G-Man, page 136
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Beyond FBI materials themselves, the most valuable source of documentation on Hoover’s life is the J. Edgar Hoover Collection housed at the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington, DC. That collection contains a wealth of personal material, including Hoover’s childhood diaries and his private photograph collection, with its hundreds of striking images of his life with Clyde Tolson. The museum itself includes an exhibit of Hoover’s office, which is well worth a visit.
Sophisticated new genealogical and newspaper databases made it possible to uncover other aspects of Hoover’s family and early life that he never discussed and apparently did not want the world to know. This book documents his grandfather’s suicide and his aunt’s murder for the first time, based on news reports. This biography also contains the first extended analysis of Kappa Alpha’s history and racial politics, much of it drawn from the fraternity’s Kappa Alpha Journal. I reconstructed Hoover’s days at Central High largely through materials available at the Sumner School Archives in Washington, D.C. My description of his time at George Washington University came from his college yearbooks and school newspaper as well as his private collection.
Additional material on Hoover’s social and personal life can be found in the archives of friends and interlocutors, many of them included here for the first time. The Melvin Purvis Papers at Boston University offer the single most revealing repository about Hoover’s inner life during his early years as director. At Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the Emmett McGaughey Papers provides an intimate view of Hoover late in life. The Mitrokhin Archive at Cambridge offers glimpses of Soviet efforts to investigate Hoover’s personal life. The William Manchester Papers at Wesleyan contain Hoover’s reflections on the Kennedy assassination, based on an interview conducted just after the president’s death. At the Library of Congress, the papers of Evelyn McLean contain an especially revealing letter written by Hoover in the wake of his mother’s death, while the Harlan Fiske Stone papers document Hoover’s surprisingly personal relationship with his early mentor. At the FBI, the files of Cartha DeLoach, Morris Ernst, Melvin Purvis, Clyde Tolson, and Walter Winchell are especially revealing on a personal level. In preparation for his 1993 biography of Hoover, Anthony Summers and his team of researchers conducted dozens of interviews with Hoover’s friends, fans, and foes alike. I am grateful to him and to Robbyn Swan for inviting me into their home and sharing their voluminous research files, including recordings of selected interviews. I am also grateful to Ed Gray, who has undertaken the task of making the papers of his late father (and Hoover’s successor) L. Patrick Gray available to researchers. Those papers are now at the Library of Congress. (For this book’s many additional personal debts, see the Acknowledgments.)
On Hoover’s political relationships and networks, the nation’s presidential libraries are a vital resource. For this book, I consulted every presidential library from Herbert Hoover’s through Richard Nixon’s. The Johnson and Nixon collections, including both oral histories and textual documents, are especially useful, reflecting Hoover’s longtime and close relationships with both presidents. For blow-by-blow reconstructions of key historical moments, the Johnson and Nixon audio recordings also have few rivals in presidential history. Outside of the presidential library system, researchers owe a special debt to Michael Beschloss, Douglas Brinkley, Max Holland, Stanley Kutler, Luke Nichter, and the team from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center (among others) for making some of the most important recordings accessible in annotated, scholarly form. Beyond the White House, I have consulted the papers of multiple politicians, including Congressman John Rooney’s at Brooklyn College and Senator James Eastland’s at University of Mississippi. At least as important as the papers of Hoover’s friends are those of his critics and enemies. The ACLU Papers at Princeton and the Papers of the NAACP (available through ProQuest) were especially valuable for this biography.
The published primary sources consulted for this book are too numerous to discuss, but a few bear special mention. The psychological works of Karen Horney provide an intriguing framework for understanding Hoover’s “inner conflicts.” I tracked them down after seeing a brief news article mentioning Hoover’s purchase of Horney’s books. The memoirs of Harry Belafonte, Simeon Booker, and Andrew Young offer especially useful insights into the FBI’s relationship with the civil rights movement. Kim Philby’s memoir, while hardly dependable in a factual sense (like Philby himself), presents a sharp character portrait of Hoover. Several attorneys general, including Francis Biddle and Nicholas Katzenbach, wrote valuable memoirs as well; they are perhaps most surprising not for their frustrations with Hoover, but for their sympathy and admiration for the man. For the FBI’s institutional history, the published reports and hearings of the Church Committee remain a vital resource, though it is now almost half a century since the committee completed its work.
The many memoirs of former FBI agents offer crucial perspective from inside the Bureau. Books by Melvin Purvis and Leon Turrou, while somewhat breathless, cover Hoover’s early years as director, as do the writings of Courtney Ryley Cooper. On Venona and the FBI’s early experiments in counterespionage, Robert Lamphere’s autobiographical book The FBI-KGB War is a vital resource. Dan Smoot’s memoir describes connections between the FBI and the mid-century conservative movement. On the FBI and organized crime, the best memoir is William Roemer’s. On the FBI and the Kennedy assassination, James Hosty’s memoir is especially valuable. Three of the officials who vied to become Hoover’s successor—Deke DeLoach, William Sullivan, and Mark Felt—published essential if sometimes conflicting accounts of their experiences. So did G. Gordon Liddy, whose memoir describes his transition from FBI agent to Nixon Plumber. Ed Gray compiled his father’s reflections into a valuable memoir. The latest contribution is Paul Letersky’s The Director, a lively account published in 2021 by a former agent who worked in Hoover’s office.
Complementing these published works is an extraordinary collection of oral histories compiled by the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI and the Former Agents of the FBI Foundation and now available online. Taken together, those interviews offer an unparalleled glimpse of what it was like to live and work in Hoover’s shadow.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Until the final year of his life, nobody dared publish a biography of Hoover. After his death, historians and journalists rushed in to fill the gap. The four most significant biographies of Hoover date from the late 1980s and early 1990s, just long enough after his death to allow for the opening of archival materials and the epic work of researching the full sweep of his career. Richard Gid Powers came first with Secrecy and Power (1987), still the biography that best situates Hoover in his life and times. Athan Theoharis’s The Boss, written with John Stuart Cox (1988), concentrates on civil liberties questions and FBI policy while contributing new details about Hoover’s family life and background. Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover (1991) offers a rollicking investigation of Hoover’s career, with an emphasis on exposing FBI secrets. Anthony Summers’s Official and Confidential (1993) contains details gleaned not only from archival sources, but from key interviews with Hoover’s acquaintances and critics.
To varying degrees, all four of these biographies promise to reveal the truth behind the great Hoover façade. G-Man does this as well, but from a distinct point of origin. This book does not treat Hoover as a rogue actor. Rather, it aims to situate him within broad currents of American political history—to move him from the margins to the center of our understanding about what the American Century was and how it worked.
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For that purpose, three areas of scholarly work have been particularly important. The first is the literature on American political development and the rise of the administrative state. As scholars such as Brian Balogh, Daniel Carpenter, Stephen Skowronek, and James Sparrow (among many others) have shown, the administrative state came of age alongside Hoover, with crucial origins in the Progressive Era. Though Hoover’s FBI acquired a distinctive stamp, he deployed ideas and methods held widely throughout federal policymaking circles. Carpenter has described the vast range of tools—including the deliberate cultivation of a reputation for professionalism and accomplishment—that career officials such as Hoover used to achieve stability, longevity, and some measure of bureaucratic autonomy. Sparrow has shown the unparalleled impact of World War II on state expansion. By the 1950s, vast swaths of the federal government were operating within what Balogh has described as a “proministrative” state, relying on a combination of private and public methods of administration, professionalism, and expertise. Though often described within the context of “liberal” state development, these methods and developments spanned parties and ideologies. They operated in conversation with but separate from electoral politics. As Hoover’s example shows, they extended beyond the social welfare and regulatory state and into the security state as well.
If Hoover shared certain ideas with self-described liberal and progressive administrators, though, he also borrowed heavily from—indeed, helped to shape and define—certain distinctively conservative ideological traditions. Since the 1990s, historians such as Kevin Kruse, Lisa McGirr, Rick Perlstein, and Kim Phillips-Fein (among many others) have developed a rich literature on the history of modern American conservatism, a second key area of historiographical engagement for this biography. Much of that literature has focused on non-state actors (businessmen, intellectuals, grassroots and party activists). To the degree that state actors have come under consideration, historians have tended to focus on conservative politicians such as Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Strom Thurmond. One goal of this book is to bring the historiographies of American political development and U.S. conservatism into closer conversation with each other.
Hoover prompts us to think differently about the origins of modern conservatism—not only to look back to the Progressive Era, but to think about those conservatives operating within and helping to develop the modern state. If at some moments Hoover sounded like a progressive administrator, at others he sounded like a card-carrying member of the conservative movement, ferociously opposed not only to radical left movements of all sorts but also to the liberal policymakers, politicians, and intellectuals whom he accused of aiding and abetting them. His great skill was to maintain both identities at once. Historian Jonathan Schoenwald has highlighted the distinction between “responsible” and “extremist” conservatives during the 1960s—between those like Hoover who considered themselves players within the Washington establishment and those who stood outside, often hoping to tear it down. Though Hoover placed himself in the former camp, he was also seen as a hero to the latter. Indeed, he was one of the few federal bureaucrats who could claim such a feat. Critics of the state admired Hoover not despite but because of his institutional power, especially his ability to use the federal government’s formidable police and investigative might to contain and discredit the American left. In his classic work on conservatism, George Nash identified anticommunism as the glue that held together an uneasy conservative coalition. As the nation’s most prominent anticommunist—more famous and certainly more respected than Joe McCarthy—Hoover was a key part of that project: a conservative state-builder during the supposed age of liberal consensus.
Of course, as historians such as Michael Flamm, Elizabeth Hinton, Khalid Muhammad, Stuart Schrader, and Heather Ann Thompson (among many others) have pointed out, the nation’s politics on the issues of crime and policing have never divided neatly along partisan or ideological lines. In recent years, historians have developed a wide-ranging and incisive literature on policing, incarceration, and the rise of the U.S. security state. Two themes from this literature are especially useful in thinking about the significance of Hoover’s life and legacy. One is the wide degree of agreement across party lines about crime and policing, whether in the Progressive Era, the New Deal or the 1960s and beyond. The other is the centrality of race in constructing these evolving regimes of law enforcement and carceral policy. Like his friend and patron Lyndon Johnson, Hoover often enforced his racialized vision through the tools of the liberal state—including the forms of bureaucratic autonomy and professionalism so central to the literature on American political development. At the same time, his life underscores that many of these ideas, themes, and mechanisms were not new in the 1960s. Hoover’s life prompts us to think about the 1960s and 1970s not as a rupture in the history of crime and incarceration, but as part of something we might describe as a Long War on Crime.
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The vast literature on the FBI itself has of course been the crucial resource in the writing of this book—one for which I offer deep thanks to the many historians and journalists who have spent years puzzling over redactions, filing FOIA requests, and otherwise trying to bring the Bureau’s history to light. All students of the subject owe an especially significant debt to two scholars, Athan Theoharis and Richard Gid Powers, who not only wrote two of the first and best biographies of Hoover, but who performed uncommon service to fellow scholars and citizens by making a range of archival and reference materials available. Together with Susan Rosenfeld and Tony Poveda, they compiled The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide (1999), still the most reliable guide for basic questions of FBI history. They also produced scholarly editions (often on microfilm, the technology of a bygone age) of important FBI material, including Hoover’s Official and Confidential File. The list of their published work available in the bibliography only begins to capture the scope and significance of their influence.
Several other historians, journalists, and scholars have taken on the daunting task of attempting to tell the FBI’s institutional story from start to finish. During Hoover’s lifetime, books by Max Lowenthal and Fred Cook sounded the alarm on Hoover’s abuses, while Don Whitehead pushed back with Hoover’s help. After Hoover’s death, Sanford Ungar published the first major synthesis of Bureau history; it has held up well. For more recent but no less essential single-volume synthetic histories, see the work of Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Ronald Kessler, and Tim Weiner.
Many recent scholars and journalists have chosen (wisely) to focus on particular cases, themes, or historical periods rather than to engage the full Hoover era. Their works are too numerous to describe in full here, but a few warrant special mention. I relied upon the works below and many others to fill out my understanding of Hoover across vast swaths of time and subject matter. Without them, my own book could not have been written.
On Hoover’s early life, the work of Kenneth Ackerman is essential. On the FBI in World War I and the Red Scare, see especially the work of Mark Ellis, Joan Jensen, Regin Schmidt, Jeffrey Simon, and Theodore Kornweibel. The FBI’s institutional growth during the 1920s and 1930s has been a fruitful area of scholarly insight and analysis in recent years. See the work of James Calder, Matthew G.T. Denney, Kathleen Frydll, Anthony Gregory, Lisa McGirr, Kenneth O’Reilly, Claire Potter, and Daniel Richman & Sarah Seo. Bryan Burrough offers a riveting overview of the major gangster cases of the 1930s. For more targeted case studies from the era, see the work of Carolyn Cox, Jonathan Eig, David Grann, Elliott Gorn, Vivien Miller, Alston Purvis, and Robert Unger, among others. On FBI public relations, Richard Gid Powers wrote the pioneering work, while Matthew Cecil is now the go-to scholar. On the FBI’s policing of sex and gender before World War II, see the work of Douglas Charles, Jessica Pliley, and Mary Elizabeth Strunk. For understanding Hoover in the context of debates over masculinity, homosexuality, and bachelorhood in the early twentieth century, I relied especially upon the work of George Chauncey, Howard Chudacoff, Daniel Hurewitz, and Nick Syrett. On Walter Winchell and café society, works by Neal Gabler, Ralph Blumenthal, and David Stowe were especially useful. For speculation about Hoover’s sexuality, see the writings of Douglas Charles, Christopher Elias, Ronald Kessler, Claire Potter, Anthony Summers, and Athan Theoharis. For the history of Washington, D.C., I relied especially on the books of Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Constance McLaughlin Green, and Tom Lewis.
World War II and the invention of U.S. intelligence has inspired an extensive if uneven literature, much of it focused on the OSS and CIA rather than the FBI. Ray Batvinis and Mark Riebling offer the best overviews of the FBI’s attempts to learn the intelligence trade. On World War II and the security state, the works of Douglas Charles, Matthew Dallek, and Lynn Olson offer useful context. On Nazi espionage, I relied especially on books by Ray Batvinis, Michael Dobbs, Peter Duffy, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, and Pierce O’Donnell. On the FBI’s wartime internment and political surveillance, see the work of Mark Becker, Stephen Fox, Donna Haverty-Stacke, and Maurice Isserman. Books by Tim Weiner and Douglas Waller provide especially useful background on Hoover’s early rivalry with the CIA.
The history of lynching in the U.S. has inspired a vast and grim scholarly literature, much of it concentrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the major cases of the 1940s, the period of Hoover’s greatest involvement, historical treatment has been somewhat more limited. To reconstruct the FBI’s activity in this area, I relied primarily on case studies by Richard Gergel, William B. Gravely, Anthony Pitch, Howard Smead, Jason Ward, and Laura Wexler. Phillip Dray’s work provided a useful overview. Patricia Sullivan’s study of the NAACP was crucial for understanding the organization’s early work.
