Beverly Gage

This book bears comparison with Robert Caro’s magisterial The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York as among the few close studies of how administrative titans confound the democratic process.

J. Edgar Hoover built up the FBI from 1919 to 1972 as a private fiefdom with his rules, his filing system, and his decisions on when to bend the rules.

In spite of Hoover's self-proclaimed impartiality between Democrats and Republicans, Beverly Gage very clearly lays out how Hoover used his office to further his own interests, be it sometimes in line with Democrat interests, sometimes Republican, and sometimes the interests of white supremacists.

This is what clearly differentiates Gage's biography from earlier Hoover biographies. It is the best on focussing on the power and process of government.

In the Power Broker, Caro brilliantly showed how Robert Moses used the power to tax, in one famous instance, to build up his own war chest. Gage shows how Hoover protected his independence from Congress, how he used the power of secrecy, guile, and Hollywood promotion to build the ramparts.

One of Hoover's greatest failures as a bureaucrat came in the lead up to and the aftermath of WWII when he tried to role foreign intelligence into the FBI's gamut of services. After the war, Truman claimed that he didn't want to create a US version of the all powerful German Gestapo and handed off foreign intelligence to a new agency, the CIA. Hoover never forgot the slight and kept his secrets apart from CIA. You could draw a straight line between this and 9/11, when lack of communication between the agencies contributed heavily to Al Qaida's success.

But not all of Hoover's failures were his fault. He seemed powerless to curb lynchings, to get convictions against racists in the Deep South, or to enforce Federal law at all in race relations. He blamed a lot of it on the split between Federal and State responsibilities. It seems that the only way he could reduce the power of the Klu Klux Klan was to turn to illegal means. He used illegal wiretaps, subversion, and paid informants. Moreover, most violent crimes were state crimes, outside the control of Federal lawmakers or law enforcement.

So many subversive techniques on so many targets that an argument can be made that the Bureau of Investigation's greatest successes came at the cost of law and order, not at its preservation.

With the nodding approval of Presidents and Attorneys General, Hoover almost single-handedly created the surveillance state. Not only did his FBI surveil known and suspected Communist and anarchist sympathizers, he surveilled legislators, White House staff, civil rights activists, university educators, many government employees, businessmen, and journalists.

He steadfastly refused to elevate blacks to FBI agents, he helped purge all suspected homosexuals from government office, and his hiring focussed on white graduates of his own alma mater, George Washington University in DC, and his own exclusive white fraternity.

Without Hoover the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee Hollywood hearings could not have taken place as he opened up his vast files to select members of the Senate and House. After WWII Hoover got authorization to radically expand his workforce of snoops. And at a time when Federal legislators feared their influence waning, Hoover obliged by lending committees many, many FBI "professionals" as research and policy aids.

One thing that Hoover did not have and Senate committees did have was the power to subpoena. Thus when Hoover empowered the committees not only could he ask the questions, but the committees could compel witnesses to answer truthfully under threat of imprisonment.

But secrecy was his greatest weapon, as it was demonstrated in his exclusive control over the WWII Venona intercepts, Soviet communications during WWII that American codebreakers only succeeded to decrypt after the war. Hoover used them to help break the Cambridge Five but not before the Soviets had stolen the secrets of America's A-bomb project. It also help Hoover finger Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

But neither FDR nor Truman were let in on their secrets. This gave Hoover tremendous leverage.

Gage adeptly explains every step of FBI's rise from a tiny branch of the Justice Department to to a colossus with thousands of employees and billions of reports, transcripts of buggings, and analysis on its filings. Hoover had snitches in the NAACP, the KKK, the armed forces, the SDS, and many more places. She builds a case that the backbone of the crazy right were former FBI G-men trained by Hoover.

I don’t think she’s succeeded, not for want of trying. She’s tied in Murchison and other Texas millionaires, but Hoover didn’t convert anybody, nor did the FBI academy grads.

Throughout his life Hoover never took his eye off the case of Communist subversion and used it to drive Martin Luther King, among others, to distraction. His antipathy to the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement contributed to the rise of reaction in the universities and beyond. Once young people stopped trusting their elders they led a huge cultural change.

There are parallels between that period and the rise of ME-TOO and anti-racism from the murder of George Floyd and others.

I can see that the decline of confidence in lawmakers today and the reaction to Israeli warplanes strafing Gaza as stepchild to the George Floyd demonstrations.

And among history's ironies, there is the picture of Lyndon Johnson seeing Hoover as the only man he could trust in Washington, all the while Hoover is making mincemeat of constitutional protections for individuals, including ML King.

To summarize: Hoover built an army of “investigators” building dossiers on thousands of Americans who never broke a rule and never broke a law in the better part of 50 years he ruled the FBI. A vast part of that surveillance was obtained illegally and thus could never be used in a prosecution. And Hoover prevented anybody from seeing it. When a prosecution could be obtained the FBI could not participate because it had no authority over state crimes. Including lynchings. Including the murder of civil rights advocates. In the 1930’s Hoover’s FBI gained notoriety for “getting” some famous bank robbers like John Dillinger and Baby-faced Nelson even though that really wasn’t his job and his “investigators” weren’t issued firearms, at least not in the beginning, and a few agents were gunned down because they were poor shots and didn’t have bulletproof vests. Franklin Roosevelt authorized Hoover to do something about the “crime wave” overtaking America without truly understanding that the FBI didn’t have the constitutional authority to do anything like that. In fact, none of the eight presidents Hoover served under understood that. They let Hoover create a state of mass surveillance or “a surveillance state” very often using illegal methods. The “crime wave” in the 1920’s and 30’s was largely driven by Prohibition when even Presidents stocked up on illegal booze. One of Hoovers “great successes” although spoken of quietly was using illegally collected evidence that Federal employees were homosexuals who needed to be removed from government. It was called “the Lavender Scare.” This in spite of the well-known fact that Hoover was himself homosexual. His success at counter-intelligence was spotty. After all, the Russians stole the plans for the A-bomb, used the Cambridge Five ring to roll up Western Agents in the Soviet Union, lost two Kennedys and ML King to assassins’ bullets, and laid the groundwork for intelligence mishigas that was 9/11.

Shortly after I finished reading the book I was sharing the experience with a friend. The first question he asked me about the book was were the Presidents Hoover served under afraid of him?

You would think that’d be a question Gage would have addressed directly, but I don’t recall as she had. Certainly John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had reason to fear Hoover, who had plenty of unsavoury information about both men in his files. And they were Democrats, he Republican.

Hoover was, after all, answerable to them and he was a stickler for process. Besides, they were elected to the highest office in the land. Hoover served at the pleasure of the President. I don’t think Eisenhower or Franklin Roosevelt were the kind of men who were much afraid of anybody, they couldn’t have won WWII if they were.

But Hoover’s tactics stuck to Presidents. Whatever he did affected how people came to see the President and ultimately, the United States of America.

Which leads to ask a question that Gage avoids: How good was Hoover at his job, even at defining what the FBI should be. In order to evaluate Hoover it would have been helpful to find another individual who built an investigative police force and compare them.

Perhaps the best person she could have compared Hoover to would have been the British crime czar Sir Robert Peel, a Conservative, who among other things founded Scotland Yard. His modern policing featured the civilian nature of the domestic police and the need for consent among the policed.

Hoover did not keep this front and centre.

Finally, how good and how useful is FBI to the democracy under Hoover? My grade: C-.… (més)

An epic look at the life of J. Edgar Hoover a man synonymous with the birth, growth and importance of the F. B. I. A tremendous amount of research to bring this man to life. From his youth you see how he develops many of his attributes like self discipline, determination and a misogynistic and racist bent. .The book ranges over his seventy seven years from fighting gangsters in the twenties to fighting radical groups in the sixties. Many of his practices were unsavory but but he had a profound effect on American culture.… (més)