Transcripts For CSPAN3 Beverly 20240705

But in. Good evening, everyone. I believe we have a very nice, very, very nice audience tonight. I think perhaps the largest audience weve had since precovid. So welcome to tonights program. Only truly iconic figures of the 20th century american history. The long time fbi director j. Edgar hoover, a special. I suppose its not surprising that in a series titled great lives, the term iconic often comes up to the point of being somewhat trite, perhaps. But in this case, particularly, i think its appropriate because there are few figures to whom that description applies more properly. I agree that the j. Edgar hoover, for people of a certain generation, the man and i believe many of yours as well known, i dont mean to insult you, but yeah, no name in our earlier years was more problem. Or for a longer period of time than hoovers. After all, while president s came and went, eight of them during his career, in fact, hoover remained a towering figure, for better or worse, or perhaps i should say, for better and worse, as our speaker this evening will describe before introducing her. I want to thank our sponsors for the evenings program. Dr. John and linda coca, and ask them to stand. I know youre out there, john and linda, where are you. At . And i might add that applause is also in order for another reason. And that is that the caucus this week and will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. So congratulate. Im delighted to introduce our speaker, professor beverly gage of yale university, where she teaches u. S. History courses focusing on politics, government and social movements. She is herself a graduate of yale, earning a b. A. In american studies, followed by a ph. D. In history from columbia university. She is the author of the day wall street exploded a story of america in its first age of terror, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to her teaching and research, professor gage writes for numerous journals and magazines, including the new yorker, New York Times and washington post. She has won numerous awards for her teaching and academic work, and in 2021 was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve on the National Humanities council. The Advisory Board to the National Endowment for the humanities. Her most recent work, published just last year, is titled man j. Edgar hoover and the making of the american century. Ive known about this book throughout its gestation period, in part because reports from several of her yale colleagues who have been speakers in our great lives series. I had been alerted that it would be a phenomenal book, which it turned out to be. But even so, i was astonished by the extraordinary acclaim that it has received in my job as director of great lives. Ive read a lot of reviews, but dont think ive ever encountered the uniform warmly laudatory praise that has been lavished on professor gages book. One reviewer has called it, quote, unflinching inside and riveting part biography, part political thriller, and much more and essential new history of 20th century america. Another eminent historian, john lewis gaddis, has commented that the book is, quote, rigorously researched, vividly written. And the most remarkably fair. It will long remain as the definitive account and so of the great pleasure indeed that i welcome to the university of Mary Washington and to the great lab series, one of americas most Outstanding Young historians and biographers. Professor beverly gage. Well, thanks to bill for that kind introduction and to so many of you for turning out on this warm winter evening to hear some talk about a man who i think in many ways dominated american politics and government in the 20th century. But who also in the 21st century was ripe for some reinterpretation. And thats what ive tried to do in this biography. And tonight, im just going to give you a few highlights of that and then hopefully we will have a robust question and answer period. I think part of the nature of of hoover is that i can give the big picture and then in my experience, many people have come with questions about particular the investigations, particular aspects of his life which spanned so much time and for better and worse, as bill said, he had his fingers in so many Different Things over the course of the 20th century that i want to make sure that we get to your interests as well as mine. When most americans hear about j. Edgar hoover or think about him today, one of two images tends to come to mind. This is the first hoover as the great surveiller the person who was watching everyone. And in the process of doing that, often committed many abuses of Civil Liberties, many acts of excess of power and really expressed what it meant to be unaccountable and to have your fingers in everything over the course of the 20th century. This is hoover as perhaps the greatest villain in our Public Discourse about the 20th century. The second image that comes up again, for better or worse, tends to be about hoover, his sexuality, his private life, and in particular, the rumors that circulated very widely in the early 1990s, in particular that hoover liked to wear womens clothing. I do write in the book about hoovers sexual ity, and im happy to talk more about those rumors and their validity or lack thereof in many cases. But this evening i wanted to start with a different image. This is a set of images from hoovers funal in may of 1972, and i think that there are a couple of things that are worth noting about this particular moment. First is just how long j. Edgar hoover had been in office and in power, or by 1972, when he finally died with his boots on as fbi director, still in that job at that moment. Just to give you a sense of what i mean when i say j. Edgar hoover was there for so long. He had gotten that job in 1924 and had stayed in that job for 48 years as fbi director. And to just fill that out a little bit more. This is a cartoon from 1968 after the 1968 election, showing all of the president s that hoover had served under. And of course, in most cases its outlasted. So he was appointed director of this Little Organization known as the bureau of investigation under Calvin Coolidge in 1924. He then stayed on for Herbert Hoover in the late twenties and early thirties. So those are the years of the onset of the great depression. He then remained for all three plus years of Franklin Roosevelts time in office. So that was the onset of the new deal. And then, of course, the Second World War. That is roosevelt seated there, signing a critical piece of crime legislation from the 1930s. And hoover is basically the young man right behind him. And one of the things that i should tell you that is often a newsflash to many people is that j. Edgar hoover was in fact once a young man. Even though we all imagine him as that kind of towering old bulldog that is so stamped in so many peoples minds, hes there for all of Franklin Roosevelts time in office. He stays on through harry truman. So thats the late forties into the early fifties. The rise of the red scare. Mccarthy ism, the onset of the cold war. He was there for both of Dwight Eisenhowers terms. So through the 1950s, which as ill talk about, were in many ways kind of hoovers happiest years in office and in many ways the heyday of his power. He then stayed on for john kennedy as president in the early sixties. He stayed on through Lyndon Johnson and finally through the first term of Richard Nixon, at which point he died toward the end of nixons first term. So to return to that funeral moment, one of the first things that many people said when j. Edgar hoover died in 1972 was, i cannot remember a United States of america without j. Edgar hoover, that he had been a monument. He had often been controversial, particularly in his later years, but that he had been an institution in his own right. And in fact, when he dies, there are many editorials comparing him to the washington monument. Right. When you come to washington, what do you see . Whats been here forever . The monuments and j. Edgar hoover. And the other feature that i would note about his funeral is just what a landmark event it was. In many ways in popular and political culture, as the headline suggests, it was covered by all three television networks. There were three of them at the time. It was covered live. They stopped. There were other programing to focus on the death of j. Edgar hoover. And as people began to weigh in on hoovers life, republicans and democrats, ordinary citizens and high political figures. What many of them said was not only that he had been there for a long, long time, but that despite all of the controversy, he had remained incredibly popular and wellrespected. And in many ways, though, i spent more than a decade doing research into deep and secret records, filing freedom of information act requests, trying to find out some of the secrets that hoover might not have wanted us to know. I think the most surprising thing in this book may be that simple fact that hoover was, for most of his career, incredibly popular, wellrespected. Well supported in washington and in the country at large. Today, we tend to think of him as a great villain in many ways as a kind of one dimensional villain. And that makes it easy to forget just how central he was. As bill said, for better and for worse, during most of the time that he was alive. So in writing this biography, i wanted to really wrestle with those two big facts. His longevity in office, combined with his popularity, his support, his influence, these aspects of his life that i think have become much less visible in the 50 years since his death. And to think about not only what that meant for telling a story about a single life, but for thinking of hoover as a lens into broader themes about american politics and government. Ill return to these at the end of the talk, but ill just highlight a few of them right now so you can think about them as we go along. So one is that hoover, i think turns our gaze away from many of the ways that we tend to narrate our national story, our political story as being about president s and elections and Political Parties and congress and turns it toward the poor out of our government, where in fact, most of the work of government is done, which is a career Civil Servants, people who make their lives in government, who go to work for the government and stay there, not through an electoral. Process, but through a process of appointment or Civil Service. In hoovers case, appointment into what was in his early years the very beginnings of both the Security State and the administrative state. And so i think part of hoovers story is about being in the right place at the right time as our federal government grew and really explode it in many ways over the course of this period from the twenties through the seventies. And so he directs our attention there. I think hes also something of a political puzzle and one that we dont see a whole lot of today in our government, which is to say that he came of age during the progressive era as really something of a true believer in a set of ideas that we tend to associate with being kind of progressive or liberal ideas about expertise and professionalism in government, about the virtues of nonpartisan Government Service, about the desire to create a kind of scientific fact finding agency that was going to stand outside of politics and serve the public good. And at the same time, he was a really passionate, devout, outspoken, ideological conservative on issues like race and anticommunism and religion and law and order and i think that the puzzle of hoovers career and in some ways what made it work is that he put those ideas together. As i said, its not a combination. We see a lot in our own politics, but hoover really fuzed these two ways of working and looking at the world and created the fbi out of that. And then the third theme that i just emphasize in starting is something that ive already suggested, which is thinking about hoover not as a rogue agent, not as someone who sort of sat alone in a room strong arming the rest of the country into submission. The man that nobody liked who did everything in secret. Now there is some truth to all of that. Hoover did a lot of strong arming. He liked secrecy. And so i dont want to discount those parts of his career. But i think in many ways, as i suggest it, he was a much more popular figure, much more widely supported in a bipartisan way than that kind of caricature would suggest. And therefore, i think it means when we look at a figure like j. Edgar hoover, when we think about him, were not just thinking about hoover, were thinking about the broader political history of the United States. And in many ways, he was channeling ideas as and techniques and beliefs that many people supported and wanted and embraced and enabled over the course of his career. So with those ideas in mind, i thought i would spend the next half hour or so just giving you a little bit of an overview of this book, which as i mentioned, i spent more than a decade working on and partly as a result of that, its a very big long book. I highly recommend that you buy it. I will even sign it afterwards, but i will warn you, its a book of about 800 pages, in part because hoover was there doing so much for some of this. So much of this of this time. The audio book is 37 hours long. Its a very good narrator. And again, i recommend it. And i should say the chapters are short, the book is long. The chapters are short. But i will only be able to give you the kind of big picture, the big story of of whats in those pages. And we can get into some of the details of of the investigations. I should say. One of the one of the joys of working on this book, which is perhaps rather strange thing to say about writing a book about j. Edgar hoover. But nonetheless, one of the joys of working on this book was that while i was working on a single subject, that subject led me in so many different directions. It led me into the city of washington, which a lot of the book is about. It led me into the history of the Civil Rights Movement, into the history of the red scare, into the history of the Second World War, into history of american crime, fighting into president ial politics, into grass roots politics, into the Security State, into Public Opinion polls and the history of the press. So all of that is there in the book. And ill just give you a little taste of it this evening. This is a birth to death story like many of the biographies and figures who appear in the great live series and it is a story that really begins with hoovers family in washington, d. C. , and his birth in that city in 1895. Hoover is a pure creature of washington. Hes born on capitol hill on january first, 1895. He dies in washington in 1972. He never lives anywhere else. And he is in many ways, i think, produced by the city of washington and representative of the city of washington in a variety of ways. So this is young hoover. This is the only bona fide picture of hoover wearing a dress that we have in the historical record. And as i said, he really grew up in washington. And one of the things thats interesting about his history is that even in 1895, he was born into a family that was sort of steeped in the world of Government Service in the late 19th century. Washington is not a big city. Its not actually a city that a lot of people want to be living in. And the government itself is relatively small. There are not many people who could say that going back generations. Their family had been part of the Government Service, that they were long time citizens of the city of washington. But hoover was, in fact, one of them. He came from a pretty middle class family. His father worked for the government. But in a midlevel sort of Civil Service position, he went to the washington public schools, then went on to George Washington university, and from there entered the federal government immediately and never left. So a few things to note about the city of washington that i think turn out to be very important for hoovers later career. One is this history of Government Service. This is hoover as a cadet at Central High School in washington, where he was kind of a star student. He was valedictorian and he was a cadet captain. He was a debate star. And he at central high and elsewhere, was really immersed in a world that prioritized service to the government and employment by the federal government, in particular as one of its highest values and highest priorities. And so throughout his childhood and these institutions in which he came of age, he was really infused with many of these ideas about expertise, nonpartisanship, professional ism, all of these ideas that are just coming into being during this era and are beginning to be applied to government work because he lived in the city of washington and because washington citizen could not vote, he never cast a ballot in his life. He never joined a political party. And in fact, he sold himself. And then ultimately sold the fbi as a fundamental, elite, nonpartisan institution that was supposed to be doing Something Different than kind of the scrum of of democratic politics. He grew up in that world, and it shaped him from the beginning. The other piece of washing in history that i think shaped hoover very early on was its history as a Southern City and a city that was actively undergoing racial segregation during the time that hoover was a young man at the moment that he entered Government Service during the Wilson Administration was a moment in which the federal government was becoming much more firmly segregated along racial lines and a lot of his education and upbringing were also steeped in a kind of racially hierarchical, segregationist ethos that i think in many ways ended up being best represented by the fraternity that he joined when he was a student at George Washington university. It was a fraternity called kappa alpha and kappa alpha was an explicitly southern fraternity. It was a fraternity widely known both in fraternal circles and in political circles, as standing for sort of the way of life of the white south. It had been founded in 1865, in the aftermath of the civil war. Explicit only to carry on the traditions of robert e lee and by the time hoover joined in 1913 and 1914, some of its most famous alarms were some of the most influential segregationist cultural and political figures in the United States. One of them was a man named thomas dixon, who wrote a novel called the klansman that became the basis for the birth of a nation, which came out in 1915. The famous silent film glorifying the ku klux klan came out during. The time that hoover was in college. And kappa alpha, in its Alumni Network also had an enormous concentration of southern democrats who had come to washington in many of them to serve in the Wilson Administration, who spent a lot of time hanging out at the chapter house with the younger college boys. These are some images from the history of kappa alpha. Thats birth of a nation and the klansmen are up there on the top. Thats a picture from the 1950s when kappa alpha became instrumental in popularizing the confederate flag. Once again as a symbol in part of southern white resistance to civil rights and as you can see from this document over here, this is hoover being honored by the fraternity in 1966. He remained a lifetime supporter of and with with involvement in in kappa alpha. So i think these two elements coming out of the city of washington, his educational experiences have really shaped hoover. And he then happened to graduate into you federal service in a key moment in american history. And that moment was 1917. For those of you who know your american history, the spring of 1917 is important. For one key reason, which is that the United States was entering the first world war. Hoover graduated from law school in the spring of 1917, and immediately moved not into military service but into the Justice Department, which was going through a massive wartime expansion, had just acquired all sorts of new duties and had a desperate need for ambitious ships and competent and smart Young Lawyers who could help out with those wartime duties. He entered the Justice Department in 1917 and he never left. His first job there changed a little bit over time, but he always remained a justice employee. He hoovers first job at the Justice Department was working in an area of war work that we i think, have largely forgotten about, which was german internment and registration. So the United States government ran an internment program aimed at noncitizens of german german citizens living in the United States, people who are not american citizens who were deemed disloyal or somehow threats to the american war effort. That was hoovers first job, helping to decide who ought to be interned and not. And it turned out that he was so good at that work that in 1919, at the ripe young age of 24, he got a big promotion. And really one of the critical promotions in his life in 1990 when he was made the head of a new Division Within the Justice Department. And this Little Organization called the bureau of investigation that was called the radical division. The radical division was the federal governments first peacetime surveillance effort aimed primarily at left wing radicals in the United States. You just had the bolshevik revolution in russia. There were lots of concern about revolution, violence and strikes in the United States. And 24 year old j. Edgar hoover is put in charge of some of the First Federal efforts at watching and containing these forces in american life. He turns out to be particularly instrumental in something that became known as the palmer raids, which were a series of deportation raids aimed first at anarchists and then at communists. And you can see during these early years that hes forming his ideas that are going to become so central. His views of anticommunism, his suspicion of american leftist communists and radicals. These are also the years in which he first encounters an organization thats going to be quite important in the rest of his life. A brand new organization known as the aclu, who at first encounters Civil Liberties, critiques that target the palmer raids. But he manages to survive that criticism. Thats aimed at the palmer raids in 1921. He got a promotion to be assistant director of this little part of the Justice Department, known as the bureau of investigation. And then in 1924, he became its director and stayed there for the next 48 years. So that is part one of the book these years from 1895 through 1924, the years in which hoover is not only coming of age, but beginning to develop and in many ways really already solidify many of the ideas that are going to be central to the way that he builds the fbi. Ideas about race, ideas about governance, ideas about public service, ideas about communism, which in many ways remain quite consistent for the rest of his life. If you look at what j. Edgar hoover is saying, in 1919, it doesnt look all that different from what hes saying in 1972. So theres a remarkable consistency in hoovers life and career. And at the same time, he is also someone who is able to pivot to change, to remold his institution and in many ways to remold himself in order to meet the various crises of the 20th century. And that in many ways, is what parts two, three and four are about these years in which he first builds the bureau and then really uses the power of the bureau to do some of the things in american politics and culture and National Security that he thinks are most important. So part to begins in 1924 with this moment that hoover became head of the bureau and one of the things that its sort of funny to think about, given what we know about hoover today, is that he really came into that position as a young reformer. He was 29 years old when he became the head of the bureau. And he was brought in really to do two things. One was to move away from some of the Civil Liberties abuses that had been so prominent during the era of the palmer raids. The second was really to clean up the bureau after the scandals, a lot of them corruption scandals, whiskey peddling, poker playing, bribery that had characterized the years of the Justice Department under warren harding. So hoover came in as a reformer. And some of what he does in those very first years is promise that he is going to have this kind of shining model of gentlemen bentley work. His men are going to be lawyers, theyre going to be accountants, theyre going to be college educated, theyre going to be incorrupt able, and theyre never going to do any of the things that are more nefarious as practices of Law Enforcement, such as wiretapping, opening peoples mail in addition to strong arming and other things. Now, of course, j. Edgar hoover doesnt really stick with all of these early promises, but they are an important part of how he comes into this office. And they do hold at least to some degree, for his first decade as director. When he comes into the bureau, actually the bureau doesnt have that many things that its in charge of doing. Federal jurisdiction is pretty limited during the twenties and into the thirties. And so he concentrates a lot of his energy during those years on perfecting the bureaucracy that he wants to create. The first thing that he does is decide that hes going to hire the kind of men that he believes in that he thinks will forward his vision. And that means hiring men who are pretty much like him. A lot of the first generation of fbi agents and officials under hoover come out of two institutions. One is George Washington university. His alma mater. These are early fbi officials who were all gw graduates. The other is kappa alpha in particular. And fraternity is more broadly. He has a very particular type of man that he wants to hire. And in many ways, that remains who an fbi agent is under hoover. You know, when you say what is an fbi agent look like, what does a gman look like . Theres a very particular image and a very particular answer that tall white guy in the suit that is the product of the kinds of reforms hoover made during these years. The most important of those recruits, straight out of george George Washington university and a rival fraternity there is this man, clyde tolson, who is in these early years really kind of just an ordinary agent, someone hired to meet hoovers standard needs. But as im sure many of you know, goes on to be the most important person in hoovers life rises not only to be the number two man at the fbi, but also essentially hoovers life partner. They end up not living together, but doing just about Everything Else together, traveling together, socializing together, eating all of their meals together, really performing the function of social partners or spouses for each other. And that, of course, both then and now, raises the question about what that relationship consisted of. Was it a sexual relationship . How did they feel about each other . And i write quite a lot of that in the book. In the end, i try to rely on the evidence that we do have and not try to imagine the evidence that we dont have. And there is on the social front, a surprising amount of evidence about their partnership. And in fact, perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how publicly it was, how widely accepted it was in the highest levels of washington social life, in new york, in florida, in los angeles, in the places that they traveled and lived their lives together. Was it a sexual relationship . I think that piece, we just dont know. Its clear that neither hoover nor tolson dated women in a serious way and that they cared really deeply for each other. He bk, as i said, i go into this in much more detail. I also include what turned out to be some of the most useful and interesting sources to try to, you know, figure out what this relationship ship really consisted of and a lot of those are photographs both from hoovers official collection and his private collection. Ill just a few of them here. This is hoover and tolson together at the fbi by celebrating one of tolson anniversaries there. I kind of like it. It looks a little bit like a like a wedding photo, but a very formal, very formal photo of the two of them together. But a lot of what is in hoovers personal collection are much more private photos of their beach vacations, the time that they spent on the road together. This is this is hoover looking into the camera, you know, on a beach vacation. Heres a photo of, tolson. These are really very intimate photos. And i think they suggest, you know, a pretty deep and caring relationship, if not one that we can fully characterize in. I think the terms that we would turn to today. So thats the personal side of hoovers life in the twenties, thirties and forties, as he and tolson are really getting to know each other, spending more time together. But most of hoovers energies during those years going into the fbi itself and these are the years in which hes really building the bureau in his own image, according to his own ideas. And this is the period in which the fbi gets most of the powers that it has today. A few features of that hoover is, as i said, a big believer inside science and social science and expertise. And so during these early years at the bureau, he begins to do many of the things that the fbi is still doing along these lines and really sets out to make the fbi a kind of pioneering model for the rest of Law Enforcement in terms of adopting new techniques and ideas. He builds up a grand national id or fingerprint apparatus in which the bureau begins collecting first criminal fingerprints and then fingerprints of government employees. He founds the famous fbi lab during these years, and he also works very hard to get the fbi to become the people who collect our crime statistics. There was a battle over this in the early thirties. Hoover wanted to do that. He thought that he could do it well and that it would help him sort of interpret the phenomenon of crime to the rest of the country. So when you hear today about the fbis uniform crime reports, you read about crime statistics, those go back to this era of hoovers life coming out of this. Hoovers big selling point, the fbi, is that its a model bureaucracy. Right. And he sells himself as kind of a model bureaucrat. And administrator to the degree that anyone is yet paying attention. This is a publicity shot of the fbi in the twenties, and there are countless shots like this which are just guys standing around filing cabinets, basically. And that was their big image that then has a dramatic change in the 1930s when i think the fbi more recognizable and begins under Franklin Roosevelt to acquire many of the duties that we would associate with the fbi first. There is the war on crime of the 1930s, a period when from about 1933 to 1936, the fbi suddenly pivots from being this kind of nice white collar gathering of lawyers and accountants to suddenly needing to really fight crime. They get jurisdiction over bank robbery. They get jurisdiction over federal kidnaping and kidnaping. That crosses state lines. And they become sort of armed crime fighters for in many ways, the first time on a mass scale in their own history. Many fbi agents before this moment did not carry guns. And then suddenly, by the mid 1930s, its not filing cabinets anymore. Right. Its agents with tommy guns fighting crime. The person most responsible for giving those powers to hoover is Franklin Roosevelt. And in fact, it is the two great liberal president s of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who are most responsible for giving hoover his formal and institutional power. And in the thirties, the fbi then, in a very rapid way, begins to acquire a whole set of new duties that come to define it as the federal Law Enforcement agency that we know today. As i mentioned, theres big federal anticrime drive, a war on crime that they become really central to during the new deal. The fbi during these years also begins to move much more aggressively into the world of publicity and Public Relations. Hoover learns partly from Franklin Roosevelt and other figures in the new deal. Government that the work of government isnt selfserving and that youve got to sell it to the american people. And he begins to invest very heavily in the thirties and then for the rest of his career, in an elaborate Public Relations apparatus that deals with the press, that deals with hollywood, that deals with grassroots groups like the American Legion to represent the fbi and the heroic image of j. Edgar hoover in the way that he wants. And then finally, as the war comes along, the fbi acquires a whole new set of Domestic Intelligence duties that it had been moving away from after the first world war, but that Franklin Roosevelt in particular, urges hoover to reengage age. And that ranges from reentering surveillance of fascist groups, communist groups, various social in the United States, and also taking on things like wartime espionage, sabotage, investigations, etc. So by 1945, the essential architecture of the fbi, i think as we still know it today is really in place. Theyre doing a lot of technical work, crime statistics, lab work, fingerprints, etc. They are now the premier Crime Fighting Law Enforcement agency, and they have also become the central Domestic Intelligence agency of the United States. Sometimes all of those things go together very well. Sometimes theyre a little bit at odds with each other, particularly Law Enforcement work versus intelligence work. They can be very different ways of approaching the world, but that is the fbi as we know it today in a very broad sense, and that comes out of these early decades of hoovers career. Last thing to say about this is that over those years, the twenties, thirties into the forties, the fbi expands dramatically. During the Second World War alone. The size of the bureau more or less quadruples. This is the washington armory. And this is, if you think back to our our filing cabinets from before the twenties, you have your one nice room of filing cabinets. Now, the washington armory itself is full of filing cabinets, fingerprints. And it gives you a sense of the fbis growth and of the rising significance of j. Edgar hoover hoover. All right. Now, id like to just talk little bit more about the half of hoovers career, which i think in many ways is the more familiar year. Part of hoovers story for us today. Not only because its a closer chronologically, but i think these are really the periods in which he has already become a celebrity and begins to do with what what he wants with the institution hes created and the power and celebrity that he has acquired. So part three of the book looks at the years. From 1945 to 1960. So these are the years of truman and eisenhower. These are the years of the red scare and of macarthur theism. And while joe mccarthy is, i think, still are kind of remembered icon of that period and of the anticommunist surge of those years in many ways. Hoover i think, was truly the more important. First of all, he was there long before joseph mccarthy. This is the cover of newsweek from 1947 at a moment where no one has ever heard of joseph mccarthy. He is just entering national politics. He doesnt really become famous until several years later. And hoover is also much more effective during those years, a taking his own vision of anticommunism. The need to contain it both at home and abroad, at institute, analyzing it. In contrast to someone like mccarthy. Mccarthy he was good at making speeches and getting headlines. But throughout forties and fifties, hoover is working very hard in a wide variety of ways to, not only promote his own vision in public, but to build new sets of relationships and new forms of institutional power that are going to allow him to carry out his vision of the struggle against communism. One of my favorite parts of the book are the chapters in the forties where he begins to work with congressional committees. One thing that happens after the Second World War is that congressional committees acquire professional staff for the first time. But before this moment, they basically didnt really have their own investigators or professional staff. Lots of congressmen are still opening their own mail. They dont have very many people working in their offices. And suddenly they say, well, you know, if were going to combat this great colossus of the presidency and the executive branch that has come out of the new deal, you know, we need our own staff, too. And so they give themselves this whole new world of professional staffing, and then they look around and they say, oh, well, who are we going to get thats qualified to staff our committees . And many of them turn to j. Edgar hoover and say, you seem to have good investigators. Do you want to staff our committees and hoover often says, sure, ill do that. So fbi agents begin to staff the appropriate committee. And amazingly, hoovers appropriations never go down from that point on. They begin to work with committees like the House Committee on unamerican activities. Q ask the famous committee of that era, the Senate Internal security subcommittee, and this is hoover testifying before congress in the early 1950s as Committee Power is growing. So thats just one sample of sort of hoovers bureaucratic genius. He has his own anticommunist vision, and then hes very smart at figuring out all sorts of ways to build out that power in congress in the country at large and elsewhere. He does work a little bit with joe mccarthy. So this is hoover and, tolson and mccarthy all on vacation together. So hoovers over there. Tolson, the second from your left, and mccarthy is on the end there. So they were friends. They moved the same social world. They did share certain points of view. But one of the things that was really interesting to me in looking at this period was how differently many people perceived hoover and mccarthy under the truman administration, under the eisenhower power administration. Many people are saying, you know, mccarthy is the irresponsible one. J. Edgar hoover is our responsible. You know, institution based, state based, public servant. And in fact, even many liberals and even some leftists kind of rally behind hoover as the preferred alternative to joseph mccarthy. And thats sort of a through line for me in thinking about hoover was discovering over and over again. In fact, though, this isnt the way we tend to see him today throughout his lifetime, many liberals, in fact, supported. Public opinion polls throughout the fifties bear this out. When people are asked if they think j. Edgar hoover is doing a good job during the red scare, he is getting Approval Ratings in the 7080s and 90 percentiles. He is regularly declared to be one of the most Popular Figures in the United States, and that is in part because hes doing a lot of outreach on these sorts of questions through his Public Relations apparatus. Theres just a few photos that suggest this. This is, you know, just some exterminator. Hoovers published a big book called masters of deceit about the threat of communism and a local Small Business owner has decided that hes going to paint the the bench is at bus stops telling people to believe in j. Edgar hoover. And hoover did not only talk about communism, he also spent a lot of the fifties lecturing American Parents about how to raise children who were not going to turn to crime, turn to communism. Here is a pamphlet. Hoover telling you, you know, if i had a son, which he did not, here is what i would do. American parents. And then hes also talking very publicly during these years about his religious faith, his christianity. And in fact urging everyone to be church, going to sunday school. And hes really through these mechanisms, making himself not only a National Security figure, but a real and important and influential cultural force in american life. So thats part three of the book. When we move through, as i said, the forties and fifties. And then the last part of the book, up with the sixties and early seventies, the period that is the most famous and even in hoovers life was the most controversial period of his career. If he had retired in the late 1950s, he would be remembered very differently. I think he was still getting those Public Opinion polls that put him way, way up in the 90 . Giles. That changes over the course of the 1960s for many of the reasons that i think are familiar to people today. So the sixties moved through three really fascinating and for hoover, quite complicated presidencies. The first is the presidency of john kennedy. And you what i love about this photo is that it really captures how they all felt about each other. It didnt go so well for anyone concerned. You know, kennedy came into office. He was the first president who was younger than hoover. He had different views than hoover. And hoover particularly did not like Robert Kennedy, who was appointed attorney general by his president , brother. Hes just in his midthirties at that point. Hoover is really furious about this, tries to get along with Robert Kennedy. That falls apart pretty quickly for a variety of reasons, having to do with personality and culture and politics. And im happy to talk about that more in the q a, if of interest. One thing that hoover really didnt like about Robert Kennedy is that, you know, fbi agents were buttoned down. Hoover came with a perfectly pressed suit, a flower in his lapel every day. And if that flower was fading by midday, he got a new flower for his lapel. And Robert Kennedy would just sit right would take off his jacket. He would loosen his ties. He would fold up his Shirt Sleeves. And this outrageous to j. Edgar hoover. And there are some very kind of funny memos in which hoover is talking about the Shirt Sleeves problem and what he means by that is, is the attorney general, having taken off his suit coat. So the kennedy years are really fascinating, as are the johnson years. I said Franklin Roosevelt was really important in giving hoover his institution more power. We can thank Lyndon Johnson for basically making hoover director for life. One of the earliest things that johnson does as president is exempt hoover from the mandatory federal retirement age of 70. This is the ceremony in which hoovers looking very pleased, kind of pretending to be surprised and johnson is saying, you know, you dont have to retire. America cannot survive without you. J. Edgar hoover they have a really relationship. They were neighbors on the same street in washington beginning in the forties. And so by the time johnson became Vice President and then ultimately president , they were very tight. And in many ways, johnson used hoover more aggressively. And i think more effectively both for better and for worse than any other president. And then we, of course, finish up with hoover and nixon, which it might seem strange to say is my favorite relationship ship in the whole book, in part because many people think about both hoover and nixon as such kind of unlikable, friendless figures, but they really liked each other. They too got to know each other. In the forties were very close when nixon was Vice President under eisenhower and then remained close through the sixties. And when nixon comes back around to being president in 1968, hoover is very excited about nixons electoral victory. But they run into some problems once nixons actually be in power because. Nixon wants the fbi to do a lot of very political things that hoover doesnt especially want to do. And they end up in some conflict. So the last part of the book takes on these three really important president ial relationships. It also takes on some of the most important investigation sessions of hoovers later years. One being the kennedy assassin nation and then the Warren Commission that emerges, of course, after Lee Harvey Oswald is murdered. The second is more Martin Luther kings assassination in 1968, which is a really expansive and high profile fbi investigation. This part of the book also looks in particular about hoovers surveillance and disruption of many of the social movements and organizations of the 1960s, the antiwar, the student movement, the black power movement, almost anything you can name. Hoover was watching and in many cases actively engaged in trying to disrupt and contain those movements. The fbis investigation into Martin Luther king in particular plays a big role in the book. And i think, you know, symbolizes a few things about what hoover is doing. By the 1960s. One is that it is in many a kind of deeply racist investing nation. Some of his comments in the margins of fbi files about king are some of the most unfiltered racism that we can see in hoovers career. I think the king invested gation also is a really good and pretty dark example of the ways in which what starts as a National Security investigation then begins, bleed out and expand all sorts of pretty outrageous ways. The fbi began investigating king not only for his civil rights work, but because they thought some of his Close Associates were involved with the communist party, which they were. In fact, heres a good cartoon sort of making these connections. But from there, it expanded out into a series of wiretaps on those advisors. Then wiretaps on king from those wiretaps and then microphone bugs planted in kings hotel rooms recording his sex life. And then from there, taking that knowledge of, his private and personal affairs, trying to use it to intimidate king to discredit him in the press and in many ways to try to drive him out of public life. One of the most interesting and upsetting documents that i found over the course of doing this research was this letter, which is an anonymous sort of dirty tricks letter that the fbi sent to Martin Luther king accompanied by a reel of tape from these recordings made in his hotel rooms, and the existence this letter had been known for quite a long time, but we had only had pretty heavily redacted copies of the letter, thanks to some reprocessing at the national archives. I was able to find an unredacted copy of this letter and of the fbis really aggressive attempts to intimidate, disrupt, upset, disgrace and discredit king in quite outrage just ways. This is what we had before, and this is what i ended up being able to uncover. So theres a lot about all of that. And then i think theres some pieces of what happened in the sixties that are a little surprising at the very moment that hoover going after king. He was deploying some of those same techniques against the ku klux klan and other white supremacist and neonazi groups. Most in a program known as cointelpro, which stood for a counterintelligence program, which was the fbis pretty large scale effort, not just to conduct surveillance of groups that it didnt like, but in fact, to disrupt them from within, you know, create dissension. So factionalism screw up their meetings, plant fake stories in the press, a whole array of techniques that were applied very widely. As you can see, many of them against groups on the left, but not exclusively that third piece there, cointelpro, disrupt ation of white hate groups. Was their attempt to apply those techniques to the klan in particular. So coming out of all of this, by the end of hoovers life, some of this is becoming public. Much of it is still somewhat secret and will only come out in detail after his death. But by the time he died, he was becoming a much more controversial figure. Opinion about him was becoming much more divided, but in many ways he was also a figure who decided that he could not let go. And in some ways, thats sort of if there is a tragedy to j. Edgar hoovers story. Part of it is that he stayed much too long and and and stayed, as i said, through his death in 1972. So just to return this picture, hoovers funeral, this is a shot of him lying in state at the u. S. Capitol. He is the only Civil Servant to lie in sta at. The capitol safe from military figures, politicians and others. Hoover is thon unelected official to be accorded that honor. And i just want to finish by returning to a couple of the themes that i started out with. One is, you know, thinking about the longer of his career and how we want to make sense of that, of the forms of unaccountable power that he was able to exercise sometimes for better, often for worse. And also to think about his popularity and his wide regard, which, as i said, was starting to slip toward the end of his life for very good reason. But for most of his career was very present. And so i think when we take the measure of j. Edgar hoover as a man or as a political figure, as an administrator or as an appointed official in, many ways were also taking the measure of the city of washington of the government writ large and of our country as a whole. I will leave my formal remarks there. We have about. 15 minutes or so left for q a. And bill, do you want to. Raise your hand . Well try to get as many questions as we can in a relatively short amount of time from. Good evening. A two sided question. What evidence . What is this . What evidence is there to the accusation that hoover was blackmailed by organized crime . And what happened, on the other hand, to his secret files . And having been such as you had a chance to look at any of them . Yeah. Those are great questions. So, you know, was hoover being blackmail by organized crime . If you couldnt hear that and then what happened to his to his own files . So i think by its very nature, the question of hoovers, you know, whether that is true or not, those blackmail stories, you know, its very hard to find evidence of that. I am skeptical of that idea. I did not find, you know, any evidence in the files. One might say you wouldnt find it written down in that sense. But that seems to me to be the product of kind of speculation, rumor mongering than than anything that we can really have hard evidence about. So im skeptical about the rumors that, you know, four in particular that the that the mafia had information about hoovers gambling habits, that he didnt want to come out or about his his sex life, and that therefore they were somehow controlling or influence the fbi. Im just skeptical. I didnt find any evidence of that on hoovers own files. Its an interesting story. Hoover had a couple of sets of private files. In addition to the regular fbi files. So the fbi did have files on every member of congress. You know, really most public figures of any note, those tended to be files, not that the fbi was actively going out and investigating these figures, but rumors would come in, information would come in and it would end up in the file. And sometimes that was about peoples sex lives, their drinking habits. Right. A whole array of things. Those those ended up in the bureaus files. So some of those were just in, you know, the regular run of fbi files. Hoover had one set of files called his official and confidential files on particularly sensitive investigations. For instance, some of his information about kennedys sex life is in the official and confidential files. And those we have, thats actually where the king letter was. It was in a version of official and confidential files. But hoover also asked that his personal files be burned when he died, and his secretary, helen gandy, went ahead and did that and destroyed a whole set of files that she maintains really were just personal files. You know, christmas cards from friends. There are some suggestion that theres probably more in there, either of an official capacity or simply of a personal capacity, because there were plenty of secrets that might have been kept there. But those files were, in fact, destroyed. And we just dont know what was in them. And its its really heartbreaking for a biographer. Of course, though, i had plenty to read, but but those seemed like they would have been really good back there. This question addresses the bureaucracy associated with the fbi. So what proportion of the u. S. Population is the the fbi is what proportion, say, of the u. S. Population compared with the kgb . Not saying that theyre as a proportion of the russian population. Thats a really interesting question. So i dont actually know what the comparative numbers would be, but i think the short answer is that even though the fbi grew to be this large institution, by the time hoover died, it is in many ways much smaller than most people think. So the structure of american Law Enforcement then and now is that almost all Law Enforcement is done at the local level. And so theres not that much thats being done at the at the federal level. And theyre very particular areas of federal jurisdiction. So i dont know, relative to population, i think and i might be getting this slightly wrong by the time hoover died, there were maybe 16,000. And is that agents or employee . Is it something in that neighborhood . But you know, so its a substantial institution. I think thats agents. But in any case, its a substantial institution relative to the population of the United States. Its really a pretty small institution. And hoovers vision. And i think still the vision that the fbi holds for itself to some degree is that theyre limited to a federal jurisdiction and that be theyre really there to be a kind of elite of Law Enforcement rather than a kind of mass mass agency in that way. Question here. A couple of things, and one type pathetically so. After hoover died, i know they passed a laws limiting the term of the director, and he serves at employment as the president. Then gets out of the senate when he was before the director, he was just a Civil Service employee. So he couldnt be fired and he wasnt serving the president. He was just a government servant. Is that correct . Well, yes and no. So yeah, by the time hoover was getting into his seventies, so even before his death, people were saying, you know, next time, maybe we dont want the same guy in this job for 48 years. And so those reforms that you mentioned were already into being one is limiting the fbi directors to ten years, which is longer. Any one president ial administrator nation, but not two too long. And then it became a president ial appointment. But when hoover was appointed in 1924, it just wasnt a very important appointment. So actually he was not under Civil Service and his own agents were not under Civil Service. So the clerical parts of the fbi were in the Civil Service. But hoover worked very hard over his career to keep his agents of Civil Service because that meant that he could hire his own people in the way that he wanted them. And he was very successful at that. So he was not formally a and anyone could have any attorney general could have fired him. And president could have fired him. And they did not. And the hypothetical of his right into that line is 1968 different. Robert kennedy wins the presidency. Would hoover have survived or roberts president . See, i dont think so, although one of the things that became a sort of a board in public conversation because was Robert Kennedy was assassin in in june as as the campaign was still going was that Robert Kennedy was denying that he had signed the wiretap orders for Martin Luther king, which he fact had done as attorney general. And the fbi was very busy, the scenes gathering all of this information and everything that they had that had Robert Kennedy signature on it, that was of some nefarious form. So they were going to come for him. And a little bit of that began to kind of percolate in the public. But of course, then he was killed. A couple more real. Okay, kelly, back there, thanks for your presentation, roy picone, what was his role in propagating some of the rumors that eventually would have been spread about him right . Roy cohn is a really interesting figure, and im delighted that there is a great biographer. Maybe he will be here in a few years named kai bird, who is now he wrote a great book about oppenheimer and hes now writing a book about roy cohn. So were going to get a big new biography, roy cohn, which should be plenty juicy life or not. Yeah, i dont know. You tell me its a life, an important one. But roy cohn and hoover had a sort of interesting relationship. So roy cohn was is most famous as being kind of mccarthys right hand man in 1953. In 1954, hes there is a very man and hoover kind of likes cohn and admires him and sees something of himself in it. You know, cohn is this like fast rising, outspoken young anticommunist. On the other hand, hoover thinks cohns a little bit of a loose cannon and there are all sorts of things in the fbi files like dont share anything with him. You know, he is not responsible with information. So, you know, roy cohn did like to deal in all sorts of rumor. He seemed to kind of like and admire hoover and and remain loyal to hoover, probably more loyal to hoover than hoover was to cohn. Quick. Just recently finished a shorter biography of this gentleman, hoover and it seems that in all his decisions he was concerned about reaching the right decision. He had to be the right. It never occurred to that many of the decisions he made were against the constitution of the United States and he violated the constitutionality of many all the time never considered that would be an important thing, that whatever he decides fit with the constitution he just cared about. Is it the right decision . Yeah, i think that that is both true and not true. So there are moments in hoovers life where he makes some interesting arguments and ones that we might be pretty sympathetic to. So he in 1942 is one of the few federal who tries to speak out against mass japanese internment, arguing that it is actually unconnected traditional to in turn american citizens that. So there are glimmers of moments in his career when he is thinking about those kinds of questions. And im thinking them pretty seriously being relatively careful. But i think you are certainly right. There are many moments where he is violating them. And most importantly, that he had a powerful of his own righteousness. And he was so certain that he was correct. Pretty much all the time that he was very sensitive to criticism and therefore went after people who criticized him very aggressively, but also believed that he could go beyond the law, beyond the jurisdiction, and that he actually had in the service of the causes that he believed in. And those were the moments, i think, where he committed his greatest abuses and excesses. Thank you for an excellent presentation. I wanted to go back to this time period and your favorite president ial relationship six weeks after this is watergate, which entangled the fbi. I wonder how different the investigation would have been. I can either think that he would have helped cover it up or he might have told nixon no. But im just wondering how different that might have been had he lived a couple more a couple more years. Yeah. Watergate is something that i would have loved to write more about, but i tried to discipline myself and no, hes dead. The biography has to end at some point. But hoover died in may 1972. The watergate burglary was in june of 1972. And so while hoover was not there for watergate, his shadow and his influence there in a couple of ways, one is that, you know, when hoover died, this created a huge succession crisis at the fbi you had all these younger officials who have been waiting, you know, not just for years, for decades, for him to leave the person who was the third in command at the fbi, at the time of hoovers death, hoover was number clyde tolson was number two, but he promptly resigned. When hoover died and the number three man was a guy named felt, mark felt was a career fbi official. He had come up under hoover and, you know, felt wanted to be appointed director instead. Nixon brought in someone from the outside, someone who he thought was loyal to the nixon administration, to a guy named patrick gray. Mark felt gets very mad about this. And then mark felt turns around, becomes we now know deep throat. And so is really important in the early months of watergate in leaking information about the fbis investigation. So i think thats one place where, you know, shadow of j. Edgar hoover is there. The other place thats interesting and i think gets at your question a little bit more is the question of what would have happened with investigation if hoover had still been around. And if you listen to the nixon tapes, Richard Nixon there on those tapes, kind of comisar rating with his advisors as his world is collapsing around him and saying, you if edgar were here, he never would have let this happen. And so Richard Nixon certainly believed that hoover would have found a way kind of manage and contain watergate and to work with him. Now, would that have happened . I actually think theres a pretty good case for that. But it is also true that they were a little bit at odds throughout the nixon presidency. The last connection watergate that ill mention is nixon was pressuring hoover to do variety of political things that hoover didnt think were a very good idea. One of them was to go more aggressively against daniel ellsberg, who had leaked the pentagon papers. Hoover thought this was a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Nixon was getting frustrated with hoover, the fbi, and its one of the reasons that he founded the plumbers is, which were his own kind of little dirty tricks squad, which, of course, were very important to watergate as. He was really trying to get rid of him at the end. Nixon really tried. There is there is an amazing moment. So nixon decides hoovers getting all hes getting less popular. Hes not doing what we want. Weve got to, you know, find a way to ease him out. And so he does kind of screw up his courage and sit down for a breakfast meeting with edgar, his old friend, and say, you know, dont you think the time has come for you to just retire in glory . And hoover says, no, i dont really think so. And nixon says, oh, okay, well, thats fine then. Just stay. And that was the end of that. Okay bill usually gets our first question will have to give the last word. I know the other question. Im sorry, but we get out of time, bill. Go ahead. You said you said hoover, spider, a lot of people. And he broke the law. But is the bottom line, did he do good for the country or bad . Thats great question. A hard one to answer. I would say i ended up, you know, not being a j. Edgar hoover fan. So i think in ways in particular, the more political sides of the fbis activities, the ways they went after the Civil Rights Movement and other groups, i come down on the the view that was pretty damaging not only to those movements but to american democracy more broadly. That said, i think the material that i found in many ways the most engaging, and that is probably the most surprising in the book are the moments when he did do good are the moments when you know you can see him really working to build an organization and with integrity a powerful professional internal that actually is pretty good investigating pretty difficult things in a lot of instances. And then there are many moments where he does take stands, hold up incredibly well over the test of time. You know, his opposition to the japanese internment, his of lynchings in the forties when it was very difficult to do his investigations of the ku klux klan. His criticism and and quiet opposition to joe mccarthy. I think there are a number of instances in which, you know, hoover isnt the caricature that i think hes so often portrayed as being. And theres a lot of that in in the book, too. And so while i wouldnt say that i ended up as a hoover fan and i did end up as someone who respected him and thought of him as a complicated figure and not someone who was one dimensional in any sense. I think what you just said really encapsulates the tone of. Your book, which one reviewer referred as ultimately fair and i think youll see that if you if you read the book and i hope you will, and ed and beverly visited some copies in the back if i have to, after program. Join me in thanking beverly for our great