G-Man Quotes

“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.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“Never kept back once,” he later wrote in his “PRIVATE” notebook. “Had a clean character & high standing in every grade.” Even as a child”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“The writer James Baldwin, at the peak of acclaim for the essays in his collection, The Fire Next Time, declared Hoover responsible for their deaths. “I blame J. Edgar Hoover in part for the events in Alabama,” he told The New York Times, citing the FBI’s dismal record on racial violence. “Negroes have no cause to have faith in the FBI.” James Wechsler, Hoover’s inveterate critic at the New York Post, wondered if this brutal crime, coming after years of federal hesitation, might finally do Hoover in. “The bomb that destroyed four children in Birmingham should have finally shattered the Hoover myth,” he wrote, while conceding that “such legends die hard.” The statistics from Birmingham spoke for themselves: at least forty racially motivated bombings since 1947, with not one successful arrest or conviction.[2]”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“When a bomb tore through Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, less than a month after the March on Washington, many people assumed that it would be the FBI’s biggest case of the year. The congregation had been at the epicenter of the summer’s protests: “a large Negro church in which many pro-integration demonstrations” had been held, in the words of an “urgent” telegram to Hoover from Birmingham that afternoon. The bomb struck just as the church was filling up for Sunday services. Four girls—eleven-year-old Denise McNair, along with fourteen-year-olds Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins—had been looking into a mirror in the basement restroom when the explosion burst in on them, ripping off their Sunday-best dresses and burying them beneath a pile of steel, stone, and brick.[1]”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“And so they tried again in 1943—now in Baker County, Georgia, where a sheriff named Claude Screws was accused of beating a Black prisoner named Robert Hall to death with an iron blackjack. They made some progress, not only securing federal indictments against three police officials but also winning highly unusual convictions. Then the Supreme Court intervened and ruined it all. In 1945, the court ruled that because Sheriff Screws had not specifically intended to deprive his victim of a federal right, such as voting, there was no federal violation in his case. Once again, Hoover’s efforts were for naught.[7]”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“With these instructions in place, Hoover began an experiment unprecedented in federal history: the first systematic peacetime attempt to track the political opinions of noncitizens and to deport them en masse. He also began to collect information on native-born and naturalized citizens, assuming that the federal government would soon enact a peacetime sedition statute allowing for the prosecution and jailing of U.S. radicals.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“The early twentieth century was in the throes of what historians have described as a masculinity crisis, a set of deep and pressing cultural anxieties about whether American men would be able to meet the challenges of the modern world. The crisis trickled down to the nation’s boys and adolescents, who found themselves barraged with prescriptions about how to be the right sort of man.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“It was this combination of factors – openness and secrecy, liberalism and conservatism, hard and soft power – that gave Hoover his extraordinary staying power.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“Measured by what he accomplished – not just by what he said – Hoover was among the most powerful conservative political figures of the twentieth century, able to steer the ship of state in his direction even when electoral politics and White House sentiment might have dictated otherwise.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“Eastland had been born in 1904 into a crucible of Mississippi racial violence. Just months before his birth, his father had led a lynch mob seeking vengeance for the murder of Eastland’s uncle. The mob killed at least three people before finally capturing the alleged murderers, a Black couple. Eastland’s relatives beat the suspects, cut off their fingers and ears, and tortured them with corkscrews before burning the couple alive in front of a crowd a thousand strong. Named for his murdered uncle, Eastland had been groomed to take over his family’s plantation holdings, and to maintain the social and political order on which it rested. Upon arriving in Washington in 1941, he had carved out a place for himself as an outspoken champion of white supremacy. He opposed any federal policy that might disrupt it.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

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― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“As early as 1953, Hoover had authorized the creation of a small “Top Hoodlum Program” designed to target the most powerful mob bosses in major American cities. In the wake of Apalachin,”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“On the day of the Brown ruling, Eastland announced that Southern states “will not abide by nor obey this legislative decision by a political court.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“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). Lest anyone fail to give credit where credit was due, Elson dedicated his book to Eisenhower, “who by personal example and public utterance is giving testimony to the reality of America’s spiritual foundations.”
― Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century