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J. Edgar Hoover

, Political Figure / Government Official
J. Edgar Hoover
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  • Born: 1 January 1895
  • Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
  • Died: 2 May 1972
  • Best Known As: Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1924-72

In 1913 John Edgar Hoover began working in U.S. government service, first at the Library of Congress, then at the Justice Department. During World War I Hoover worked for the Bureau of Investigation, keeping statistical records of immigrants for the Alien Enemy Bureau. A vigorous anti-communist, Hoover quickly moved up the ranks in the postwar period, and by 1924 was appointed Director of the Bureau of Investigation, later called the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.). He held the post for nearly fifty years, his administration lasting from President Coolidge to President Nixon. Hoover had a reputation for hypervigilance in the face of crime and political subversion, and the F.B.I. grew to become known as incorruptible law officers who kept files on just about everybody, from John Lennon and Martin Luther King, Jr. to Marilyn Monroe and Eldridge Cleaver. Hoover has been a controversial figure since his death, and there has been much speculation about his personal life, family background and dictatorial rule over the Bureau; given his political power over five decades, he is a central figure in the history of scandal and U.S. politics.

 
 
Biography: John Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) was appointed assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1921, and director in 1924; he was the popular (and then controversial) director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1935 until his death in 1972, at age 77.

J. Edgar Hoover was born into a Scottish Presbyterian family of civil servants in Washington, D.C. on New Year's Day, 1895; his mother called him Edgar from the day he was born. He was a leader of the student cadet corps in high school, and a champion debater. He taught Sunday school at Old First Presbyterian Church. His life-long guiding principles were formed early: he was convinced that middle-class Protestant morality was at the core of American values, and he harbored a deep distrust of alien ideas and movements that called those values into question.

Working days and attending school at nights, Hoover earned his Bachelor of Law degree with honors from George Washington University in 1916. He excelled in mock court proceedings. In 1917 he earned a Master of Law degree and got a job with the Alien Enemy Bureau in the Department of Justice, administering the regulations governing the hundreds of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian aliens interned or supervised by the department. In response to a series of bombings in the spring of 1919, supposedly carried out by radicals, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer decided to concentrate on aliens, since they could be deported summarily and wholesale, without due process, and in 1920 he put the 24-year-old Hoover in charge of the operation. Within a short period of time, Hoover had written briefs arguing that alien members of the new American Communist and Communist Labor parties were subject to deportation under the immigration laws; planned a raid on the headquarters of the Union of Russian Workers; and put Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other "radicals" on a ship for the Soviet Union. A few days later, Hoover led a nationwide operation which arrested more than four thousand alien Communists.

While civil libertarians deplored the Justice Department's tactics and treatment of prisoners, Hoover had established his reputation as an organizational genius. In 1921, he was appointed assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation. Three years later, when the bureau had become known as "the most corrupt and incompetent agency in Washington, " Hoover was appointed Acting Director by a new Attorney General, Harlan Fiske Stone (later Associate Justice, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court). Hoover took the job under the conditions that he would tolerate no political meddling and that he wanted sole control of merit promotions. Stone agreed. Almost immediately, the new director instituted new personnel policies; he fired agents he considered unqualified, abolished promotions based on seniority, introduced uniform performance appraisals, and laid out strict rules of conduct (including instructions that forbade the use of intoxicating beverages, on or off the job). He established new lines of authority (all regional officers were to report directly to Hoover) and did whatever he could to create power for his agency. At the time, for example, the Bureau had jurisdiction over little more than car-thefts. Agents were not allowed to carry firearms until 1934, and they did not have the power of arrest. Law enforcement was a state activity, not a federal one. Gradually, Hoover professionalized the organization and freed it from the taint of corruption. He was a pioneer in the areas of personnel training, the use of scientific laboratory techniques, accurate reporting, and filing large volumes of material. By 1926, state law enforcement agencies began contributing their fingerprint cards to the Bureau of Investigation. Early on, Hoover laid the foundation for a world-class crime fighting organization.

During this period, Hoover still maintained his card file of over 450, 000 names of "radicals" and worked on building the bureau "his way, " but the agency slumbered through the violence of the Roaring Twenties. It took the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932 to convince Congress that there was a need for national legislation authorizing the Federal government to act against crimes of violence on other than government reservations; companion legislation between 1932 and 1934 augmented that authority, and the FBI (so named in 1935) was in business, chasing down the likes of Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and her sons, and John Dillinger.

Hoover was famous for his successes in public relations, legend-building and image-making his Bureau into a Hollywood extravaganza, firmly entrenched as a mainstay of popular culture through films, comic strips, books, and carefully orchestrated publicity campaigns. The FBI and its director became dear to the hearts of the American people and Hoover himself became a hero of almost mythic proportions. But during most of the 1930s, Hoover was relatively obscure, merely the head of just one of several investigatory agencies. In the art of public relations, Hoover was the beneficiary of Franklin Roosevelt's Attorney General Homer Cummings, who between 1933 and 1937 developed a massive, multi-front public relations campaign to make law enforcement a national movement wholly dependant on public support for its success in dealing with the gangsters of the Depression era. When Cummings suffered political decline, Hoover now head of the nation's only national law enforcement agency adopted many of his methods, always looking for new public enemies to protect the nation against. In the coming years, these were to include Nazi spies, Communists, Black Panthers, the New Left, and Martin Luther King, Jr. As for law enforcement, Hoover mostly abandoned it altogether after 1936.

After World War II Hoover took from the growing tension between the United States and the Soviet Union a mandate to prepare for domestic sabotage and subversion, and to round up Communists, siding with such anti-Communists as Richard M. Nixon and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. He pursued the investigation of Alger Hiss that discredited the domestic security policies of the Truman Administration; he uncovered the alleged atom spy conspiracy of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who were subsequently executed as traitors); and his Bureau provided the evidence for the Smith Act convictions of the top leadership of the American Communist Party (later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court).

During the late 1950s, Hoover developed a counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) to covertly harass the remnants of the American Communist Party. In the 1960s he extended the program to harass and disrupt the Ku Klux Klan, the black militant movement and the antiwar movements, particularly targeting the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. Now into his 70s, Hoover extended his defense of "Americanism" with public attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr., and two attorneys general Robert Kennedy and Ramsey Clark. His tactic in all cases included illegal wiretapping and microphone surveillance.

During all these years, Hoover managed to overlook organized crime. Robert Kennedy became a thorn in Hoover's side when he demonstrated otherwise as assistant counsel on the Kefauver committee's investigations into organized crime. Hoover ignored political corruption and white collar crime. Most of his work was political, in two senses of the word. First, he target individuals, groups, and movements which offended his moral sense. Second, he collected compromising information provided by his agents on all sorts of public officials. The fact that he had such information in his personal files or was merely thought to have such information was enough to sway congressional votes in favor of FBI appropriations requests and to keep presidents from removing him from office, even long after mandatory retirement age. The perception of "such information" worked both ways, however. It was long thought that Hoover denied the existence of organized crime because certain Mafia figures had photographs and other documentation of Hoover's alleged and widely-believed homosexuality. However, nothing could be proved, as after his death, Hoover's secretary obeyed instructions that all his personal files be burned.

J. Edgar Hoover died in May, 1972, still the Director of the FBI, and became the only civil servant to be honored with a state funeral. Post-Watergate investigations of the FBI's abuses of civil liberties under Hoover and recent releases of FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act (including files his secretary missed) have destroyed Hoover's reputation. Recent scholarly works have asserted that Anthony Summers book (1993), exposing Hoover's homosexuality, was based on slender and dubious evidence. Other works have also shown the FBI's ineffectiveness in pursuing organized-crime figures had little to do with Hoover's vulnerability, but rather from his lack of accountability, his use of illegal investigative techniques, and his obsessive focus on his own political agenda. J. Edgar Hoover's methods contributed substantially to a culture of lawlessness in the FBI itself. Within a few years of his death, public opinion about Hoover had shifted to the point that his name by itself conjured up the image of a government at war with the rights and liberties of its citizens.

Further Reading

Hoover's own writings Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How To Fight It (1958) and J. Edgar Hoover on Communism (1969) were written for him by FBI publicists. The book that purports to expose Hoover's private life, Anthony Summers' Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993), was not highly regarded even by Hoover's critics. Richard Gid Powers G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture (1983); Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox The Boss J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (1988); and Ronald Kessler The FBI: Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency (1993) are useful works, as is the older "oral biography" by Ovid Demaris The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Scholars will want to see three microfilm collections of documents edited by Athan Theoharis, The J. Edgar Hoover Official and Confidential File (1996); FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, and Break-Ins: The National Security Electronic Surveillance Card File and the Surreptitious Entries File (1996); and The Louis Nichols Official and Confidential File and the Clyde Tolson Personal File (1996). See also Alan Theoharis J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (1995); Alan Theoharis From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1993); Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993); Mark North, Act of Treason: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy (1992); Curt Gentry J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (1992); Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom (1988); Ward Churchill and James Vander Wall's two books, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (1990); and Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret War Against the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party (1990).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover
(click to enlarge)
J. Edgar Hoover (credit: AP)
(born Jan. 1, 1895, Washington, D.C., U.S. — died May 2, 1972, Washington, D.C.) U.S. director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He entered the Department of Justice as a file reviewer in 1917; two years later, as special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, he helped in the roundup and deportation of suspected Bolsheviks. In 1924 he was named director of the Bureau of Investigation, which he remade into a professional, merit-based organization. In the 1930s he successfully publicized the FBI's success in tracking down and capturing well-known criminals. During this time, both the FBI's size and its responsibilities grew steadily. In the late 1930s Hoover received authorization to investigate foreign espionage in the U.S. and the activities of communists and fascists alike. When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the FBI undertook intensive surveillance of communists and other left-wing activists in the U.S. Hoover's animus toward radicals of every kind led him to investigate both the Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other African American activists in the 1960s. At the same time, he maintained a hands-off policy toward the Mafia, which was allowed to conduct its operations nationwide practically free of FBI scrutiny or interference. Hoover habitually used the FBI's enormous surveillance and information-gathering powers to collect damaging information on politicians throughout the country, and apparently he was able to intimidate even sitting presidents by threatening to leak damaging disclosures about them. He retained his post for 48 years, until his death.

For more information on John Edgar Hoover, visit Britannica.com.

 
US History Companion: Hoover, J. Edgar

(1895-1972), director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Born in Washington, D.C., the son of a low-level federal bureaucrat, Hoover earned a bachelor of laws (1916) and a master of laws (1917) from George Washington University. He was an assistant in the alien registration section of the Department of Justice during World War I, where he monitored alien radicals in what became a lifetime antiradical crusade.

Appointed head of the General Intelligence Division in 1919, Hoover continued to monitor radical activities, culminating in the series of deportation raids subsequently dubbed the red scare of 1919-1920. Because Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer purposefully exploited these raids to promote his unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hoover was untarnished by the public's subsequent reaction to revelations of the bureau's abuses of power, which focused on Palmer. Following Warren Harding's election, Hoover's administrative skills and diligence won him promotion to assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935), a post he held until appointed director by Attorney General Harlan Stone in 1924. Hoover held that post until his death in 1972.

A lifetime bachelor with few nonprofessional interests, Hoover devoted his considerable talents to furthering the power of the fbi. Having inherited an agency beset by scandal, Hoover moved quickly to restore public confidence by improving the quality of bureau employees and by ostensibly working within the limits of a powerful states' rights tradition. A more professional organization evolved and, responding to the seeming crime wave of the 1930s, the public came to accept the need for a federal law enforcement role. But while publicly opposing the creation of a national police force and emphasizing the limits to the bureau's responsibilities, Hoover remained committed to monitoring what he considered immoral and dissident activities. Because this was risky and contradicted his public posturing, the director proceeded cautiously and secretively.

Hoover's keen sense of public relations and careful cultivation of reporters, members of Congress, civic leaders, and conservative organizations won him a powerful constituency. An administrative genius, he devised sophisticated records procedures to preclude the discovery either of his authorization of illegal investigative techniques (break-ins, wiretaps, bugs) or the accumulation of derogatory personal information. Finally, Hoover willingly serviced the political and policy interests of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon to obtain their issuance of secret executive directives expanding fbi authority. As a result, the bureau not only increased in size (from 890 agents in 1940 to 7,002 in 1952, and 10,000 in 1970) but became an autonomous agency operating independently of executive, congressional, or judicial oversight.

Hoover successfully neutralized demands for independent investigations of the bureau's conduct and his administration during his forty-eight-year tenure as fbi director. His power, however, moved Congress in 1968 to enact legislation requiring Senate confirmation of future fbi directors and limiting their tenure to ten years. Because Hoover's death coincided with the furor created by the Watergate affair, it marked the end of an era. Thereafter, Congress and the media became more vigilant in monitoring the powerful agency Hoover had helped forge and legitimize.

Bibliography:

Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1987); Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (1988).

Author:

Athan G. Theoharis

See also Federal Bureau of Investigation.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Hoover, J. Edgar
(John Edgar Hoover), 1895–1972, American administrator, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), b. Washington, D.C. Shortly after he was admitted to the bar, he entered (1917) the Dept. of Justice and served (1919–21) as special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In this capacity he directed the so-called Palmer Raids against allegedly radical aliens. Director of the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935) after 1924, Hoover built a more efficient crime-fighting agency, establishing a centralized fingerprint file, a crime laboratory, and a training school for police. During the 1930s, to publicize the work of his agency in fighting organized crime, he participated directly in the arrest of several major gangsters. After World War II, Hoover focused on the perceived threat of Communist subversion. In office until his death, he became increasingly controversial. His many critics considered his anticommunism obsessive, and it has been verified that he orchestrated systematic harassment of political dissenters and activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover accumulated enormous power, in part from amassing secret files on the activities and private lives of political leaders and their associates. After his death reforms designed to prevent these abuses were undertaken. His writings include Persons in Hiding (1938), Masters of Deceit (1958), and A Study of Communism (1962).

Bibliography

See biographies by T. G. Powers (1987) and A. G. Theoharis (1988); D. J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1981); K. O'Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans (1983); A. G. Theoharis and J. S. Cox, The Boss (1988); B. Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34 (2004).

 
History Dictionary: Hoover, J. Edgar

A law enforcement official of the twentieth century. Hoover became the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1924 and stayed in the position until his death in 1972. His time as director was marked by vigorous investigation and prosecution of gangsters, kidnapers, and foreign spies.

  • Hoover's activities remain controversial. Some praise him as a pioneer in scientific law enforcement, but others say that he abused his power, particularly in his investigation of the supposed influence of communists on the civil rights movement.

    •  
    Quotes By: J. Edgar Hoover

    Quotes:

    "Justice is incidental to law and order."

     
    Wikipedia: J. Edgar Hoover
    John Edgar Hoover
    J. Edgar Hoover

    J. Edgar Hoover, photographed September 28, 1961
    In office
    May 10, 1924 – May 2, 1972
    Succeeded by L. Patrick Gray
    In office
    May 10, 1924 – March 22, 1935
    Preceded by William J. Burns
    Born January 1 1895(1895--)
    Flag_of_Washington,_D.C..svg Washington, D.C.
    Died May 2 1972 (aged 77)
    Flag_of_Washington,_D.C..svg Washington, D.C.
    Religion Presbyterianism
    Signature J. Edgar Hoover's signature

    John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. He founded the present form of the agency, and remained director for 48 years until his death. During his life, Hoover was highly regarded by much of the U.S. public, but since his death various allegations have tarnished this image.

    Hoover's leadership spanned eight presidential administrations, encompassed Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. During this time the United States moved from a rural nation with strong isolationist tendencies to an urbanized superpower.

    From nearly the beginning of his career with the FBI,[1] Hoover was accused of exceeding and abusing his authority, criticism that grew especially strong in the 1960s. He is known to have investigated individuals and groups because of their political beliefs rather than their suspected criminal activity as well as using the FBI for other illegal activities such as burglaries and illegal wiretaps.[2] Hoover frequently fired FBI agents by singling out those who he thought "looked stupid like truck drivers" or he considered to be "pinheads."[3] He also relocated agents who had displeased him to career-ending assignments and locations. Melvin Purvis was a prime example; he was one of the more effective agents in capturing and breaking up 1930s gangs and received substantial public recognition, but a jealous Hoover maneuvered him out of the FBI.[4] It is because of Hoover's long and controversial reign that FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.[5]

    Early life and education

    Hoover was born in Washington, D.C., to Anna Marie Scheitlin and Dickerson Naylor Hoover, Sr.,[6] and grew up in the Eastern Market section of the city. Few details are known of his early years; his birth certificate was not filed until 1938. What little is known about his upbringing generally can be traced back to a single 1937 profile by journalist Jack Alexander. Hoover was educated at George Washington University, graduating in 1917 with a law degree. During his time there, he worked at the Library of Congress[7] and also became a member of Kappa Alpha Order (Alpha Nu 1914). While a law student, Hoover became interested in the career of Anthony Comstock, the New York City U.S. Postal Inspector who waged prolonged campaigns against fraud and vice (as well as pornography and information on birth control) a generation earlier. He is thought to have studied Comstock's methods and modeled his early career on Comstock's reputation for relentless pursuit and occasional procedural violations in crime fighting.

    FBI career

    Early years

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    During World War I, Hoover found work with the Justice Department. He soon proved himself capable and was promoted to head of the Enemy Aliens Registration Section. In 1919, he became head of the new General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department (see the Palmer Raids). From there, in 1921, he joined the Bureau of Investigation as deputy head, and in 1924, the Attorney General made him the acting director. On May 10, 1924, Hoover was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to be the sixth director of the Bureau of Investigation, following President Warren Harding's death and in response to allegations that the prior director, William J. Burns, was involved in the financial scandal(s) of the Harding administration. When Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, it had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents.

    Gangster wars

    In the early thirties, there was an epidemic of bank robberies in the Midwest orchestrated by colorful criminal gangs who took advantage of superior fire power and fast get-away cars to bedevil local law enforcement agencies. To the chagrin and increasing discomfort of authorities, such robbers were often viewed as somewhat noble in their assaults upon the banking industry, which at the time was evicting many farmers from their homesteads. That empathy reached the point that many of these desperados, particularly the dashing John Dillinger (who became famous for leaping over bank cages and his repeated escapes from jails and police traps), were de facto folk heroes whose exploits frequently captured headlines. State officials began to implore Washington to aid them in containing this lawlessness. The fact that the robbers frequently took stolen cars across state lines (a federal offense) gave Hoover and his men the authority to pursue them. Things did not go as planned, however, and there were some embarrassing foul-ups on the part of the FBI, particularly clashes with the Dillinger gang (actually led by "Handsome" Harry Pierpont). A raid on a summer lodge in Little Bohemia, Wisconsin, left an agent and a hapless civilian bystander dead, along with others wounded. All the gangsters escaped. Hoover realized that his job was now on the line and he pulled out all stops to capture the culprits. Hoover was particularly fixated on eliminating Dillinger, whose misdeeds he considered to be insults aimed directly at him and "his" bureau. In late July 1934, Melvin Purvis, the Director of Operations in the Chicago office, received a tip on the whereabouts of John Dillinger. That paid off when the gangster was cut down in a hail of gunfire outside the Biograph theater.

    Because of several other highly-publicized captures or shootings of outlaws and bank robbers such as Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, and Machine Gun Kelly, the Bureau's powers were broadened and it was re-named the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. In 1939, the FBI became pre-eminent in the field of domestic intelligence. Hoover made changes, such as expanding and combining fingerprint files in the Identification Division to compile the largest collection of fingerprints ever. Hoover also helped to greatly expand the FBI's recruitment and create the FBI Laboratory, a division established in 1932 to examine evidence found by the FBI.

    Investigation of subversion and radicals

    Hoover was noted for his concern about subversion, and under his leadership, the FBI spied upon tens of thousands of suspected subversives and radicals. Hoover tended to exaggerate the dangers of subversives, and many believe he overstepped his bounds in his pursuit of eliminating that perceived threat.[8]

    The FBI had some successes against actual subversives and spies, however. For example, in the Quirin affair during World War II, German U-boats set two small groups of Nazi agents ashore in Florida and Long Island to cause acts of sabotage within the country. The members of these teams were apprehended due in part to the increased vigilance and intelligence gathering efforts of the FBI, but chiefly because one of the would-be saboteurs, who had spent many years as an American resident, decided to surrender himself to the authorities, leading to the apprehension of the other saboteurs still at large. President Harry Truman wrote in his memoirs: "The country had reason to be proud of and have confidence in our security agencies. They had kept us almost totally free of sabotage and espionage during the World War II".[1]

    Another example of Hoover's concern over subversion is his handling of the Venona Project. The FBI inherited a pre-World War II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States. Hoover kept the intercepts — America's greatest counterintelligence secret — in a locked safe in his office, choosing not to inform Truman, his Attorney General McGraith, or two Secretaries of State — Dean Acheson and General George Marshall — while they held office. However, he informed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the Venona Project in 1952.

    COINTELPRO years

    In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute Communists. At this time he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO.[9] This program remained in place until it was revealed to the public in 1971, and was the cause of some of the harshest criticism of Hoover and the FBI. COINTELPRO was first used to disrupt the Communist Party, and later such organizations such as the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s SCLC, the Ku Klux Klan, and others. Its methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations.[10] Some authors have charged that COINTELPRO methods also included inciting violence and arranging murders.[11]

    Hoover in 1935
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    Hoover in 1935

    In 1975, the activities of COINTELPRO were investigated by the Senate Church Committee and declared illegal and contrary to the Constitution.[12]

    Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed deputy Attorney General in early 1974, Director Clarence M. Kelley thought such files either did not exist or had been destroyed. After The Washington Post broke a story in January 1975, Kelley searched and found them in his outer office. The House Judiciary Committee then demanded that Silberman testify about them. An extensive investigation of Hoover's files by David Garrow showed that Hoover and next-in-command William Sullivan, as well as the FBI itself as an agency, was responsible. Those actions reflected the biases and prejudices of the country at large, especially in the attempts to prevent Martin Luther King, Jr., from conducting more extensive voter education drives, economic boycotts, opposing the Vietnam War, and even running for President.

    In 1956, several years before he targeted King, Hoover had a public showdown with T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI's failure to thoroughly investigate the racially-motivated murders of George W. Lee, Lamar Smith, and Emmett Till. Hoover not only wrote an open letter to the press singling out these statements as "irresponsible" but secretly enlisted the help of NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall in a campaign to discredit Howard.

    Response to Mafia and civil rights groups

    In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover's unwillingness to focus FBI resources on the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors, after famed muckraker Jack Anderson exposed the immense scope of the Mafia's organized crime network, a threat Hoover had long downplayed. Hoover's retaliation and continual harassment of Anderson lasted into the 1970s. Hoover has also been accused of trying to undermine the reputations of members of the civil rights movement. His alleged treatment of actress Jean Seberg and Martin Luther King, Jr. are two such examples.

    Hoover personally directed the FBI investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report in 1979 critical of the performance by the FBI, the Warren Commission as well as other agencies. The report also criticized what it characterized as the FBI's reluctance to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president.[13]

    Late career

    Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson each considered firing Hoover but concluded that the political cost of doing so would be too great.[14] Richard Nixon twice called in Hoover with the intent of firing him, but both times he changed his mind when meeting with Hoover.[citation needed]

    Hoover maintained strong support in Congress until his death, whereupon operational command of the Bureau passed to Associate Director Clyde Tolson. Soon thereafter Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray, a Justice Department official with no FBI experience, as Acting Director with W. Mark Felt remaining as Associate Director. As a historical note, Felt was revealed in 2005 to have been the legendary "Deep Throat" during the Watergate scandal. Some of the people whom Deep Throat's revelations helped put in prison — such as Nixon's chief counsel Chuck Colson and G. Gordon Liddy — contend that this was, at least in part, because Felt was passed over by Nixon as head of the FBI after Hoover's death in 1972.[15]

    In the latter part of his career and life, Hoover was a consultant to Warner Bros. on a 1959 theatrical film about the FBI, The FBI Story, and in 1965 on Warner Brothers' long-running spin-off television series, The F.B.I.. Hoover personally made sure Warner Bros. would portray the FBI more favorably than other crime dramas of the times.

    The FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. is named after Hoover. Because of the controversial nature of Hoover's legacy, there have been periodic proposals to rename it.[citation needed]

    Personal life

    FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson.
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    FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson.

    Hoover was a lifelong bachelor, and there has been speculation and rumors that Hoover was homosexual, but no concrete evidence of these claims has ever been presented. Such rumors have circulated since at least the early 1940s.[16] It has also been suggested that his long association with Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the FBI who was also Hoover's heir, was that of a gay couple. The two men were almost constantly together, working, vacationing, and having lunch and dinner together almost every weekday.[17] Some authors have dismissed the rumors about Hoover's sexuality and his relationship with Tolson in particular as unlikely,[18] while others have described them as probable or even "confirmed",[19] and still others have reported them without stating an opinion.[20] Attorney Roy Cohn,[21] an associate of Hoover during the '50s investigations of Communists and himself a closeted homosexual, opined that Hoover was too frightened of his own sexuality to have anything approaching a normal sexual or romantic relationship.

    Hoover's biographer Richard Hack[22] reports that Hoover was romantically linked to actress Dorothy Lamour in the late '30s and early '40s, and that after Hoover's death, Lamour did not deny rumors that she'd had an affair with Hoover in the years between her two marriages. Hack additionally reports that during the '40s and '50s, Hoover so often attended social events with Lela Rogers, the divorced mother of dancer and actress Ginger Rogers, that many of their mutual friends assumed the pair would eventually marry.

    In his 1993 biography Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers quoted a witness who claimed to have seen Hoover engaging in cross-dressing and homosexual acts on two occasions in the 1950s.[23] Summers also claimed that the Mafia had blackmail material on Hoover, and that as a consequence Hoover had been reluctant to aggressively pursue organized crime. Although never corroborated, the allegation of cross-dressing has been widely repeated, and "J. Edna Hoover" has become the subject of humor on television, in movies and elsewhere. In the words of author Thomas Doherty, "For American popular culture, the image of the zaftig FBI director as a Christine Jorgensen wanna-be was too delicious not to savor."[24] Most biographers consider the story of Mafia blackmail to be unlikely in light of the FBI's actual investigations of the Mafia.[25]

    Hoover has been described as becoming increasingly a caricature of himself towards the end of his life. The book, "No Left Turns," by former agent Joseph L. Schott, portrays a rigid, paranoid old man who terrified everyone. For example, Hoover liked to write on the margins of memos. According to Schott, when one memo had too narrow margins he wrote, "watch the borders!" No one had the nerve to ask him why, but they sent inquiries to the Border Patrol about any strange activities on the Canadian and Mexican frontiers. It took a week before an HQ staffer realized the message related to the borders of the memo paper.[26]

    African American author Millie McGhee claims in her 2000 book Secrets Uncovered to be related to J. Edgar Hoover.[27] McGhee's oral family history holds that a branch of her Mississippi family, also named Hoover, is related to the Washington, D.C., Hoovers, and that further, J. Edgar's father was not Dickerson Hoover as recorded, but rather Ivery Hoover of Mississippi. Genealogist George Ott investigated these claims and found some supporting circumstantial evidence, as well as unusual alterations of records pertaining to Hoover's officially recorded family in Washington, D.C., but found no conclusive proof. J. Edgar Hoover's birth certificate was not filed until 1938, when he was 43 years old.

    Honors

    See also

    Writings

    J. Edgar Hoover was the nominal author of a number of books and articles. Although it is widely believed that all of these were ghostwritten by FBI employees,[29] Hoover received the credit and royalties.

    • Hoover, J. Edgar (1938). Persons In Hiding. Gaunt Publishing. ISBN 1-56169-340-5. 
    • Hoover, J. Edgar (1958). Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1-4254-8258-9. 
    • Hoover, J. Edgar (1962). A Study of Communism. Holt Rinehart & Winston. ISBN 0-03-031190-X. 

    Footnotes

    1. ^ Hack, Richard Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. (2007). Phoenix Books. ISBN 1597775126
    2. ^ Documented in Cox, John Stuart and Theoharis, Athan G. (1988). The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Temple University Press. ISBN 0-87722-532-X.  and elsewhere.
    3. ^ Schott, Joseph L (1975). No Left Turns: The FBI in Peace & War. Praeger. ISBN 0-275-33630-1. 
    4. ^ Purvis, Alston; and Tresinowski, Alex (2005). The Vendetta: FBI Hero Melvin Purvis's War Against Crime and J. Edgar Hoover's War Against Him. Public Affairs, pp 183+. ISBN 1-58648-301-3. 
    5. ^ U.S. Code Title 28, part 2, chapter 33. sec. 533, Confirmation and Compensation of Director; Term of Service (b)
    6. ^ http://www.wargs.com/other/hoover.html
    7. ^ http://www.fbi.gov/libref/directors/hoover.htm
    8. ^ See, for example, Cox, John Stuart and Theoharis, Athan G. (1988). The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Temple University Press. ISBN 0-87722-532-X. 
    9. ^ Cox, John Stuart and Theoharis, Athan G. (1988). The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Temple University Press, pg. 312. ISBN 0-87722-532-X. 
    10. ^ Kessler, Ronald (2002). The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. St. Martin's Paperbacks, pp 107, 174, 184, 215. ISBN 0-312-98977-6. 
    11. ^ See for example James, Joy (2000). States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons. Palgrave Macmillan, pg. 335. ISBN 0-312-21777-3. , Williams, Kristian (2004). Our Enemies In Blue: Police And Power In America. Soft Skull Press, pg. 183. ISBN 1-887128-85-9.  and Churchill, Ward and Wall, Jim Vander (2001). Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. South End Press, pp 53+. ISBN 0-89608-646-1. .
    12. ^ Intelligence Activities And The Rights Of Americans (1976). Retrieved on 2006-10-25.
    13. ^ Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (1979). Retrieved on 2006-10-25.
    14. ^ Hack, 2007
    15. ^ Tapes: Nixon suspected Felt. Cnn.com. June 3, 2005. Retrieved August 7, 2007.
    16. ^ Terry, Jennifer (1999). An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. University of Chicago Press, pg. 350. ISBN 0-226-79366-4. 
    17. ^ Cox, John Stuart and Theoharis, Athan G. (1988). The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Temple University Press, pg. 108. ISBN 0-87722-532-X. 
    18. ^ For example,
      Felt, W. Mark and O'Connor, John D. (2006). A G-man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat,' And the Struggle for Honor in Washington. Public Affairs, pg. 167. ISBN 1-58648-377-3. ,
      Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2003). Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence. Yale University Press, pg. 93. ISBN 0-300-10159-7. ,
      Cox, John Stuart and Theoharis, Athan G. (1988). The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Temple University Press, pg. 108. ISBN 0-87722-532-X.  "The strange likelihood is that Hoover never knew sexual desire at all."
    19. ^ For example,
      Percy, William A. and Johansson , Warren (1994). Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. Haworth Press, pp 85+. ISBN 1-56024-419-4. ,
      Summers, Anthony (1993). Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover. Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-88087-X. 
    20. ^ For example,
      Edited by Theoharis, Athan G. (1998). The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide. Oryx Press, pp 291, 301, 397. ISBN 0-89774-991-X. ,
      Doherty, Thomas (2003). Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. Columbia University Press, pp 254, 255. ISBN 0-231-12952-1. 
    21. ^ Hack, 2007
    22. ^ Hack, Richard Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. (2007). Phoenix Books. ISBN 1597775126
    23. ^ Summers, Anthony (1993). Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover. Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-88087-X. 
    24. ^ Doherty, Thomas (2003). Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. Columbia University Press, pg. 255. ISBN 0-231-12952-1. 
    25. ^ See for example Kessler, Ronald (2002). The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. St. Martin's Paperbacks, pp 120+. ISBN 0-312-98977-6. 
    26. ^ Schott, Joseph L (1975). No Left Turns: The FBI in Peace & War. Praeger. ISBN 0-275-33630-1. 
    27. ^ McGhee, Millie L. (2000). Secrets Uncovered: J. Edgar Hoover--Passing for White?. Inland Empire Services. ISBN 0-9701822-2-8. 
    28. ^ Citation and Remarks at Presentation of the National Security Medal to J. Edgar Hoover.
    29. ^ See, for example:
      Anderson, Jack (1999). Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account. Forge Books, pg. 174. ISBN 0-312-87497-9. ,
      Powers, Richard Gid (2004). Broken: the troubled past and uncertain future of the FBI. Free Press, pg. 238. ISBN 0-684-83371-9. ,
      Theoharis, Athan G. (editor) (1998). The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide. Oryx Press, pg. 264. ISBN 0-89774-991-X. 

    References and further reading

    • Lowenthal, Max (1950). The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0837157552. 
    • Schott, Joseph L (1975). No Left Turns: The FBI in Peace & War. Praeger. ISBN 0-275-33630-1. 
    • Garrow, David J. (1981). The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., From 'Solo' to Memphis. W.W.Norton. ISBN 0-393-01509-2. 
    • Powers, Richard Gid (1986). Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. Free Press. ISBN 0029250609. 
    • Gentry, Curt (1991). J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. Plume. ISBN 0-452-26904-0. 
    • Theoharis, Athan (1993). From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 1-56663-017-7. 
    • Beverly, William (2003). On the Lam; Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-537-2. 
    • Stove, Robert J. (2003). The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims. Encounter Books. ISBN 1-893554-66-X.