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

In 1959, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover arrived at a government screening room to watch the story of his life. At the age of sixty-four, he had long ago gone thick around the middle (though FBI weight codes forbade his employees from doing the same). The press said he looked like a bulldogsquat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowlsbut this had not always been the case. Thirty-five years earlier, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with physical energy and big ideas for reform. At the time, the Bureau of Investigation had been a law enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal and failure and controversy. In the three and a half decades that followed, Hoover rebuilt it and then rebuilt it again, according to his own priorities and in his own image.

Some found the result frightening to beholda political surveillance force without precedent in American life. Hoover always insisted that his creation was thoroughly American. Born and bred in Washington, D.C., he believed in the power of the federal government to do great things and fight great battles on behalf of the nations citizens. He also believed that there were certain groupscommunists and racial minorities, above allwho threatened that project. His career reflected both themes: a faith in progressive, expert-driven government and a commitment to an avenging social conservatism. His genius came in amassing enough power to promote and enforce those ideas as he saw fit.

Now he had a chance to discover what Hollywood thought of it all. The FBI Story followed the life of an organization rather than a man. But as everyone knew, Hoover was the FBI, its driving force and animating spirit. The film starred Jimmy Stewart as FBI agent Chip Hardesty, the embodiment of all that Hoover wanted his employees to be. Since taking over the Bureau in 1924, Hoover had cultivated a particular type of man as his ideal agent: tall, white, conservative, athletic, always in a dark suit and spit-shined shoes, either a lawyer or an accountant by training. In the 1930s, the newspapers had started describing this figure as a G-Manor Government Manthe front-line soldier in the countrys War on Crime. As one of the federal governments longest-serving and most prominent officials, Hoover became known as the ultimate G-Man, a political legend whose life and career were inextricable from the growth of federal bureaus and agencies and departments, and from the fraught public debate over how they were supposed to use their powers.

Colleagues liked to say Hoover was married to his Bureau, a policeman with neither time nor inclination for anything beyond the job. This was not quite true. If he was married to anyone, it was to Clyde Tolson, his famously loyal associate director. Tolson had joined the Bureau in the late 1920s, when Hoover was still working out his law enforcement vision. Since then, Tolson had been a model employee, but he had become something more as well. Where Hoover went, Tolson went too: not only to the office, but to the nightclub and the racetrack, on vacations and out for weeknight dinners, to family events and White House receptions. They were, in essence, a couple, though almost nobodyespecially Hooverreferred to them that way.

Tolson attended the screening with Hoover. He also appeared with Hoover for a brief cameo in the film: Hoover seated at his mahogany desk, poring over serious investigative papers, with Tolson standing to his right. The rest of the film tracked Stewarts character but the stories were all Hoovers, the greatest hits of his three-decades-plus career. As Agent Hardesty, Stewart solved the gruesome Osage Indian murders of the mid-1920s. From there, the film broadened out into the kidnappings and gangster shoot-outs of the 1930s, the German sabotage and espionage cases of the war years, and, most recently, the FBIs investigations of communists. Those cases, along with the Bureaus attendant public relations campaigns, had made Hoover into one of the most widely admired men in American politics, championed by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals alike. They had also earned him a small but incisive group of critics, who warned that his methods and thirst for power endangered American democracy.

The FBI Story director Mervyn LeRoy counted himself among Hoovers admirers. He had allowed Hoover to review and approve the films script. Still, he confessed to being nervous about what the FBI director would think. If Hoover was most famous as a lawman, he was also known as a ruthless political warrior, unyielding to those who criticized him or tarnished his Bureaus reputation. To LeRoys relief, Hoover looked pleased as the lights came up. Mervyn, thats one of the greatest jobs Ive ever seen, he declared after two and a half hours of watching his life story unfold. One aide thought he saw tears in Hoovers eyes, the first time he had ever seen the indomitable FBI director show a human side.

If Hoover had decided to step down at that moment in 1959, after thirty-five years at the FBIs helm, we might remember him differently: as a popular and well-respected government official, often cruel and controversial but a hero to more Americans than not. Instead, he stayed on through the 1960s and emerged as one of historys great villains, perhaps the most universally reviled American political figure of the twentieth century. His abuses and excesses, from the secret manipulations of COINTELPRO to his deep-seated racism, offer a troubling case study in unaccountable government power.

G-Man is the first major biography of Hoover to be published in nearly three decades. One of its goals is to document those abuses and then some, drawing upon recently released files to show how Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of the administrative state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history. But Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and backroom schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 until his death in 1972, he was the most influential federal appointee of the twentieth century, a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents. He also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. Far from making him a public scourge, these two aspects of his life garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans, including many of the countrys leading politicians, for most of his career.