—mainly tax collectors and border agents—to contain the violence in Montgomery. But when Bobby asked the FBI for extra cars to help shuttle the marshals, Hoover said no, insisting that the FBI needed all its men and equipment. As the crisis accelerated, he avoided Bobby’s calls and provided only half of the hundred agents requested to fill out the marshals’ ranks.

compared to most local law enforcement, the FBI was the more progressive force, at least willing to investigate and hold Klansmen to account. But Hoover never wanted that particular badge of honor and did not deserve it. 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.

“Attributing every adversity to communism is not only irrational, but contributes to hysteria and fosters groundless fears,” he declared, calling for citizens to embrace “thoughtful, reliable, and authoritative sources of information” rather than conspiracy theories.

simplest solution to the crime, to wrap up the whole matter right then and there. Even as his agent snuck into the Dallas police station to participate in Oswald’s interrogation, Hoover was assuring confidants in Washington that “very probably we had in custody the man who had killed the President in Dallas” though “this had not definitively been established.” When assistant attorney general Norbert Schlei called just after five o’clock, seeking to gather background information for a public announcement, Hoover calmly ticked off the available facts. “I stated [Oswald] was born an American but tried unsuccessfully to lose his American citizenship; came back to this country in 1962.” He also passed along at least one mistake, suggesting that Oswald had visited Cuba “several” times in recent years. Hoover made no attempt to hide the FBI’s past interactions with Oswald. Nor did he show much concern that Oswald might not have acted alone. Instead, he seemed to take the facts at face value. Most likely, he informed Schlei, the president had been killed by a man who was at once “a nut” and “an extreme radical of the left.” Hoover’s confidence would later fuel speculation: Why was he so certain about Oswald? What could account for his calm in the midst of so much emotion and chaos?

Only Hoover and a handful of other federal officials, agents, and confidants have ever heard the recordings. (After Hoover’s death, a court order placed the tapes under embargo for fifty years, set to expire in 2027.)

Later that evening, when Evers contacted Hoover again, the director was even less sympathetic. Evers had hoped that Hoover might want to meet personally with local civil rights workers and perhaps gain a firsthand impression of conditions on the ground. Instead, Hoover flew off to New York with Tolson the next morning, avoiding a scheduled trip to Neshoba County.

Asked why he would not, at last, get rid of the sixty-nine-year-old FBI director, Johnson allegedly explained in his most down-home, East Texas patois, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”[11]

The Bureau also assumed that Klansmen would not—indeed, could not—read anything more complicated than a simple letter or cartoon. When one agent proposed writing a harsh critical history of the Klan for distribution to members, Hoover vetoed the idea. Unlike the intellectually nimble communists, FBI correspondence noted, Klansmen were “emotionally unprepared to completely absorb and fully comprehend the significance” of such material. When the Bureau faked letters written by Klansmen, they made sure to include spelling and grammatical errors, and to keep the messages short.

Back in Selma, Bureau agents played a similarly passive role. Twenty agents were present for what became known as the Bloody Sunday march, in which police attacked protesters as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The agents took photographs and film footage, and counted up the ensuing injuries. But they arrested only three white men, all of them accused of assaulting an FBI agent. Katzenbach objected to Johnson: “That didn’t look right, Mr. President, from the public viewpoint, you know—all the Negroes that were beat up and the people we arrested were the people who beat up the FBI agent.”

The commission rejected Hoover’s conspiratorial thinking. Instead, they saw America for what it was: “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

In private conversation, Johnson allegedly referred to King as “that goddamned n—— preacher” even as the White House pushed ahead on fair housing legislation, one of Johnson’s last civil rights achievements.[9]

In late October, Johnson came running with a last-minute request that the FBI surveil and wiretap the South Vietnamese embassy, for fear that Nixon was secretly negotiating to delay a peace settlement.

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]

Though Hampton spurned Weatherman theatrics, he worked diligently to create alliances with other groups, including local Chicago gangs and even so-called hillbilly rights groups, which advocated on behalf of poor white migrants from states like Kentucky and Tennessee. For Hoover, this was the prospect most to be avoided.

Initial news coverage described a gun raid gone bad. In Panther circles, though, word spread quickly that Hampton had been “murdered in his bed,” in the words of Panther leader Bobby Rush—and that Hoover had been at least tangentially responsible. When blood tests suggested that Hampton had been drugged, those suspicions took on new weight. “A pig agent must have given it to him because Fred never used any drugs and J. Edgar Hoover has said he has infiltrators in the Black Panther Party,” Rush told the press. Hoover may or may not have known in advance about the drugging or about the precise plan for the raid; such local operational details sometimes made their way up to headquarters, sometimes not. Either way, he helped to make Hampton’s death possible: by vilifying the Panthers and pressuring his men to act, by authorizing and orchestrating the larger COINTELPRO effort, and by encouraging FBI field offices to coordinate their efforts with local police.[28]

Hoover sent a note cheering the bold action. He even found it hard to sympathize with the four students shot and killed by National Guardsmen during an anti-war demonstration at Ohio’s Kent State University, informing the White House that “the students invited and got what they deserved.”[19]