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

by Beverly Gage

To no one’s surprise, Hoover asked him to resign. “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.

Perhaps because of their friendship and deep affinity, he recognized in Hoover a determination to carry on no matter the cost. “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me,” Nixon warned.[35]

As it turned out, he died just in time to avoid witnessing the public repudiation of his life’s work and the destruction of his reputation.[2]

In 1977, a federal district judge ruled that the recordings and transcripts from King’s hotel rooms should be sealed for fifty years.

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.

During his lifetime, Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking racial and social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.

In his zeal to protect the “American way of life,” Hoover helped to accelerate a turn against the federal government—indeed, against the very idea of government service—that is still a major feature of the modern right. At the same time, his reactionary politics and the abuses they inspired have made him—and the forms of government power for which he came to stand—anathema among leftists and liberals. The man who once garnered a 98 percent approval rating now has few admirers and almost nobody willing to claim his legacy, even within the FBI.

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]