Official and Confidential Quotes

“I cannot believe we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself ~ George McGovern”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob,’ said Novel. ‘There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover’s head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me …”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“they told me Lansky had some pictures – pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover – to lay”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Edgar had been playing a double game all along,”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“the wildcatter stereotype, a rough-tongued bachelor with a limp and a penchant for bourbon and late-night poker games.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Hoover had shown his total incompetence for sophisticated wartime intelligence early on. His handling of the “Popov Affair” might well have been a tip-off for his future legendary secretiveness and over-simplified way of thinking.’ William Casey, CIA Director”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“The President himself saw the material within twenty-four hours. He did not, however, see the microdots with the questions about Pearl Harbor. Edgar did not send those to Roosevelt, although he himself knew their contents – the laboratory report on all the microdots had come in the very day of the letter to the White House.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“It seems almost certain, however, that they did not receive the crucial backup information that went with it – Popov’s report on the statements of Jebsen, Baron Gronau and Major von Auenrode. Without those factors to put the questionnaire in perspective, its impact must have been greatly diminished.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“When Popov’s memoirs were published in 1974, two years after Edgar’s death, the FBI flatly rejected his allegations. Edgar’s successor as Director, Clarence Kelley, said the Bureau ‘certainly did not receive information which indicated the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“The British had vastly more experience in the field than their U.S. counterparts – a fact of life that Donovan appreciated. Edgar, however, burned with resentment.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Edgar behaved at the track as though he did not know what everyone in law enforcement knew, that racetrack gambling was the single most important source of revenue for organized crime.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“The art of the police consists in not seeing what there is no use seeing.’ Napoleon Bonaparte”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“You must understand that you’re working for a crazy maniac and that our duty is to find out what he wants and to create the world that he believes in, and to show him that’s the way things are”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“For once, by sheer weight of numbers, Edgar’s wrath was thwarted.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“there were now two FBIs. There was the Field, with its corps of brave, hardworking agents serving in the front line against crime; and there was FBI Headquarters – the Seat of Government, as Edgar liked to call it – with its ever-expanding bureaucracy made up of men who had been office-bound for years.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“The Constitution has never been in such danger …”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Nixon said in a recent interview that ‘the FBI and Hoover played no role whatsoever in the Hiss case thing. Hoover was loyal to Truman … There was no way that he was going to have his boys running about helping the Committee.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“I came to America,’ he said in 1947, ‘because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.’ At the time of his death, the FBI dossier on him had grown to thousands of pages. They contain no evidence that he was ever disloyal.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Unfriendly’ witnesses and those who opposed the hearings, such as John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, were vilified.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“We are a fact gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody. We don’t condemn anybody. Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.’ J. Edgar Hoover, July 14, 1955”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Roosevelt and his advisers soon fell into the habit of calling for Bureau reports on matters that had little or nothing to do with law enforcement.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“On May 8 Edgar went to the White House to discuss the problem with the President and senior members of the cabinet. The outcome was that for the first time, Edgar gained official sanction to conduct political intelligence.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Welles had allegedly tried to bribe several black male Pullman staff members to have sex with him in his compartment”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“In his day, as is still often the case today, anything other than evident heterosexuality could destroy a public official. Acutely aware of the danger, Edgar overcompensated. Like several other public figures with a secret homosexual life, Edgar often behaved viciously toward fellow homosexuals.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“There were Hoover blankets, the newspapers used by the destitute to ward off the cold; Hoover flags, pockets empty of money; and Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the homeless.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“The Bureau boasted thirteen blacks by the end of that year, out of a total agent force of 6,000 men.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“(they would cost $30,000 each by the end of his career)”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Edgar brushed aside all talk of recruiting women, claiming that they ‘could never gunfight, and all our agents must know how to do that.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover