Once America's Most Popular Public Figure - J. Edgar Hoover the man who Knew America's Secrets

J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century 

By Beverly Gage. Viking, 2022, 

864 pp.

In a Nutshell

This is a deeply researched, highly accessible to the general reader study of the controversial lawman by a Yale professor of American history.

Who was J. Edgar Hoover?

Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the founding director of the FBI and, in his prime, one of the most admired men in the US. He served four Republican and four Democratic presidents, starting with Calvin Coolidge (1924) and ending with Richard Nixon. Because of all the secrets Hoover knew, the director was one of the most influential figures in Washington. There is no evidence he ever blackmailed anyone.

 

What's the Jewish angle?

None really. Hoover preferred to hire people like the white Christian men he went to college with. Nonetheless, in 1925, he appointed Harold Nathan deputy director for administration, giving him badge #2 at the FBI.

Of course – and with good reason – Hoover investigated many Jews, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Stanley Levison, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman.  

What does the book say about his personal life?

His mother was homemaker Anna Marie, and his father was Dickerson Hoover, the chief printer at the Coast Guard. Washington, DC, of the early 1900s, was a small town. Mental illness and business failures plagued his father. His aunt was murdered. Hoover was a Boy Scout. Religious (Protestant), repressed, and square. He had no patience for bad-boy behavior and valued discipline and self-restraint. Hoover was a high achiever and became a military cadet; was a Valedictorian. He was also a Freemason. (I would have wanted to know more about that.) And throughout his life, a control freak. 

The future FBI chief obtained a BA in Law from George Washington University. Gage accentuates that he belonged to a fraternity, Kappa Alpha, with a white supremacist ethos.

Was Hoover homosexual?

Gage implies that Hoover was a closeted gay man. There was an early flirtation with Melvin Purvis (circa 1934). Much of Hoover's personal and social life revolved around Clyde Tolson, his partner and deputy at the FBI. "My best friend." By the mid-1930s, it was the most important relationship in his life, says Gage. Socially, they were treated as a married couple, including by the Nixons and Johnsons. They dined and vacationed together but lived apart. Though nearby. Hoover bequeathed his estate to Tolson.  

Was Hoover power-hungry?

Apparently not. Hoover started as a librarian and was best at the gathering, collating, cataloging, and analyzing information about people and movements. The FBI director was pushed into fielding agents and giving them guns. He did not want the FBI to undertake any line of investigation in which he was not convinced it could excel. So he moved cautiously. He created a professional, technologically state-of-the-art, and apolitical law enforcement agency. He was keen to train local police in FBI methods instead of overseeing a national police force from Washington. He kept his bosses at the Justice Department and in the White House generally informed about what he was up to though he didn't always reveal his sources and methods. Presidents, more often than not, wanted him to cut civil liberties corners.

 

The agency grew, and so did his power…

Indeed. He was coaxed into fighting organized crime, anarchists, Nazis, and communists. Then into intelligence and counterintelligence. But once he had responsibility, he latched on to it. He was unhappy when, post WWII, the CIA was created to focus on foreign intelligence gathering. During the Second World War, Hoover privately opposed the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.

What was his attitude toward Negro civil rights?

He saw FBI involvement in battling Jim Crow as a losing proposition, especially when there were few federal laws on the books he could use. And because local police were complicit with Klan. Local juries were made up of Klan supporters. A product of his time, he was personally prejudiced. At the same time, he despised white vigilantism. Ultimately, the FBI crushed the KKK.

The FBI collaborated with the NAACP during the 1940s and 1950s. The bureau was called upon to investigate the horrific murder of Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old African American boy. And the June 1964 killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

 

What were some of the more fascinating nuggets Gage uncovered?

Going into this book, I thought there was maybe some doubt about whether Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty. There was none. Parenthetically, Hoover wrote a memo against giving Ethel the death penalty. He could not understand why the Soviets made no overtures to trade the Rosenbergs in a spy swap. Moscow preferred to keep the fiction alive that they were innocent victims of a runaway Red Scare. In fact, there was reason to be scared of the Reds. The Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, post-WWII, British intelligence, and the US State Department.

That said, Hoover was often at odds with Sen. Joe McCarthy (the rapid red-baiter) and would not release FBI files to Roy Cohn, counsel to the committee.

Gage provides a fascinating overview of the Whittaker Chambers episode. A writer, Communist Party member, and Soviet spy (1932–1938), he defected in 1938 and exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent. Hoover knew it all along. Ultimately, the FBI was able to prove Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy without revealing his sources.

Did Hoover torment Martin Luther King?

The short answer is yes. He deemed Martin Luther King as the country's "most notorious liar" and ethically a hypocrite. Hoover also knew that King's top advisers – most importantly Stanley Levinson but also Jack O'Dell, Bayard Ruston, and Wyatt Tee Walker were communists. Gage describes the raw surveillance material on King (embargoed until 2027) in shocking detail. It does not portray the civil rights icon in a favorable light.

Hoover's significant – not unreasonable – fear was that the CPUSA was acting as a tool of Soviet intelligence. And that the party's influence over King created a potential danger to national security. Beyond King, he worried that the New Left (SDS, Weatherman, and others) and black supremacists would unite to undermine US national security. If this sounds far-fetched, Google "race riots 1960s-1970s" and "Weather Underground Bombings."

What was the relationship between Hoover and the Kennedy clan?

By the time of the New Frontier, Hoover was an older man.

He had little respect for both JFK and RFK. He never forgot that JFK was a no-show on the vote to censure McCarthy. He believed the president and attorney general were hypocrites posing as Catholic family men while living fully libertine lives. JFK's extramarital sex life knew no bounds. He fornicated with Nazi spies, East German spies, and Mafia molls. He slept with Judith Campbell while she slept with the Cosa Nostra's Sam Giancana. When Bobby became Hoover's nominal boss at Justice, Hoover disliked his casual style. Bobby, incidentally, was a homophobe.

FBI wiretaps could not be used in court, but they provided Hoover proof that there really was a Cosa Nostra national crime syndicate. He knew, too, that the CIA hired the Mafia to kill Castro.

Hoover was convinced Lee Oswald killed the president acting alone. But he did not reveal all he knew to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination.

Which president was Hoover closest to?

In Gage's elegant turn of phrase, Hoover and Richard Nixon had "Something resembling a friendship." Both were awkward; neither man easily made friends. Nixon sometimes called Hoover twice a day at home.

Why is Hoover portrayed as a villain including by Gage?

In one word COINTELPRO. Between 1956 and 1970 (give or take), Hoover ordered the FBI to illegally disrupt and sabotage subversive groups, including the Socialist Workers Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam (briefly), the Black Panther Party, New Left groups such as SDS, and the old Left Communist Party. He also targeted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (which, from Hoover's point of view, had also been infiltrated by communists). His methods were nasty and led to suicide and broken marriages.

Gage writes Hoover "did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and government that might have been possible."

I don't entirely share Gage's sensibilities about the illegal infiltration and disruption of the Klan, the Black Panthers, and others since there may have been a "ticking bomb" case to be made. While the raison d'etre of some groups he undercut was social justice, many preached the violent overthrow of the American political system and racial hatred. Moreover, an elected president could have reigned him at any given point. And Hoover was not blindly dismissive of civil liberties. He rebuffed Nixon's HUSTON PLAN, which would have been COINTELPRO on steroids.

COINTELPRO was exposed when left-wing radicals broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, busted open file cabinets, and cleaned the place of documents. It took a while to realize the treasure trove they had stumbled upon. The squad sent the COINTELPRO material to the newspapers, revealing the civil liberties threat in all its horror.

And the consequences…

In the post-Vietnam War, post-Watergate era, and with Hoover's demise, hearings by the Senate's Church Committee (1975) led Congress to construct legal guardrails to discourage the FBI, CIA, and NSA from abusing civil liberties. The Freedom of Information Act was strengthened to shine further light on the intelligence community.

When did Hoover resign?

He didn't. Hoover remained director of the FBI for 48 years until he died of a heart attack in his Washington home, on May 2, 1972, during Nixon's presidency. He was 78. His loyal secretary burned his personal files. The director left his estate to Tolson with gifts to his devoted household staff.

***

Bottom line? A good read?

Yes. Highly recommended. This is a long and comprehensive book worth the time of serious students and scholars of the intelligence world, radical politics, racial politics, and political biography. Gage writes gracefully.

 

#ENDS