How J. Edgar Hoover Went From Hero to Villain
Five decades after his death, J. Edgar Hoover still haunts the FBI. His nearly 48-year reign as its director, from 1924 to 1972, has come to symbolize the dangers of a stealth domestic police-and-intelligence agency in an open society. Hoover is widely seen today as an autocrat who used secret surveillance and other illegal means to control politicians and infiltrate and disrupt domestic political groups in the service of his conservative worldview. No operation confirms this verdict more vividly than the FBI’s wide-ranging electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., which culminated in a threatening letter to King accompanied by tape recordings of romantic trysts—an effort designed to drive King from the civil-rights movement or induce him to commit suicide.
In her masterful, 732-page biography of Hoover, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, the Yale historian Beverly Gage carefully chronicles all of the major abuses committed by his FBI. She also shows that the prevailing image of Hoover as a “one-dimensional tyrant and backroom schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission” is a distortion. Hoover emerges instead as a still-flawed figure, yet more team player than solo villain. He understood that his success depended on public approval, which he was adept at building. Just as crucial was high-level support for his actions (covert as well as overt), under liberal and conservative administrations alike, which he worked assiduously to secure. Hoover’s pragmatism helped curb, at various junctures, his dogmatism and extremist tactics.
Hoover was also significantly aided, Gage notes, by a mid-century consensus, which he reinforced, on the need to confront threats to the state—primarily Nazis, communists, and gangsters. When the aging Hoover targeted civil-rights activists, Vietnam protesters, and other 1960s radicals, he ventured onto much more contested political terrain. An appeal to nonpartisan principles could no longer justify his actions, especially after the bureau’s secret and often
