'Shunned from the American political story': Author offers new insights on the now-infamous J. Edgar Hoover

25 November 2022

Former President Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists have crossed so many dangerous lines that controversial right-wing figures who crossed lines in the past — such as President Richard Nixon and long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover — seem quaint by comparison. Watergate-era veterans that include former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks, television journalist Dan Rather and Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have argued that Nixon’s corruption pales in comparison to Trump’s actions. And some historians who are vehemently critical of Hoover have been even more critical of Trump.

Regardless, Hoover is now widely regarded as the most controversial FBI director in the agency’s 114-year history, and countless historians have lambasted him for spying on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Author/history professor Beverly Gage takes an in-depth look at Hoover’s history in her new book, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” — a book she discussed during a late November appearance on the Daily Beast’s podcast “The New Abnormal.”

Gage told co-host Andy Levy, “It’s extremely hard to find people who want to champion J. Edgar Hoover, and that is not my goal either. But I do think there are more interesting and subtle things to say about him than simply that he was a very bad man who did some very bad things…. This book is less about judging him than about understanding him and thus understanding ourselves and our national political past. And I was struck by that because here’s a guy who, for so long, was so admired.”

The FBI goes back to 1908, when it was called the Bureau of Investigation; in 1935, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, the agency was restructured and reorganized under a new name, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And Hoover served as its director from 1924 up until his death in 1972 at the age of 77 — a total of 48 years.

Hoover became increasingly controversial along the way as more and more came out about his corruption and his authoritarian leanings. But during her “New Abnormal” appearance, Gage stressed that for many years, Hoover was a very mainstream figure among both Democrats and Republicans.

Gage explained, “I joke with a friend of mine that the thesis of the book is that if Hoover sucked, we all sucked because in fact, he was incredibly popular for most of his career…. And he was really widely supported by Republicans, by Democrats, by presidents, by Congress. And so, we can’t really think of him as just this rogue agent that we’ve now, you know, shunned from the American political story. He was right in the center of it for most of the time that he was in office.”

Gage, during the interview, went on to tell Levy, “One of the most telling polls I came across in doing this research was a poll from 1964, which is a moment when Hoover has declared Martin Luther King, quote, ‘the most notorious liar in the country.’ The FBI is on a big campaign against King, and in our own contemporary consciousness, King is the great hero and Hoover is the great villain — and rightly so. But when you actually look at polls from that moment, 50 percent of Americans said they supported Hoover in that encounter.”

Gage added, “Only 16 percent said they supported King, and then, a bunch of the rest were just sort of undecided…. The past is a lot more complicated and, in some ways, a lot darker than we often want to think.”

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