American History Hit - The Fall of J. Edgar Hoover

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

From 1956 to 1971, J. Edgar Hoover ran COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). A series of covert and illegal FBI operations aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting political organisations in America. The leaders of pro-civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and pro-choice groups were among those targeted. When the programme was uncovered, it revealed the paranoia that consumed Hoover in his last decades in power and would change his legacy forever.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In his office in Washington, D.C., J. Edgar Hoover is listening to secretly recorded tapes of a Black Panther Party meeting in Chicago. It is 1967, and Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Black Power Political Organization, has been identified by the FBI as a radical threat to U.S. national security.

Two years later, Hampton will be shot and killed in his apartment, in what many believe to be an assassination orchestrated by the FBI. As Hoover listens in to the Panthers, the audio recorded by an FBI mole within the organization, the conservative FBI chief hears the sound of an America from which he has grown ever more distant. The voice of liberal America, pro-civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, pro-choice, left-wing. In America, J. Edgar Hoover does not trust. The targeting of Hampton and the Black Panthers was one example of co-intel pro. the counterintelligence program that Hoover ran from 1956 to 1971, a series of covert and illegal FBI operations,

surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations. When Co-Intel Pro was uncovered, it revealed the lengths to which Hoover and the FBI would go to subvert progressive politics in America and the paranoia that consumed Jaeger Hoover, changing his legacy and the reputation of the FBI forever. Hello and welcome to another episode of American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Today, we're picking up my conversation with Beverly Gage, author of G. Mann, Jay Edgar Hoover, and The Making of the American Century. In a previous episode, we tracked the first part of Hoover's story, The Rise, as he became director of the most infamous crime-fighting agency in the land, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, shaping it into a proper and effective bureaucracy for a modern superpower. Today's episode is more about the 1960s and beyond, as Hoover chooses to remain perhaps too long in power and sees the country and his beloved agency strain under the pressures of greatness.

I welcome back to the show, Beverly Gage. Beverly, a whole new America is beginning to dawn, and Jay Edgar Hoover once more needs to pivot his agency to the age at hand, the task at hand. The 1960s dawns, Hoover is a celebrity. He has created a bureaucracy that he's in control of. This fabulous Hollywood movie has just come out starring Jimmy Stewart and featuring the FBI and Hoover as kind of heroes of the age. Now, of course, a lot of that is exaggerated. When we go back, look at the history, we can find all sorts of things to criticize about who. Hoover and his career up to that point. But in terms of his standing in Washington, his standing in the nation at large, he's an incredibly powerful, popular, influential figure. And then comes the 60s, where a lot of that really begins to fall apart. One of the aspects of his personality recovered

in part one was very important in terms of him being a very conservative man politically and very wary of radicals in this country. I mean, it goes all the way back to his youth. really. He's a creature of Washington, D.C. in every way. He believes fully in the federal government's purpose in this nation. And it is really kind of to hold the center and to keep this ship from steering to left or to right. Along come the 60s and there's a big reaction with a brand new generation and lots of global pressures on this new superpower, which is the United States. How does he envision the FBI adjusting to this? Is he consciously aware of it? I mean, there's the CIA dealing with all that espionage overseas.

What in his mind is going to be the FBI in this new age? Well, I think one of the things that in many ways goes wrong for Hoover is that he doesn't see the ways in which the politics of the 60s is going to change so much about American life and particularly the politics of the left. In the 40s and 50s, he'd been very focused on the Communist Party in particular, on the threat of communism in this Cold War context, but he's very focused on domestic communism because that is sort of the FBI's bailiwick. But by the late 1950s, I mean, he's kind of won that struggle. The Communist Party is falling apart. It's gone underground. It's no longer

very popular or influential. But he can't really see that. And so as he enters the 1960s, I think he understands that he's going to keep doing a lot of the things that he was doing in the 50s, maybe some cause for that. But he misses a lot of what's coming and he tends to see it through this lens of an earlier era. That includes the civil rights movement. It includes the student activist left, the anti-war left. He really responds to them primarily through this lens of communism initially, which isn't a very good understanding of what's actually happening on the ground as the 60s are coming into being. We talk about this man making the agency in his own image almost, but how in a nuts and bolts fashion did he do that? I mean, is it through policy or is it through training? I mean, what is the

calculated process of his doing? Well, I think there were a lot of sources of his power. In the popular image, you tend to think of J. Edgar Hoover really is just being this sort of secret power broker who built up files on politicians and got his way through that. And there is some of that for sure by the time we're moving into the 1960s. But he had lots of other sources of power and influence, too, beginning with, as you say, how he built the FBI itself. When he came in in the 20s, he was very careful about selecting agents who already reflected a lot of his views and his ethos. He pulled a lot of the first generation of FBI agents and officials out of the institutions that he knew and loved best, George Washington University, where he went to school, Kappa Alpha, which was his college fraternity, a sort of reactionary southern fraternity. He pulls a lot of people out of that.

So he's got this core of very loyal, like-minded men who are around him. And he is very careful, too, about trying to keep the FBI, his agent core, out of the civil service structure. And so he fights that battle a lot. So if you're in the civil service, it means that people take an exam and there's this pool of people that you pick your employees from. Hoover didn't want any of that. He wanted to be able to hire and fire his own agents, basically at will, based on his own standards. and he won those battles. And so he had this incredibly homogenous core of agents who were loyal to him, who were under his control, and who had been selected to be just like him.

So within the FBI, it's a huge source of his power. He's also really good at other things, building up a popular constituency, building relations with Congress and the White House. And those really matter, too. But within the Bureau. I think that's a lot of where it comes from. Government on that level is really about budget and getting the money and the funding to do what you want to do and getting it approved. And he had the stuff to do that, I guess. He also kept a lot of files on people.

He knew a lot of secrets. He knew where the bodies were buried and all that kind of thing. And that really comes to the four in the 60s as he begins to fight this new battle against a radical left that he sees coming from different directions. The 60s is a complicated time. Let's talk about the civil rights movement and J. Edgar Hoover, which is probably one of the, of the best known things. He had a poor opinion of Martin Luther King, Jr. That is a real understatement. Yes. Hoover, throughout his career, had always been incredibly suspicious of black activists, and particularly people that he thought were black radicals of one sort or another. He had

pretty racist ideas in many ways, although he could temper those at various moments in ways in ways that are worth exploring and discussing. But when the civil rights movement began to come along and then King, in particular, as a leader, he is worried about a whole host of things. He sees this as a very alarming development. He is worried that there are communists in the civil rights movement who are close to a figure like King, sometimes with good reason, sometimes with not such good reason. He doesn't like the techniques of civil disobedience that develop in the 50s and 60s.

He sees that as lawbreaking. He sees that as a defiance of federal authority. He doesn't like the ways that the civil rights movement criticizes the FBI for being ineffective at protecting and enforcing civil rights. And there's a real problem, particularly in the South. On the one hand, big expectations of the federal government. on the other hand, in many ways, pretty limited federal jurisdiction until the Civil Rights Act comes along. So there's a whole stew of things. And then probably most importantly, you know, a basically racist worldview that led him to see actions, calls for dignity and full Democratic

participation by black people, including Martin Luther King, as being somehow deeply threatening to the established order. Did you read this in his writings? I mean, could you see evidence of these racist opinions? Yeah, you can see it in various places. So one of the things that Hoover did on FBI memos was to kind of write relatively unfiltered handwritten comments along the sides. And there you see a lot of his vitriol come out in some of his memos about King and some of these handwritten notes. He is using a variety of pretty derogatory terms. I think you can can see it in the way that he built the FBI. He refused more or less to have black agents, despite coming under pressure beginning in the 40s to do that. So there are all sorts of ways

in both his policy, the ways he's policing black Americans, and then in these kind of unfiltered comments. He was much more measured, of course, in public in many ways. But even there, you know, there's a famous moment in which he calls Martin Luther King publicly the most notorious liar in America becomes a big public showdown. And he approves surveillance all over the place on King, among others. I mean, there were units just following King around doing this throughout that period of time. Right. The campaign against King is one of the most extensive and really outrageous things that the FBI does over the course of the 1960s. There are really a vast array of things that they're up to.

They are recruiting informants in his circle. they are wiretapping his home and his office and the phones of many of his advisors, friends, and co-workers. Ultimately, they move into bugging his hotel rooms. So, you know, through the wiretaps, they listen, they figure out what his travel plans are. They go ahead of time to the hotels. They plant microphones in his hotel rooms. And through that, they really begin recording a lot of his extramarital

sexual activity. And from that, they then take on a really aggressive campaign of disruption and intimidation and harassment aimed at King. Everything from trying to get universities not to give him honorary degrees to probably the most famous incident is when they send King himself a set of recordings from his hotel room, along with a kind of faked up anonymous note from a would-be admirer, saying, King, I know the true you and it's terrible and it's awful and you know what you have to do. And King understood that as them pressuring him to commit suicide. Did it have an effect on King in terms of how he pursued the campaign for civil rights? I mean, was there a tangible effect?

I think there was an effect on most people in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. A lot of movements where people understood that they were under surveillance. They understood that there were probably informants around them. And they understood that this very powerful man and this very powerful institution was targeting them. You know, that is frightening. It's psychologically debilitating. It makes you sort of suspicious of the people around you. And, you know, obviously King pushed through in many ways.

But there are lots of moments when you hear him being really worried about this and concerned. It's troubling to imagine that on so many levels, this is a story full of hypocrisy. On one hand, you have this director of the FBI, you know, feeling personally responsible for the security of America, therefore pursuing policies highly questionable and you wouldn't find constitutional support in it at all, especially pointed up by the fact that he and himself was living a life, his personal life, that was, you know, questionable to a lot of Americans. Let's talk about his personal life. I don't even know where to begin, except to say that he had a very famous, relationship with an FBI agent named Clyde Tolson. Who was Clyde Tolson in Jay Edgar Hoover's life? Clyde Tolson was the most important man in Jay Edgar Hoover's life and the most important person in Hoover's life. Officially, he was the second in command at the FBI for almost all of Hoover's career, so beginning in the 1930s. But their relationship went far beyond this kind of work relationship. They were effectively each other's partners, social partners. And what's really fascinating to me is that they were pretty widely accepted and pretty open social partners. Tolson entered the Bureau in

1928. And by the mid-1930s, he and Hoover are living a life together. So they don't live in the same home, but they travel together. They eat all of their meals together. They go to nightclubs and racetracks and vacations together. And they're really widely accepted as a couple. So if you were going to invite Edgar to dinner, you were also going to invite Clyde. When you wrote a thank you note, you would say, hey, Edgar, you know, be sure to give my regards to Clyde. And so, of course, there's a really interesting puzzle there. How did these two men live this open social partnership in an era when, of course, gay relationships were being. heavily policed, were in fact widely considered to be illegitimate, and in which the federal

government had a policy that if you were engaged in a homosexual relationship or understood yourself to be, quote-unquote, homosexual, you could be fired from your government job. So we don't know, actually, if Hoover and Tolson had a sexual relationship. We will probably never know that, but we know they had a deeply intimate relationship. So there are lots of of puzzles and contradictions to sort out there. Really, in all those archives that you don't find love letters or anything like that? There are a series of letters or at least a few letters that honestly are in Tolson's personnel file at the Bureau, the one that I found the most meaningful as a moment in the 1940s

when Hoover writes Tolson this letter saying, I am so grateful for everything you've done. I hope to always have you at my side. Words can't really express how I feel, but know how much you matter to me effectively, right? So it's a little bit euphemistic. He's holding back a little bit, but you do see these expressions. What I found really fascinating and probably the best evidence were Hoover's personal photo albums, which are filled particularly in the 30s and 40s with really intimate photos of his vacations with Tolson, and, you know, in their bathrobes, in their bathing suits,

kind of gazing into the camera at each other, all of those sorts of things, which suggest a really quite deep intimacy. But Hoover asked, and it happened, that his personal papers be destroyed when he died. And so, you know, a lot of the most intimate parts of his life really aren't accessible to us. I'll be back with more from Beverly Gage after this short break.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, from History Hit, we talk about everything, from what Queen Consort, Camilla, could learn from the Renaissance. Really, when we begin to look at Queen Consorts, we notice that there's a lot of ways that women could have authority through their relationship with the King. To how you should never upstage Henry VIII. You'd have been a very unwise individual turning up to court, probably with a larger codpiece than the King, I suspect. From the real Matawaka, better known as Pocahontohon. She's brought and presented to the King and Queen as this shining example of what we could achieve. To how to tell someone to get lost.

You could say, turd in your teeth. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors, twice a week every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It really leads you to wonder how much of his practice, especially in the 60s and onward, you know, the sort of suspiciousness on his part. Really, the persona that I grew up understanding him to be grew out of his own guardedness as he lived this double life, really. And what he applied, the amount of energy he must have applied to his own secrets was mirrored

in the way that he suspected other people of secrets. I mean, it all seemed like, seemed of a piece almost. And Hoover had something that most people didn't have, which is, you know, an enforcement wing so that actually when rumors got to him that someone was saying, hey, I heard this thing about the director's sexuality, he would actually send FBI agents to go knock on that person's door and say, you shouldn't be spreading rumors like that. The director is the most respectable upstanding person in this country. And these are terrible, terrible things that you're saying. And so that was really powerful. And most people don't have something like that. But

Those moments were also a little bit sad to me because you can imagine what was it like for Hoover to have to go to his agents and say, go out, find this, shut it down, right? It's a moment of... Cover my tracks. Right. I mean, it's a kind of moment of he did not present himself as vulnerable, but it must have somewhere deep down inside have been hard. Well, by all appearances, it seems, or lack of appearances, I guess, it seems a very

lovely relationship the two men had. And it's a shame that they couldn't be honest about it. Of course, that was true of everybody in those days. But especially as the director of the FBI, he had to keep his secrets. He had another relationship, not of that nature, but very important relationship with Richard Nixon. His relationship with Richard Nixon, I always chalked up to the longevity of his career. Once Nixon came into power, he'd been around for a long time, of course, but becomes president in 68. Boy, does he have an ally, a sort of partner in crime, if you will.

This is one of my favorite relationships in the book. which might seem very strange to say because, you know, Hoover and Nixon in some ways are sort of singularly unappealing characters and then putting them together doesn't necessarily hold much appeal either. But what was really interesting to me was how much they seemed to like each other and rely on each other in a pretty sincere way. You know, they began working together and then building a friendship in the late 40s, And they got very close when Nixon was vice president under Eisenhower. They socialized together. They talked on the phone all the time.

They sort of shared a whole set of political conversations. And they shared a lot of a worldview. And then when Nixon is sort of in the wilderness and the outs after he loses the 1960 presidential election, he and Hoover stay in touch. They both hated the Kennedys. And they used to complain about the Kennedys together. but Hoover's really very supportive of Nixon. And then in 1968, it seems like this is going to be a really great thing for Hoover and the FBI to see Nixon elected.

And a lot of Nixon's campaign that year is on kind of Hoover-style law and order themes. He really embraces Jay Edgar Hoover as part of the campaign. Now, when he actually becomes president, they actually run into some conflicts, but they had a pretty deep friendship. It's in those period that I'm watching the FBI show. on TV. That's that period is from, I guess, 1968 onward. And he's really in full flower. He is Ephraimsymbilus Jr., which is pretty comical to think of. The anti-war protest as well, I guess in many ways it's more of the same in terms of Hoover's objection to any kind of radicalism in this country, dating all the way back to the anarchists. He sees that anti-war

movement as kind of the same rejection of American values. Fair to say? He's very suspicious of the anti-war movement from the moment it starts. And one of the interesting things is to look at in this moment where he's really getting quite old, right? He's in his 70s by the mid-1960s, and he is kind of looking out on this landscape of student activism and trying to make sense of it. At first, he sees it really thinks the students are all just dupes of the communists and the Soviets. But over time, by the late 60s, he begins to narrate it in a slightly different way as being, you know, a little bit more like the revolutionary fervor, the anarchist fervor that he had seen as a very young man in 1919 and 1920. But it's safe to say he's very worried about the anti-war movement.

There are very, very aggressive efforts at surveillance and disruption of the new left, the anti-war movement. And Hoover and Nixon share that, although in a. funny moment, Nixon wants Hoover to be even more aggressive, and Hoover says, no, you know, I really think we're, I think we're doing, we're doing enough. He owns up to a program called Co-Intel Pro. What is this program and what was so dark about it? Co-intel Pro, I think today is probably the most famous and notorious of Hoover's programs during his career. It wasn't very widely known at the time. And in fact, the FBI went to great lengths to keep it secret.

It was a program that started in the late 50s aimed at the Communist Party. And Cointelpro stands for Counterintelligence program. And what they meant by counterintelligence was that you weren't just going to be gathering evidence or performing surveillance, keeping files, that the FBI was going to engage in active efforts to disrupt the Communist Party. and to make it collapse from within. So that means, you know, telling your informers to go, say, non-productive things at meetings, make the meetings last a really long time, make them really boring, spread rumors, plant false press materials, send anonymous letters, right, a whole host of techniques that are designed to kind of make movements and organizations collapse from within.

So they pioneer a lot of that on the Communist Party in the 50s, but then it spreads out to a whole bunch of other groups in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement and King, later the Black Panthers, other black power organizations, the anti-war movement, the new left. And interestingly, also organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, various neo-Nazi organizations that Hoover also understands as being threatening and destabilizing to kind of law and order in the So that is really a manifestation that Cointelpro is a manifestation of his ability to keep secrets to his interest in keeping files on people and all that. It's the official program that is the manifestation of Jay Edgar Hoover's outlook on life, really, at that point. And it starts to get very dark as he gets older. It must be a sort of, I don't know, every action meets a reaction kind of thing where he is of this nature anyway. but then as the world around him becomes more radical, he then becomes a darker sort of person as we go along. What was his opinion of the Kennedy assassination? I'm just curious. And where did he stand on that whole issue? Well, he didn't like John Kennedy. They didn't get along very well. And he particularly didn't like Robert Kennedy.

And so the Kennedy years were hard for Hoover. Some of it was just kind of cultural and stylistic. They were younger and more informal. some of it, they had real institutional battles. So when Kennedy was killed in November of 1963, the Hoover had a couple of reactions. One was, you know, the fact that it made Lyndon Johnson president was probably pretty good for Hoover in the sense that he and Johnson had been very good friends, they had been neighbors, and in fact, Johnson proves to be a big FBI ally. But Hoover is also very concerned about the investigation into the assassination. He doesn't want to be put in charge of it at first, but he ultimately plays a really prominent role. And the big disaster for the FBI is when Oswald is murdered, right? So they track down Oswald, along with the local police,

etc. Very quickly, Hoover is quite convinced early on that Oswald is the assassin, that he's acted alone. But when Oswald is killed, it's a huge problem because it means that. Hoover is quite convinced early on that Oswald is there isn't going to be a trial, there isn't going to be an adjudication of the evidence. And he sees, even in that moment, that there's going to be all sorts of conspiracy theories, et cetera. And he's very worried in the Cold War context since Oswald, you know, he defected to the Soviet Union and come back. And he had all this kind of weird biography that this was really going to destabilize things. And so, you know, he's concerned about the FBI's reputation. and he both works in cooperation and at odds with the Warren Commission as all of that develops in 1964.

It's always weird to me that the FBI has not figured into all the conspiracy theories very prominently. It's always about the CIA and so forth. But the FBI sort of stayed out of the fray, which was amazing to me. Oh, there are a few theories that bring the FBI into. Okay. There's a lot of theories anyway, but that's for another show. by 1972, is it fair to say it all backfired on him? Did the House of Cards come crumbling down for Hoover by that time? Well, I think a lot of what happened in the 1960s is that, you know, during the 30s, but especially the 40s and 50s, Hoover had been able to kind of forge this bipartisan consensus about his own standing, about the FBI, the things that they were engaged in were pretty broadly possible.

particularly the kind of anti-communist politics that he stood for. But then in the 60s, you see a real bifurcation in his reputation, which is that conservatives still like him quite a lot. They champion him, they embrace him. But leftists and liberals start becoming much more skeptical of him, much more critical of him. And so in public opinion polls, you see that happen very dramatically that he once was, you know, kind of supported across the spectrum, and he becomes a much more particular and in many ways much less popular figure. People also criticize him just because he's getting old, right? He's been there a long time. He seems out of touch. He seems to be slowing down. Yeah. Well, I remember feeling, I mean, what would I have been 10 or 12 years old at the time? And I

remember being conscious of Hoover's secret. Like, that guy's got to know everybody, you know, everything, every bad thing about everybody. That was the culture at the time. It had all gone kind of dark at the point, and Hoover was a symbol of that. He just always just looked the part, too. He was just a gnarly looking guy at that point in his life. But he would have seen, I mean, now I'm just speculating, he would have seen a world around him that was the opposite of what he hoped to create. He would have seen a nation in a state of fray, you know, in decline even by some estimations. And that would have been a terrible thing. Did Clyde Tolson outlive him? Clyde Tolson did outlive him. Hoover died in May of 72.

As you say, at the moment that he died, a lot of the response was, wow, most Americans have never experienced a world without Jay Edgar Hoover, right? For better or for worse. But he had been there so long, and a lot of what happens at the moment of his death is people just saying he was a monument, he was an institution. I can't imagine the world without him, even though maybe you want to imagine the world without him. Almost everyone who's alive at that point has experienced Hoover. But, yeah, he died. He's buried in May of 72, and Tolson is there. And in fact, when they bury Hoover, the honor guard kind of folds the flag on his casket and very publicly hand it to Tulson. This is one of the closing images of the book. You know, this very public gesture of respect for their relationship. And Hoover leaves almost all of his estate to Tulson. Interesting. Wow. Your book does such a wonderful job of telling the whole story. but in particular divides his life up into two parts, which I was never aware of. The rise, you know, till about 1959, 60, and then the fall, gradual though it was, over the last years of his life. The relevance speaks for itself, really, but I'll say it anyway. A man like this does not exist anymore in this world.

You don't end up with a J. Edgar Hoover because it just couldn't happen. For one thing, they limited the term of the FBI director, correct? Correct. During Hoover's lifetime, people started looking at this situation, and particularly as he refuses to retire and he's getting older and older, and they say, okay, next time, let's not do that. And so the FBI director is now limited to a term of 10 years. There you go. How much of the new FBI would be a strange world for Hoover to walk around in? I'm curious. I think there are a lot of ways in which the FBI still bears Hoover's stamp, so we're about 50 years out. from his death now. But you know, the basic range of duties, which is on the one hand, law enforcement and on the other hand, kind of national security and intelligence, those are pieces that he put in place, right? That's the institution he built. And I think the FBI still has, you know, a combination

of things that Hoover also put in place, this real pride in a tradition of kind of government, fact-finding, expertise, being a kind of elite law enforcement. agency and then also having a pretty conservative internal culture in most ways. Those pieces are very much of the Hoover era. And then a lot of the situations actually that the FBI finds itself in now, I think would be very familiar to Hoover, which is to say, you know, the FBI is constantly in these hard positions where they're supposed to be nonpartisan and apolitical and standing outside of politics, but they're constantly being drawn into these. incredibly charged political investigations, right, particularly in the Trump years. So he would have

recognized that. No, of course, it looks different. Who's employed at the FBI looks pretty different, right? There are a lot more women. There are a lot more people of color now. And I think that it's internal capacity for self-criticism and the mechanisms of accountability that are now in place also look quite different than they did during the Hoover years. I guess it's a tribute to the nation, maybe the Constitution more than anything else, that the FBI never wandered over its lines and became a police state kind of apparatus that it could so easily have become perhaps in another nation. But maybe that was Hoover too. Maybe he understood the limits that they needed to abide by and therefore we owe him some credit. The book is called G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the making of

the American century. It is a fascinating account of an icon of our times before our times now, but someone who really shaped the America we live in today. Thank you very much, Beverly Gage. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History, hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.

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