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 of corruption. During his tenure, Hoover attained extraordinary power and unusual discretionary authority, while also feuding with many adversaries. Some of his contemporary detractors and now some historians suspect or accused him of having links to the Mafia, of gathering information for the purposes of blackmail, of being a closet homosexual, and of passing as white while persecuting others with similar preferences and backgrounds.
FBI legacy
To date, Hoover is the longest-serving leader of an executive branch agency in the United States, having served under a record eight presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon; indeed, 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, the Ku Klux Klan, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s SCLC, using methods including infiltration, legal harassment, and violence. Hoover habitually fired FBI agents, either randomly or by singling out those who "looked like truck drivers" or had "pointy heads." He was also notorious for assigning agents who had displeased him to career-ending jobs in cities with little need for an FBI presence. Despite this, Hoover was also known to be a supporter of civil rights and liberties on several occasions, most notably was his vocal opposition to the mass internment of Japanese-Americans that took place during World War II.
Nevertheless, in 1966, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from President Lyndon Johnson for his role as Director of the FBI.
Early life and education
Hoover was born in Washington, DC, but few details are known of his early years; a birth certificate for him 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 law 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 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 short cuts in crime fighting.
He was awarded an honorary Sc. D by Kalamazoo College in 1937.
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 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.
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".[1] An example was 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 until 1952 of the Venona Project.
Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on scores of powerful people, especially politicians, which were kept separate from official FBI records. On his orders, the files were destroyed immediately after Hoover's death. 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. 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.
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.
Personal life
Speculation and rumors that Hoover was a homosexual have been suggested. However, there is no concrete evidence of these claims so they are mostly based upon speculation. The 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, and they often vacationed together. Hoover and Tolson were both lifelong bachelors, and Hoover lived with his mother until her death in 1938, when he was 43 years old. Hoover was raised a devout Presbyterian and considered the ministry as a career. Some critics said he used this to try to render his personal conduct (sexual or otherwise) above reproach during his tenure at the FBI.
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 female journalist (in an article cited by Winchell), who managed to talk her way into an interview with Hoover, wrote an article sarcastically entitled, "Hoover: He Always Gets his Man, But he Never Found a Woman."
It has long been rumored that the New Orleans and Chicago Mafia blackmailed Hoover with photos of him in drag and performing homosexual acts, which may partially explain why he allegedly never went after them (these were detailed by journalist Anthony Summers), but according to sources in the Mafia, no such photos existed.[1] After Hoover was ordered to go after the Mafia, other sources claim, he pursued them zealously. 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.
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.[2]
Claims of African-American ancestry
Author Anthony Summers, in researching his book Official and Confidential, interviewed writer Gore Vidal, who grew up in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s. Hoover was becoming famous, Vidal told Summers, and it was always said of him--in my family and around the city--that he was mulatto. People said he came from a family that had `passed.' It was the word they used for people of black origin who, after generations of inbreeding, have enough white blood to pass themselves off as white. That's what was always said about Hoover.
African-American author Millie McGhee claims to be related to J. Edgar Hoover in her book Secrets Uncovered. She was told stories during her childhood. One was that J. Edgar himself was not the son of Dickerson N. Hoover of Washington, as officially reported, but actually the son of one Ivy (Ivery) Hoover, and was born in the South, probably New Orleans, and then taken to Washington, D.C. at a very young age and raised by the Hoovers in Washington.
References in fiction
J. Gander Hooter, a fictional character featured in Disney's animated television series Darkwing Duck is named after Hoover. Hooter is the dimunitive director of S.H.U.S.H..
Hoover was also featured in Red Dwarf, as taking over as president when the crew of Starbug accidentally kills Lee Harvey Oswald before he can assassinate President John F. Kennedy. In the show, he was controlled by the mob that had a picture of him at a transvestite orgy.
In the videogame "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth" Hoover repeatedly blackmails the main character into performing dangerous missions rather than risking his own agents. He is shown to be callous and cruel, killing one of his own men when he became injured, and even torturing the game's main character to get information from him.
J. Edgar Hoover is a prominent character in James Ellroy's novels American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand.
J. Edgar Hoover is a character in the novel Underworld by Don DeLillo.
In the 1971 movie Bananas by Woody Allen, J. Edgar Hoover was played by an African American woman.
J. Edgar Hoover is a character in John Birmingham's novel Designated Targets, and is depicted as vengeful and prejudiced.
In the movie Clue, J. Edgar Hoover calls Wadsworth on the phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
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