G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“At the age of ten, Hoover may have understood his aunt’s murder as a dramatic example of what could happen if he strayed off that righteous path. For decades to come, he would warn about the dangers of women who drank and violated the sanctity of the home, and about the weak men who allowed such activities to occur. It was in early adolescence—in those years after his aunt’s murder—that he began to consider such matters, and to sort out some of his own answers.”

Hoover’s obsession with masculine virtue stemmed in part from a series of family tragedies in which the apparent cause was male weakness, especially failure to contain the defects of women. Hoover lacked many traditionally masculine qualities such as physical toughness and a fondness for women, but he came to see himself as the guardian of a social order that empowered men, or at least the right kind of men, and punished those who threatened their supremacy.

“Hoover, too, held onto certain patterns from high school. He would always reserve his greatest affections for other men, a fact readily ascribed to boyish camaraderie during high school but one that would raise difficulties and questions in years to come. Mostly, he chose men with whom he shared an institutional bond, as in the cadet corps, where he and [friend Lawrence] Jones labored side by side together in a clear hierarchy and common purpose. When he could hire his own employees, he proved partial to men like Jones as well: big, amiable football players, models of what American men were supposed to be.”

Hoover’s obsession with masculinity also entailed a concern that he himself was not living up to the ideal of the American man. He was cerebral rather than physical, and in a time when heteronormativity was the only acceptable lifestyle, he rarely pursued relationships with women, and only did so haltingly. From a young age, he sought validation through the company of more conventionally masculine men, but he also sought to exert power over them through bureaucratic hierarchies.

“Hoover saw little distinction between the social theories of a nineteenth-century German philosopher [Karl Marx], the actions of an embattled Russian revolutionary government, and the moment-to-moment proclivities of American radicals. All were part of the same criminal plot.”

Hoover branded himself the bureau’s expert on communism just as the rise of Soviet power and widespread labor unrest made it an important subject of study. As Gage notes, however, he never really engaged in a serious effort to understand communist doctrines or those who followed them, because he operated on the assumption that anyone opposed to traditional American values must by definition be a malicious actor and therefore must be destroyed.

“In order to enact ‘professionalism,’ Hoover needed professionals. As he boasted to the papers, after 1924 he required all new agents to possess either a legal or accounting degree, markers of professional training and white-collar success. He also sought out men who would uphold the highest ideals of citizenship, refusing the temptations of alcohol, womanizing, bribery, even run-of-the-mill sloth.”

Hoover built up the bureau in line with his ideals of bureaucratic professionalism and moral uprightness, which in his imagination went hand in hand. In practice, such paragons of perfection were difficult to find, and so Hoover tended to fall back on qualities he trusted, most notably a background similar to his own. Thus, George Washington University and Kappa Alpha alumni had a far easier time convincing the boss of their merits. While the bureau did improve performance in many areas, Hoover’s understanding of the model agent meant that agents could vie for his approbation, distorting the very culture of professionalism that Hoover was supposed to be upholding.

“Perhaps [Melvin] Purvis felt genuine affection, even desire, for Hoover. Or perhaps he was simply making his best guess about what his boss wanted to hear. Whatever else he may have thought or felt, Purvis had mastered one skill that assured Bureau success: pleasing J. Edgar Hoover.”

Hoover’s sexuality is a subject of great speculation, with very little hard evidence to support any firm conclusion. In the scant available evidence, such as his correspondence with Purvis, Hoover’s writing is riddled with innuendo, double meanings, and psychological gamesmanship. Even when his affection for someone was by all accounts sincere, as it was for Purvis and later Clyde Tolson, his efforts at concealing his true intentions and delicate allusions to the power imbalance between himself and his subordinates make it nearly impossible to discern a clear attitude or motive, even as his pleasure at the subservience of his subordinates was manifest.

“In the summer of 1934, Roosevelt pushed through legislation formally authorizing Bureau agents to carry guns and make arrests. Other laws created new roles for federal authorities in cases of kidnapping, bank robbery, and the hunting of fugitive felons. This led to shifts in power, culture, and tactics within the Bureau itself.”

For the first several years of Hoover’s directorship, he upheld bureau agents as consummate bureaucrats and scientists, armed mainly with information and equipment to help police departments do their job. They were supposed to provide the contrast to everyday police work, which was often prone to brutality and scandal. As a series of high-profile robberies and murders challenged the limits of state and local police, the bureau gradually took on a more direct role in enforcement, creating a split within its institutional culture that proved difficult to resolve.

“Perhaps most important, Hoover concluded that public relations—like crime statistics and fingerprints, lab facilities and office inspections—would thereafter become a permanent feature of FBI work, one of the tasks to which men would be dedicated and assigned. Toward the end of 1935, he ordered the establishment of an FBI public relations unit, soon to be known as the Crime Records Station. To lead it, he designated the one man he had come to rely upon above all others, Clyde Tolson.”

Hoover proved remarkably adaptable over the course of his career, even when doing so multiplied the contradictions within his own life. A clear example is his ability to embrace public fame: After years selling himself as a no-nonsense bureaucrat, he welcomed and thrived in the spotlight of the FBI’s takedown of famous gangsters. At this moment of peak publicity, he appointed in charge of his public relations the one man who, whatever the actual content of their relationship, could have exposed him to public rebuke for allegedly gay behavior.

“All this left Hoover with a paradoxical public image. From one vantage point, he was the same firm apolitical administrator he had always been, moving soberly between partisan factions. From another, he was a cosmopolitan socialite and celebrity, at home in the latest of late-night New York gatherings. From still a third, he was a national scold and moralist, unflinching in his demands that all Americans—including politicians—live up to a strict code of personal virtue.”

Whenever there was a contradiction in Hoover’s public persona, his response tended to be to add yet another. Initially known as a disciple of the progressive bureaucracy, he leaned on the conservatism of his upbringing to show that he would use federal power to enforce the existing order rather than bring about a new one. And when his stolid moralism combined with his bureaucratic monomania to create the image of an asocial bachelor, he became a socialite to avoid any accusations of moral impropriety.

“From the first, it was clear that communism—not fascism—occupied the greater part of [Hoover’s] imagination, and that he viewed the party’s engagement with labor unions, civil rights, and reform politics as a growing internal threat.”

It was clear by the late 1930s that Nazi Germany was the far more likely antagonist in an impending war than the Soviet Union, even during the ill-fated period of cooperation between the two totalitarian states. Regardless of the international situation, Hoover persistently regarded communism as the greater threat due to its real and potential connections with potentially subversive actors such as labor unions and civil rights activists. Even when the German-American Bund organized a massive rally in Madison Square Garden, in New York City, Hoover continued to prioritize the potential for communist action over the reality of Nazi action.

“‘There actually can be only one efficient method of processing the Japanese for loyalty, which consists of individual, not mass, consideration.’ It was a subtle protest against a policy that Hoover deemed illegal and unprofessional, a view rejected by much of wartime Washington but borne out by the judgment of history.”

For all of his many flaws, Hoover was quick to denounce the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans as both wrong and counterproductive. The precise balance of his motives is impossible to detect: He may have been more concerned about the enemy using the event for propaganda than the effect on its victims. The FBI carried on internment efforts of its own, ostensibly on the grounds of individual suspicion rather than race, and Hoover’s protest was decidedly modest, but in spite of its limitations, it does show his capacity to recognize a fundamental injustice, despite his inability to see that same problem in many other instances.

“Military conflict highlighted the essential paradox of American life: How could a nation that prided itself on freedom also deny that freedom to its Black citizens? Though Hoover stopped short of fundamental changes to Bureau policy, he began to echo Roosevelt’s warning that racial discrimination could undermine the war effort and disrupt home-front peace, providing the country’s enemies with a powerful tool of propaganda.”

When the Second World War broke out, Hoover was primed to direct the FBI against actual and potential threats originating from external forces such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. He did not anticipate how the war would effect changes within American society. Black soldiers who fought and died for freedom, especially in the course of fighting against a white supremacist regime, posed a severe challenge to Jim Crow segregation. Hoover would have to choose between his aversion to all forms of domestic activism and his reluctance to expose American hypocrisy to the world.

“It is true that the home front of the 1940s produced less of the vigilante violence that had plagued it during the previous war. Instead, it produced a larger, more effective, and far more fearsome security state, with the FBI at its core. In that sense, Hoover achieved what he had envisioned years earlier; the hunting of spies and saboteurs and dissenters remained mostly in the hands of professionals, and the government found less need or desire to throw dissenters in jail.”

Armies plan for the next war with the lessons of the last war, and the same is true for Hoover. The clumsy repression of German Americans and various left-wing elements during World War I had tarnished the bureau’s reputation; with Hoover now the longstanding director of the FBI, he would have to take responsibility for any conspicuous errors. He succeeded in pursuing a more orderly crackdown on domestic dissent, but in the process created a machine of domestic surveillance that he would later prove unable and unwilling to restrain.

“If Hoover relied upon certain ideas forged during his early years at the Radical Division, the war also brought several important discoveries that would make the so-called second Red Scare substantially different from the first. Among them were a series of revelations about the existence of a ‘communist underground,’ a network of secret party members and Soviet operates spread throughout the government and key national industries. […] Hoover came away from the war convinced that both the Communist Party and the Soviet Union were actively seeking to undermine the U.S. government from within.”

World War I–era crackdowns on communists and other leftists targeted immigrants, labor unions, and other group relatively lacking in social power. At the same time, the Soviet Union was mired in civil war, utterly incapable of fomenting revolution abroad. After World War II, the threat was personified by men like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, government officials with the ear of the president, while the Soviet Union occupied half of Europe, found an ally in China, and greenlit the invasion of South Korea. The result was a far more widespread panic and a call for the FBI to undertake harsh measures to root out the “enemy within.” 

“Taken as a whole, the Venona decryptions lend substance to Hoover’s claims that Soviet espionage was a genuine problem in the 1940s, not just a figment of the anticommunist imagination. As Hoover experienced it, though, Venona also entailed frustration and uncertainty. When he encountered the project in late 1947, the scope of what he did not know—about the scale of Soviet espionage, the connections between the Communist Party and Soviet authorities, the names and identities of participants—loomed large.”

One of the most impressive intelligence operations of the 20th century, Venona uncovered Soviet activities in the United States with remarkable thoroughness. Even so, Hoover struggled to make effective use of the decryptions. They painted a general picture of Soviet activity, but did not often prove the criminality of a particular individual. Hoover was also reluctant to share this treasured information outside the bureau, especially given his fear that communist spies were everywhere.

“The Rosenbergs continued to maintain their innocence, publishing sentimental jailhouse letters insisting, ‘we are an ordinary man and wife,’ persecuted only for left-wing idealism. Hoover thought the pressure campaign would—and should—backfire. ‘If sentences are reduced,’ he wrote in May 1953, ‘we may well be charged with knuckling under to Communist pressure, not only abroad but in this country.’”

The Rosenberg trial was a highly controversial event in the early Cold War. It is reasonably certain that they were working with the Soviet government in some capacity, but the death penalty seemed unnecessarily harsh, especially for the parents of two small children. The fact that Hoover pressed for their execution as a means of leverage signifies that his intentions were at least as much political as they were legal.

“Hoover had long emphasized self-control and inner discipline, the need to resist temptation at all costs. In the new psychological framework, that, too, could be a sign of hidden desires and inner struggles of which he himself might be only dimly aware.”

One possible answer to the puzzle of Hoover’s sexuality is that he never fully reckoned with it. Obsessed with discipline and the perils of the flesh from a young age, he may have repressed whatever desires he had. While there was undoubtedly a gap between his public persona and private life, Gage’s insights into his private life show that he may not have understood himself any more than those trying to examine him from the outside.

“In popular memory, the Army-McCarthy hearings mark the dismal climax of the Red Scare, the moment the country definitively rejected anticommunist hysteria in favor of more restrained methods and attitudes. In truth the months following the hearings produced some of the most draconian anticommunist legislation in American history, much of it justified as a way to support the FBI and push back against McCarthy.”

Hoover’s turning on McCarthy is viewed as one of the bright spots of Hoover’s career, when he chose the good of the country over his anticommunist obsessions. This is not entirely wrong: As Gage points out, Hoover could easily have continued support for the senator but feared that McCarthy’s recklessness would undermine American efforts in the Cold War. McCarthy’s theatrics would have to give way to Hoover’s behind-the-scenes machinations.

“Under COINTELPRO, there would be no more grand trials or dramatic committee-room confrontations. Instead, Hoover envisioned a slow accretion of slights and miseries—'along the line of “keeping the pot boiling,”’ as one FBI memo explained it, until the lid blew off.”

In the early 1950s, Hoover sought to expose the communist threat with high-profile showdowns in court or Congress, as in the cases involving Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. This had its successes, but Hoover concluded that focusing on individuals took too much away from the fight against the broader communist network. COINTELPRO represented a shift in strategy to a full-spectrum effort of disruption, until a combination of external pressure and internal dissent caused radical organizations to fall apart from within.

“The NAACP of the 1940s and 1950s had pushed for the law to be changed—and then for those changes to be enforced through federal power. The new generation of activists, frustrated at the slow pace of racial transformation, tried to speed things along through more confrontational methods. Hoover viewed these forms of civil disobedience and direct action as tantamount to lawbreaking—even when federal law happened to be on the protestors’ side.”

Hoover had enjoyed a surprisingly good relationship with the NAACP and its chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, because they were willing to let matters like school desegregation work its way through the federal courts. Activists like King, John Lewis, and Bayard Rustin were committed to nonviolence but saw the need for disruptive social action to draw attention to injustices that the political system would not or could not deal with on its own. This was unacceptable to Hoover, for whom the integrity and rightness of the federal government was not a matter for discussion.

“In early June, the Levison wiretaps revealed plans afoot for a March on Washington to pressure the White House into supporting a federal civil rights law. ‘The threat itself may so frighten the President that he would have to do something,’ King told Levison, by way of explanation. Hoover sent those words along to the White House.”

Hoover’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. bore early fruit in that it unearthed a plan for a March on Washington, where King would deliver his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. The Kennedy administration saw this as a direct challenge to its authority and came to see Hoover as a valuable ally despite their many conflicts and disagreements.

“In all the praise and excitement, reporters tended to miss a sobering aspect of Hoover’s visit: though he had traveled to Mississippi to promote the observance of the new federal law, he had barely spoken with civil rights supporters. Nor had he invited any Black men or women to participate in his press conference.”

The passing of the Civil Rights Act required a powerful federal presence in Mississippi, where resistance was likely to be strong. Hoover came to put his personal imprimatur on the office, but even as he did so, he showed his inability to see the law as stemming from the profound needs of human beings and as part of a need for broader cultural change. For him, the law was simply the law.

“Far more than the Birmingham bombing or the Mississippi murders, the Liuzzo case allowed Johnson to present the FBI as what he wanted it to be: an all-knowing, ever-watchful check on the excesses of Klan violence in the South.”

It would take years, and in some cases decades, for prosecutors to convict the perpetrators of some of the most high-profile acts of violence during the civil rights era. The FBI’s infiltration of the Klan, entirely outside the realm of legality, proved much more effective in degrading its capabilities, but not without a cost. An FBI informant was in a car that shot and killed a woman for having a Black male passenger. The FBI redoubled its efforts against the Klan as a result, but it showed the dangers of working with informants.

“While Hoover may have pushed his agents to deliver on a culprit, […] he bears responsibility for the assassination itself in at least one important sense. At the committee hearings, one member asked ‘whether the FBI created a moral climate’ that encouraged white Americans to view King as an urgent and existential threat. On that question, at least, the record is clear. The answer is yes.”

There has long been speculation that Hoover might have access to secret information on the King assassination, or even had a hand in it himself. There is no hard evidence of this, but it is an understandable reaction in light of Hoover’s relentless hounding of King, including a public denunciation of him as “the most notorious liar in the country.” There is no way to assess causality between his efforts and the assassination, but it is among the most shameful episodes of Hoover’s long career.