J. Edgar Hoover

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John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in its present form and its director from May 10, 1924 until his death in 1972. Hoover was appointed acting director of the FBI by President Coolidge to reform and clean up the bureau, which was considered a haven for corruption. During his tenure, Hoover attained extraordinary power and unusual discretionary authority, while also feuding with many adversaries. It is because of Hoover that, since his tenure, FBI Directors have been limited to ten-year terms.

Hoover is credited with creating an effective law enforcement organization, but has frequently been accused of exceeding and abusing his authority in blackmailing notable public figures and engaging in unwarranted political persecution. Hoover's COINTELPRO program allowed FBI agents to disrupt organizations such as the Black Panther Party, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s SCLC, using methods including infiltration, legal harassment, violence, and murder (Fred Hampton, Zayd Shakur, and Mark Clark). Hoover habitually fired FBI agents, either randomly or by singling out those who "looked stupid like truck drivers" or had "pointy heads." He was also notorious for relocation agents who had displeased him to career-ending jobs in cities with little need for an FBI presence, such as Melvin Purvis. Despite this, Hoover was also known to be a supporter of civil rights and liberties on several occasions, most notably for his vocal opposition to the mass internment of Japanese-Americans that took place during World War II. Template:Fact

Contents

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Early life and education

Hoover was born in Washington DC, but 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 became a member of Kappa Alpha Order (Alpha Nu 1914). While a medical student at GWU, Hoover became interested in the career of Anthony Comstock, the New York City based 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 shortcuts in crime fighting.

He was awarded an honorary Sc. D by Kalamazoo College in 1937.

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Department of Justice and FBI career

Rather than enlisting for military service during World War I, he 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. He became the permanent director of the Bureau in 1925.

When Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, it had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents. In great part due to several highly-publicized captures or shootings of outlaws and bankrobbers like John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis and Machine Gun Kelly the Bureau's powers were broadened and it was renamed 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 made. 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. Image:Jedgarh.jpe Hoover was noted for his concern about—some would say obsession with—subversion. He attacked and spied upon scores of suspected subversives and radicals throughout his career as FBI director. Hoover tended to exaggerate the dangers of subversives, and many believe he overstepped his bounds in his pursuit of eliminating this perceived threat. The one exception to this is perhaps during World War II, when German U-boats would prowl the eastern seaboard of the United States, sinking merchant vessels and some even launching small groups of Nazi agents ashore to cause acts of sabotage within the country. Numerous members of these teams were apprehended due to the increased vigilance and intelligence gathering efforts of the FBI. President 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".Template:NamedRef An example is his capture of the Nazi saboteurs in the Quirin affair.

Another example of Hoover's power and obsession with subversion is his handling of the Venona Project. The FBI inherited a pre-WW II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the U.S. Hoover kept the intercepts in a locked safe in his office, choosing not to inform President Harry Truman, his Attorney General McGraith and two Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and General George Marshall while they held office. He chose not to inform the CIA of the Venona Project until 1952.

Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on scores of powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed deputy Attorney General in early 1974, Clarence M. Kelley (the then Director of the Bureau) thought such files either didn't 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, which he did. An extensive investigation of Hoover's files by David Garrow showed that, in these abuses, blamed not just Hoover but next-in-command William Sullivan, as well as the FBI itself as an agency, which 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, and even potentially running for president.

In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover's apparently cozy relations with 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 and the Black Panther Party.

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. While Richard Nixon twice called in Hoover with the intent of firing him, but both times he changed his mind when meeting with Hoover.

Hoover maintained strong support in Congress until his death, whereupon operational command of the Bureau passed to Associate Director Mark Felt. Soon thereafter Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray, a Justice Department official with no FBI experience, as Acting Director with 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, due to Felt's being passed over by Nixon as head of the FBI after Hoover's death in 1972.

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 WB's long-running spin-off TV series, The F.B.I.. Hoover personally made sure Warner Bros. would portray the FBI more accurately than other crime dramas of the times.

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

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Personal life

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For decades, there has been speculation and rumors that Hoover was a homosexual, but no concrete evidence of these claims has ever been presented. Such rumors have circulated since at least the early 1940's: an FBI memorandum dated June 11, 1943, reports on a woman spreading gossip of Hoover being "queer" and keeping "a large group of young boys around him." The memo reports the woman said she had overheard conversation at an adjoining restaurant in Baltimore in 1941.[1] The additional allegation that he was also a crossdresser is generally considered to be an urban legend.

Hoover's right-hand man, Clyde Tolson, was a constant companion for more than 40 years, with the pair often vacationing together. Both were lifelong bachelors, with Hoover living with his mother until her death in 1938. Raised a devout Presbyterian, Hoover had considered the ministry as a career, with some critics saying that he used this to try to render his personal conduct (sexual or otherwise) above reproach during his long FBI tenure.

Even within Hoover's own lifetime, journalists and other observers made observations that hinted at a hidden personal life. Walter Winchell, the famed gossip columnist, once wrote a column that superficially extolled Hoover, while at the same time included many of the aforementioned peculiarities. A journalist (in an article cited by Winchell), who managed to talk her way into an interview with Hoover, wrote an article drily entitled, "Hoover: He Always Gets his Man, But he Never Found a Woman."

Longstanding rumors still exist that the New Orleans and Chicago Mafia had blackmailed Hoover with photos of him in drag and performing homosexual acts. These rumors (that were detailed by journalist Anthony Summers) are used to explain why he allegedly never went after the mob, but according to sources in the Mafia no such photos existed.[2] Other sources claim that Hoover pursued them zealously after being ordered to go after the Mafia. However, Peter Maas, a notable journalist, has criticized accusations that Hoover had deep ties with the Kennedy family, and these allegations in turn were heavily criticized in Anthony Summers's book on Marilyn Monroe.

African-American author Millie McGhee claims to be related to J. Edgar Hoover in her book Secrets Uncovered. She was told stories by her grandfather, father and mother throughout her childhood that Hoover was related to their Mississippi family. In 1998, McGhee contacted a professional geneologist, George Ott of Salt Lake City, UT to confirm these stories. One was that J. Edgar himself was not the son of Dickerson Naylor Hoover Sr. of Washington as officially reported, but was actually the son of one Ivy (Ivery) Hoover, was born in the South, probably New Orleans, and was then taken to Washington, D.C. at a very young age and raised by the Hoovers in Washington. Since publication of the first edition of McGhee's book, Ott found Mississippi census records that confirm the McGhee family's oral history as well as disquieting erasures and alterations of records pertaining to the Hoovers of Washington, D.C. Ott and McGhee were not, however, able to prove without doubt that Ivy (or Ivery) Hoover was indeed J. Edgar's father. But the journalist Edward Spannaus received a copy of J. Edgar Hoover's birth certificate. He found that it was not filed until 1938, when the FBI director was 43 years old, while his other siblings had their certificates filed days after their births. The Naylor and Hoover families were also unaccountably living in areas of Washington where blacks and whites were not as segregated.

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References in fiction

J. Edgar Hoover has appeared or has been the basis of characters in numerous works of fiction. His notable appearances in Western culture include:

  • Some renditions of The Mother by Bertolt Brecht, in which a man delivering a thundering introduction of himself as J. Edgar Hoover yells loudly and authoritatively against communism while wearing a Ball gown or similar attire. He is brought back into the play sporadically as comic relief thereafter, exhibiting clearly homoerotic behavior.
  • Hoover is also depicted as having taken the presidency of the United States after martial law was declared, in one of the parallel worlds visited in the television series Sliders. In this world, police officers habitually wore skirts (leading to an initial theory that the regular characters had discovered a world where a Scotland-dominated British Empire had been the colonial rulers of North America, rather than the real world's English-dominated empire; or consequently, a world where cross-dressing is widely encouraged) and the Constitution had been suppressed by Hoover since the declaration of martial law.
  • Hoover is depicted during the fourth season of the X-files television series during the chapter titled "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man."
  • In the 1997 novel Underworld by Don Delillo, insight into Tolson and Hoover's personal life is featured.
  • In the 1997 film Gattaca, FBI agents are referred to as Hoovers and J. Edgars. Hoover also references the vacuum cleaners they use to find traces of DNA.
  • In the 2005 video game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Hoover is depicted as leading the raid on the fictional port city of Innsmouth, personally leading agents and the player into the Marsh Gold Refinery.
  • In The Musical Annie he is referenced throughout. "You won't be an orphan for long"
  • Hoover is mentioned in the film "The Rock" starring Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery.
  • In the 1992 film Chaplin, Hoover is shown hounding Chaplin continuously as a result of his false belief that the actor is a member of the Communist Party.
  • In the 2002 film Chicago Velma says to Roxie, "Even J. Edgar Hoover couldn't find your name in the papers".
  • In the premiere episode of the sixth season of The Sopranos Uncle Junior, suffering from dementia, believes "Little Pussy" Malanga—a character who has been dead for six years—is continuously calling him on the phone and hanging up. Tony Soprano sarcastically replies, "We'll Get J. Edgar Hoover right on it."
  • Hoover plays an important role in the movie Nixon.
  • Hoover is a 33° Grand Cross Freemason [3]
  • Hoover is mentioned in the short story "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut as J. Edgar Nation
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Notes

  • Template:NamedNote Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. II, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1956), p. 291.

Áː==Further reading==

  • Garrow, David J, "The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., From 'Solo' to Memphis", W.W.Norton, New York, 1981, ISBN 0-393-01509-2, p. 166.
  • Gentry, Curt, J. Edgar Hoover: The man and the secrets, Plume, 1991, ISBN 0-452-26904-0, LoC HV7911.H6G46 1992
  • J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, Pocket Books, 1958 (one of Hoover's many ghost-written books)
  • Johansson, Warren & Percy, William A. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. Harrington Park Press, 1994, pp. 85-88, 105, 227.
  • French - Marc Dugain, La malédiction d'Edgar - (non official translation : Edgar's Curse) a Novel (French editor Gallimard 2005, ISBN 2-07-077379-5). Dugain is the writer of The Officer's Ward
  • Summers, Anthony, Official and Confidential:The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Putnam Pub Group, 1993, ISBN 0-399-13800-5, Details many negative claims concerning J. Edgar Hoover.
  • McGhee, Millie L. Secrets Uncovered: J. Edgar Hoover--Passing for White?, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., Allen-Morris, 2000.
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External links

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  • Spub.com - 'J. Edgar Hoover [1895-1972]: Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in 1972'
  • TheNewAmerican.com - '"Assassinating" J. Edgar Hoover'
  • StraightDope.com - 'The Straight Dope: Was J. Edgar Hoover a crossdresser?'
  • Wall Street Journal - 'Hoover's Institution', Laurence H. Silberman, July 20, 2005
  • American Almanac - 'The Mysterious Origins of J. Edgar Hoover' by Edward Spannaus, August 2000
  • Ask Yahoo! - Was J. Edgar Hoover really a transvestite?, April 6, 2006


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