*G-Man* is a well written and absorbing story of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI during more than 50 years of Hoover’s service. I learned a lot, and I highly recommend this Pulitzer Prize winning biography.
Gage doesn’t hold back when describing Hoover’s illegal and dirty deeds, but also examines his motivations and accomplishments. Hoover had little tolerance for any law breakers on the right or the left, but did not hesitate to break the law himself in his campaigns against perceived threats to the country. And for many decades he was the sole arbiter of who was and was not a threat. That said, he did pursue perceived threats on the right as well as the left.
Most of what I’ve heard about Hoover related to his persecution of Martin Luther King, which was indeed nasty and unjustified, and his related campaign against both white and black leftists after King’s assassination. Gage describes these campaigns in detail.
What I did not know about was Hoover’s similar campaign against the KKK in the South, which was successful but could not be publicized due to the tactics used. I also wasn’t aware of the distinction between Hoover’s campaign against American communists, which was based on years of fact gathering, and Joseph McCarthy’s reckless accusations, which were not.
Hoover used many illegal methods in the name of law and order. But he wasn’t like McCarthy. Hoover did not simply pick names out of a hat when he accused people of being communists, but based his accusations on years of cultivating informers and investigating the communist party, including Soviet spies.
Furthermore, Hoover made his accusations behind the scenes, and not in front of cameras like McCarthy. Indeed, Hoover, like Eisenhower, worked behind the scenes to stop McCarthy’s reckless campaign and were glad to see him discredited. I’ve often heard Hoover and McCarthy lumped together as either paranoid or grandstanders or both, but they were very different men.
Hoover’s most controversial and clearly illegal program was COINTELPRO, short for Counterintelligence Program. The program began in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. It involved illegal activities such as break-ins and unauthorized wire taps, among other things.
In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. COINTELPRO was only a very small part of the FBI’s activities, but it was rightly criticized when exposed, and indeed Hoover was aware that it would be criticized and went to great lengths to avoid exposure. It only came to light after his death.
There were some limits to what Hoover would do. Despite a close relationship with Nixon, he refused to use the FBI against Nixon’s political enemies, particularly Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers revealing the secret history of the War in Vietnam. Nixon formed the White House Plumbers to stop and/or respond to such leaks when he couldn’t get what he wanted from Hoover. Unfortunately for Nixon, the Plumbers were not competent, and got caught during the Watergate break-in, with the resulting scandal eventually leading to Nixon’s resignation.
It didn’t help Nixon that Hoover had died before the scandal broke, and that the FBI deeply resented Nixon’s appointment of an outsider, L. Patrick Gray, to head the FBI. As a result, Gray’s second in command, Mark Felt, became Woodward and Bernstein’s famous source, Deep Throat, leaking information they needed to pursue the Watergate story. The White House actually found out Felt was leaking information, but feared to fire him because then he could go public about everything. Many of Nixon’s supporters believed that if Hoover had been alive he would have successfully protected his long time friend Nixon.
Hoover was a master of propaganda. He would leak information he wanted publicized to friendly journalists. He worked with TV studios to create programs glorifying the FBI. He gave many speeches extolling law and order. He networked with police departments around the country, inviting local police to undergo FBI training, and staying in touch with former FBI agents who went to work for the police. Hoover also used all his powers and connections to attack unfriendly journalists, often getting them or their editors to squelch unfriendly coverage, at least until his last few years in office.
Finally, I’ve also heard a lot of nasty remarks about Hoover’s apparent homosexuality. I don’t think we should make fun of Hoover for this reason any more than we make fun of anyone else accused of being a homosexual. The real question is whether Hoover himself hypocritically persecuted homosexuals, and Gage suggests that he did not, at least not willingly.
Gage never conclusively says Hoover was a homosexual, but presents a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was. Assuming he was, this presented a problem when homosexuals in government were persecuted in the 1950s due to the belief that they posed a security threat. Gage suggests that Hoover was never enthused about this persecution, and didn’t pursue homosexuals the way he pursued communists.
by wjbc