American History Hit - The Rise of J. Edgar Hoover

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

J. Edgar Hoover was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years. He grew the FBI from a small, obscure operation to one that employed thousands of agents, investigating everything from kidnapping and bank robberies to political subversion and international espionage. Beverley Gage tells Don how Hoover guided every aspect of the FBI's operation for his decades in charge. And how, if he had decided to step down at the end of the 1950s, we might remember him very differently.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Joseph Knight. 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. is the morning of Monday, July 23rd, 1934. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, sits poised at his breakfast table.

An array of the day's front page headlines spread before him. Agents killed Dillinger. Dillinger shot dead. Dillinger led to death by Girl in Red Dress. John Dillinger, one of the most notorious gangsters of the Great Depression, had finally been brought down. His criminal gang was accused of robbing. 24 banks and four police stations. Dillinger was imprisoned several times and had escaped twice. After evading police across four states for a year, a brothel owner in Chicago informed authorities

of Dillinger's whereabouts. He was tracked down to a movie house and fatally shot in the back by federal agents as he attempted to flee. Hoover peruses each paper with supreme satisfaction. He has used the pursuit of John Dillinger to improve the FBI's investigative techniques and address the rising threat of organized crime. Before him is the result of that dogged work by the crime-fighting agency he has created. All of it, solid evidence of his own rising star. Hi, everybody, welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. I'm going to date myself a bit here and flashback to one of my favorite TV shows of my youth,

the FBI, starring Ephraim Zimbless Jr. that ran from 1965 to 1974, some 200 episodes. The series is rarely spoken of these days. It didn't even rank very high in the ratings, but it sure made an impression on me and millions of American citizens like me. It was part of a long tradition, a history really of triumphalist entertainment. Some would even say propaganda concerning that proud and daring government crime-fighting agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, and I loved it. But the real history behind this fabled organization is the biography of the man who made the place, who founded and grew the agency,

shaped its purpose and policies, who guided every aspect of the FBI's operation for decades in a way that America once celebrated and now distrusts, if not reviles. That man was Jay Edgar Hoover, who served as the director of the FBI for 48 years up until his death in 1972, and his story is told in a brand new book called G-Man,

Jay Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, whose author is Beverly Gage, and she is with us today. Hello, Beverly. Welcome to American History Hit. Hi, it's great to be here. Beverly, it's right in the title of your book. So let's underscore this from the start. Jay Edgar Hoover lived, his lifetime, was from 1895 to 1972, and he parallels the rise of the United States as a global superpower,

the making of the American century. He is deeply ensconced in the federal government from the roaring 20s all the way up to Vietnam. He bears witness to the entire passage. He has much to do with making it happen. So before we dig down, tell me why Jay Edgar Hoover's story should still matter to modern Americans so much. Yeah, one of the things that really attracted me to writing a biography of Hoover is not just that he's interesting as an individual. And as you said, he is someone who more than most people kind of created and embodied an institution,

this institution known as the FBI, but because he's this great vehicle for tracing big, big stories about American power, American government, American politics in the 20th century. He was headed the FBI for 48 years, and during that time, he shaped the country in all sorts of ways. So the book looks at the FBI as an institution, but it also looks at the ways that the government, as it grew, and particularly the American security state as it grew, really shaped the lives of ordinary American citizens. And Hoover, for better or worse, had his fingers in just about everything that happened during those years. Beverly, your book says it right in the introduction. There's parts one and two of J. Edgar Hoover's story.

He meets this major tipping point of his life and career in about 1959. Then everything changes. Our conversation will follow this general shape. Today's episode covers part one, Hoover's Ascent, The Rise of the FBI. And then the next episode on Thursday is part two, Hoover's Fall. People just have to understand this man was around for so long that for someone of my generation, I grew up in the 60s and 70s, he was part of the furniture of the federal government. The FBI and Jay Edgar Hoover were utterly inseparable. So let's start back at the beginning before there was a Federal Bureau of Investigation or a Jay Edgar Hoover.

The FBI had its roots in the mid-1890s with something called the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation under the administrations of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, those Gilded Age presidencies. And then McKinley is assassinated in Buffalo, and suddenly Teddy Roosevelt is president. And he amps things up in reaction to McKinley's murder to this anarchist threat. Take me through those earliest days of what would eventually become the FBI. Yeah, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is the last. the moment that Hoover is born, he's kind of born into, first of all, Washington, D.C. itself, and he comes of age with all of these transformations that are happening in D.C. in federal power. But he's also born into an age where the federal government is beginning to take

all sorts of new interests in policing, which is something that in the United States is generally left to local and state authorities before this point. So the McKinley-Lews. assassination is really important, particularly in the creation and growth of the Secret Service. And then the Bureau of Investigation formally comes along in 1908 when the Justice Department decides that it has too many new duties, sometimes antitrustwork, other forms of law enforcement, and they need their own investigative force. So this is a moment when Hoover's just a kid. He's obviously not involved in that. But there are all sorts of new ideas about what the federal government ought to do, how you're going to apply new bureaucratic and scientific

methods to law enforcement itself, that he kind of imbibes coming of age and then he really puts into practice when he enters the government. He's literally born of Washington, D.C., isn't he? He is, and in many ways this really is a book about Washington. He's born there in 1895. He dies there in 1972. He lived with his mother in Washington until he was 43 years old. and then he got his own house. But I think he's really a creature of Washington in a couple of ways. One is this tradition of government service that he grows up surrounded by, which was kind of unusual in the late 19th and early 20th century. There weren't a lot of people who worked in the kind of nonpartisan career government service. It just wasn't very big, but he was in it from the start.

And then the other is that Washington was a very conservative southern town during those years. So particularly on the question of race, Washington's undergoing a very rigid process of racial segregation. But in lots of other ideas, you can see how he is coming to frame a kind of conservative worldview. And that's one of the political puzzles of Hoover and of the book, is that on the one hand, he embraces what we would tend to think of as a whole series of progressive or liberal traditions in government, federal power and career government service and science and facts and expertise. And then on the other hand, he's always a very deep ideological conservative, particularly on race, but on communism, on law and order. And he kind of puts those two things together. And that's how he makes the FBI. That's why he's such an interesting

and relevant lens through which to look at this country, and especially the federal government because he comes of an age when the federal government was the answer. That was the solution to massive problems that happened from the 19th into the 20th century, culminating with the Great Depression and those huge emergencies. Then, of course, World War II and so forth and so on, people like Jay Edgar Hoover thought of the federal government as the tool to really figure these things out and find broader and bigger solutions. Many would still feel that way, but there are so many who don't. And it's so interesting to have this story of this man's life as a touchstone to what is going on in America today. And that's why I really want to alert people to the relevance of the

story and how interesting and important it is to really figuring things out in the modern day that we live with. So let's focus more on his early days. As a kid, he's growing up in what neighborhood in D.C. I'm curious. He grew up in Capitol Hill. So he was about five blocks behind the Capitol and the Library of Congress. That is really amazing. That is. Really amazing. That is. is his stage from the get-go? Do you think as a child and as a teenager, young guy, that he knew that the government was this growing presence, or did he just find his way as an adult into that phenomenon? I think it was just part of the atmosphere that he grew up and his father worked for the federal government. Many of the previous generation have worked for the

federal government, which was incredibly unusual in that moment. So his own family had that tradition. And then most of the people around him were at least in conversation with the government in that way. You know, he came of age in the Washington public school system. He wasn't from a wealthy family. He went to George Washington University, which was right there in D.C. And at that point, it was mostly a night school for future government servants, particularly people who wanted to get their law degree and go to work for the government. And then he happened to graduate in 1917. at the very moment that the United States was entering the First World War, and he didn't join the Army. Instead, he just walked a few blocks down and joined the Justice Department, which was going through a huge expansion during the war.

And then he stayed there for the rest of his life. Crime fighting on a federal level, very similarly to other agencies in the federal government, had a very limited role in America. Power, you know, in the 19th century, was really with the states. and that continues on into the 20th to a point. But crime fighting was really limited to maybe interstate commerce and very subtle issues. Where did he find his way into that practice? That's absolutely right, that crime fighting at the federal level is not a big thing when he enters the Justice Department. And one of the funny things about his career is that though he becomes very famous as a lawman by the 30s,

we've got these shots of him with a Tommy gun, and his agents, are engaged in all of that work. He himself was never an investigator. It's not even clear to me that he knew how to shoot a weapon. And he was not actually a kind of policeman in that sense. What he was was an organizer, a bureaucrat, an administrator. When he came in in 1917, he was actually put to work more on the political surveillance side of things. Some of his earliest work was doing internment and registration of German citizens during the First World War. And then he's so good at that and so good at managing the files that when he's just 24 years old, he gets this big promotion in the Justice Department in 1919 to run something called the Radical Division. And that really was

the federal government's first experiment in peacetime surveillance of left-wing radicals. There are lots of worries about the Bolshevik revolution, which has just happened. New communist parties coming into being labor uprisings and fears of revolution. And that in many ways is where he kind of learns his trade is more on the surveillance and politics side of things than on the law enforcement end. The FBI really is, and this is true of any policing and military organization, an organization designed to react to threats. and as they rise, the FBI trains its focus on that and then grows accordingly.

So the beginnings of all of this really have their place in the earliest days of the century as a reaction to anarchism. Is that fair to say? It is. And a lot of what ultimately become the first Red Scare after World War I and then, more famously, the second Red Scare after World War II, the period of Joe McCarthy and the House on American Activities Committee, you can see both those ideas and methods and capacities really forming in the early 20th century. It's really interesting because the FBI is basically growing according to threat, beginning with anarchism.

That moves into labor problems. The business world identifies this growing threat from within American industry, which is this rising labor force saying no and so forth. And then, of course, World War I comes along and the German threat, there are very real acts of espionage. And then, of course, we have prohibition, which starts a whole new problem from within the nation. Hoover was very ambivalent about prohibition, both as a practice, but also once he became director of the Bureau in 1924, which was right in the middle of prohibition, it was already clear that this was kind of a law enforcement disaster. It was corrupting

law enforcement agencies. And it was also just a task. law enforcement couldn't pull off. When people don't want to abide by the law on a massive scale, it's going to create all sorts of conflict. It's going to create lots of bad feeling. And so Hoover actually tried to, and pretty effectively did, stay out of prohibition enforcement in the 20s. Most of that was happening at the Treasury Department. And most of his first decade as director was really trying to limit and focus the Bureau, trying to hire the kinds of men he wanted, who spends a lot of time perfecting the file system and coming up with new rules and manuals, because the Bureau wasn't in great repute, even without prohibition. There had been surveillance,

scandals, civil liberties, objections, corruption scandals. And so that's what he spends his first decade doing, is really trying to clean up the Bureau both in reputation and in fact. Why was he so good at this? Why was he such a born bureaucrat? That's a great question. And I think a lot of it was temperament. It was his skill set. Even as a kid, he was this go-getter. He was organized. He had lots of executive function. And then his first job in government, actually, before he entered the Justice Department, his job when he was in college, was working at the Library of Congress. And there he learned what was just coming into being, which was the Library of Congress filing system. And that was actually cutting-edge information technology of its time. So he both got trained in these skills early on. But I think it was just intrinsic to who he was. He liked to order his world through very clear rules and files.

And he had lots and lots of energy. And he was a smart guy. So we can chalk up Jay Edgar Hoover to the Dewey Decimal System. Is that fair to say? Pretty much, yep. How did he actually become the direct? What was the transition from being one of the work guys to being the big guy? Well, it was actually a really unlikely turn of events because Hoover had been a pretty prominent

player, even as a young man in the Justice Department during the Palmer raids, which were these deportation raids aimed at radicals that ultimately became very controversial and were really in bad repute. out of that he got promoted somehow to being assistant director of the bureau during the Harding years, but that turned out to be a scandal-ridden mess, poker games and liquor sales and the whole run of things. And so in 1924, when his boss gets fired and they need a new director, it's a little weird that he was the one chosen because he had been tainted in some ways, but he's originally chosen as the acting director, just a placeholder to keep the bureaucracy running while they look for a real director. But he turns out to be so good at pleasing the new attorney general, a guy named Harlan Stone, who goes on to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,

and really making the bureaucracy work for him that he has these six months as acting director, and then at the end of that, they make him permanent director. It's worth also keeping in mind the Bureau of Investigation was not very big. It wasn't all that important in that moment. And so appointing an FBI director now is a big deal. But basically, they just wanted someone who would keep things running. And so it wasn't a great significance in that sense. So was it an organic process for him? Did he see the opportunity at hand and what he could do with this? Or did it evolve as he grew into the role? I think a little bit of each. He became director in 1923. at a moment when he really needed a job, his father had died, and he was basically the sole support of his mother. And so he needed a job. He was very well trained and well suited to do this by that point. He had been there since he was a young man. And his original vision in the 20s

is to have a fairly small, tight-knit bureau in which he is creating what he describes as a new investigative service of gentlemen. So he makes a big point of only hiring college graduates, primarily lawyers and accountants. And a lot of his vision is about this kind of white-collar professional investigative service that's very much in keeping with all of these progressive era ideas about administration and expertise and bureaucracy. And I don't think that he had much of a vision beyond that. He certainly didn't see what the FBI was going to become. As you suggested, a lot of the later growth is driven by crises that no one saw coming. But it's as if you're talking about somebody creating a law firm and just doing smaller tasks. This is a man who becomes larger than

life. He is the building that is the FBI now. He becomes this massive, iconic figure of our culture by the time I come along in the 60s and 70s. It's an extraordinary passage to, go from this modest bureaucrat, as you're describing, to becoming this gigantic law-fighting celebrity. So that's what's so fascinating about this. And inherent in his story is really the growth and maybe unexpected growth of the federal government and the United States, which is an incredible irony or whatever the word really is. It's an unlikely passage that we all go through as a country, never mind in this man's life. I'll be back with more from Beverly Gage after this short break. Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters were real people?

It's so fascinating, isn't it, that some of the Three Musketeers are also based on real soldiers? That Sir Walter Raleigh wasn't all that he's been cracked up to be. Chemist, poets, scholar, historian, courtier. He could have been great in all these different things. And that if your name is Dudley, you better watch your back. For the tutors, each one of them took some. something from the Dudley's, either by working with a member of the Dudley family or, of course, by having one executed.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipskin, and I'm learning all this and much more bringing you not just the Tudors twice a week every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. His feelings about radicals go right back to the beginning of his life, I imagine, but it really is the centerpiece of his whole worldview in several different regards. Why did he distrust radicals so much? Yeah, that continuity and the centrality of that theme of anti-radicalism in general, anti-communism in particular, was one of the things that really drew me to Hoover.

In the last book that I wrote, I was writing about that period around World War I, when a lot of those ideas were in formation. and I could see as early as 1919 that he was coming to embrace a set of ideas that were really going to be central, not only to the FBI, but to American politics for the rest of the century. And I think for Hoover, as for many Americans, a lot of that sentiment was born in this moment of concern about revolution. And for Hoover, he then moves away from some of that work in the 20s, but comes back around to it. in the 1930s as the Communist Party grows, as labor radicalism grows. And I think for him, there were a lot of things that he saw as being objectionable. So on the one hand, he was a firm believer in order,

the established order, and he saw lots of these movements as being disruptive and dangerous, sometimes violent, rightly, or wrongly. And then he also just had a really expansive vision of what was wrong with communism. He was pretty religious. He saw communism as a threat to the American family, in addition to the much more obvious national security concerns that come along in the 40s and 50s. He liked things as they were. I mean, he was a conservative, but taken to the endth degree. And I'm fascinated by the fact that he is such a buttoned up character, especially in his earlier years. He just seems to be such a careful bureaucrat type of guy. And that's how he projects onto the American. And it becomes a bit of the American story as well. Let's just keep things as they are and keep these fringier elements to the side and then the nation steers forth. It's people like Jay Edgar Hoover who really create that image of America, that function of America, really.

I think that's absolutely right. Thinking of him as a protector of the established order, as he might have described it, but as someone who understood himself really to be policing the back. of political legitimacy, even of American democracy. And I think one of the things that's fascinating about Hoover is that because of the position of power he ended up in and that he helped to create for himself, his view of who's legitimate, who's illegitimate, really in many ways becomes the national view. And to some degree, he's reflecting that, but he's also creating it and shaping it. a lot of that is directed at the left. Sometimes it's directed at vigilante groups on the right, groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Often it's directed at people that he understands to be lawbreakers of one sort or another. But he's actually able to not only express these ideas through the FBI's

very large PR machine that creates things like the FBI TV show, but he has this massive law enforcement and political intelligence agency to police his own point of view. It's really these landmark events, these landmark cases that provide the stepping stones for his career. Talk to me about the palmer raids. This was a surprise to me. I hadn't read much about it. The palmer raids were in many ways his first really important intervention in national politics. He was the head of the radical division at that point. This is 1919 and 1920. He's just 24 years old, so a very young man. And he was really hired into that position to help orchestrate these deportation raids that were going to be aimed at anarchists and at

communists, non-U.S. citizens who are understood to be dangerous revolutionaries of one sort or another. And I think he learns a couple of things out of that experience. First, it's his big attempt to do something important on a large scale. He gets a lot of his anti-radical ideas formed in that moment, but he also encounters a lot of backlash. And from that moment on, he's intensely aware of the possibility of criticism on civil liberties grounds. The Palmer raids turn out to be not very popular. And he is kind of contending with groups like the ACLU in one moment or another for the rest of his career, that's also all being formed in those crucial years of 19, 19, 1920. In the broader sense, he becomes a contradiction in terms because we think of him as such a

conservative, but he was very supportive of NAACP and the ACLU, in fact. That's what I mean. He really put himself in the right center of life in America, deeply so, but he was not necessarily an enemy of progressive causes. So the nation transitions to the roaring 20s. As I say, we've got prohibition and the rise of all that. Also out there are those bank robbers. I mean, the famous one, John Dillinger, these guys that were running around robin banks in the middle of the Depression era, he sees a cause for the FBI not only to defeat this threat to the banking industry, which many people are surprised that that's an FBI concern, the national banking system.

So Dillinger is attacking the heart of America. The 1930s is absolutely the moment that the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover become what we know today. And that happens in a couple of ways. One, as you say, they really move into criminal law enforcement in this radically different way. Some of that is because there's new federal jurisdiction that comes along, bank robbery and kidnapping or the big high-profile crimes that become federal crimes. and he has to change his whole core of nice lawyers and accountants, teach them to carry weapons, to engage in pretty violent confrontations

with this whole generation of high-profile criminals. So that's where they get their reputation and actually begin to engage in this kind of criminal law enforcement. The 30s is the period when he also becomes a big national celebrity, and he begins to engage in public relations in all sorts of. of new ways that are going to be very important. And then finally, the 30s as the war is brewing in Europe and Asia, as you've got new movements emerging, particularly communists and fascists in the United States, it's also the moment that Franklin Roosevelt prods him to go back into political intelligence work. And then the war comes along and that kind of work, espionage,

surveillance, all of those things that we associate with the FBI. That really explains. It's really amazing to think, again, I keep coming back to this man. He was not a personality born for the role, one would think. But suddenly you've got Tommy Gunn, Touton, G. Men running around on his orders. How much of that picture of the FBI was consciously shaped by him and say Hollywood? Or was it just tabloids? Or how did he do that? Some of it was happenstance.

And actually, in a lot of ways, during the very early period, Hoover's very very hesitant both about moving into criminal law enforcement and particularly these kind of armed confrontations and also moving into public relations. Those were not his original visions, and he's a little bit hesitant about it, but he is also ambitious, and he is someone who knows how to pivot and how to deliver what his superiors want. And in this case, Franklin Roosevelt very much wanted the FBI engaged in these sorts of things, as did the attorney. general. And so in that sense, he's a little bit of a contradiction over the course of his life because he has certain fixed ideas that are there very early on and that never really change. And then he can

be incredibly adaptive as he was in the 30s and can learn whole new areas of law enforcement, of public relations, and do them really quickly and in many ways do them really quite effectively. The tipping point of America in the 20th century is the new deal, in my opinion. lots of ways of looking at that. But when that vast expansion of the federal government happens under FDR, reaction to the Great Depression, but many other things as well, the FBI has caught up in that. And it as well is expanded. Talk to me about the relationship between Jay Edgar Hoover and FDR. They didn't like each other, did they? Well, they did actually like each other pretty well. I mean, there were certain ways in which they didn't share political ideas.

but FDR did more than any other president in American history to empower the FBI and to empower Hoover in particular. And he really relied on Hoover to come through on all sorts of things from the war on crime to selling the FBI, giving it a flashy new name. And I think it is useful to think about the FBI as essentially a New Deal alphabet agency, right? We tend to think about the WPA or the CCC or all of these other three-letter agencies. But this is when the FBI gets its name, too, in 1935. And it's very much in the thick of that. And then Roosevelt went on to rely on Hoover for all sorts of things. In the 30s, he secretly goes to Hoover and says, you know, I'm concerned about fascists. I'm concerned about communists. I know probably technically you're not supposed to be

doing this kind of surveillance work, but why don't we do it anyway? And that because, formalized during the war and becomes much more legitimate and much more public. And he also relies on Hoover for some political intelligence. He asks Hoover to, for instance, keep tabs on people like Charles Lindberg, people who are opposed to FDR's war program. And so I would say that they have a working relationship more than any kind of intimate friendship. But it's a pretty good working relationship. And without FDR, neither the FBI nor Hoover would be what they became. As the stakes rise in the world for the United States, they rise for the FBI and as well for Hoover himself. His famous techniques of keeping files on people and all this surveillance that

he was eventually known for, I suppose this is when that begins to be developed, a sort of darker side of the man. Yeah, there were some glimmers of it early on when he had those couple of years at the radical division, but it's really the Second World War that is the engine for the FBI to move back into not only surveillance work, but espionage, national security work, counterintelligence, all of those skills, which honestly, they don't really know how to do when they're tasked with doing it as suddenly the war crisis is there. And so in the late 30s and the early 40s, you see this incredible process of them learning how to conduct espionage investigations, which are very different from criminal investigations. You see them pivoting in all sorts of ways. And it's the Second World

War that really makes the size of the FBI explode. So it more or less quadruples over the course of the war with all of this wartime work and then stays much bigger after the war. And was Hoover just good at learning new techniques or was he good at picking the right people to do that? I think he was good at both. He was a very quick study and throughout his career, I mean, he slowed down some as he got older, but he really was able to pivot very quickly and he had built a bureaucracy that was often not as responsive to other people in government as one might want it to be, but was very responsive to what it was that Jay Edgar Hoover wanted. And so I think He was good at knowing what his superiors wanted.

He was pretty good at reading the American public. And then he really had a lot of control over his own employees and his own bureaucracy. One of the surprising things in the story is his objection to FDR's decision to intern Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor. He was very opposed to that. He was. It's one of the surprising moments, I think, for most people. we tend to think about Hoover as always seeking power, always being on the wrong side of these civil liberties questions, but he was actually a much more careful actor in many cases than we might think. And Japanese internment is one of those.

He objected to the mass program of internment, both because he thought that the internment of American citizens in particular was simply unconstitutional. I think he's been proven right about that, but he also objected because the FBI had its own separate, much more targeted internment program that was aimed not only at Japanese citizens, but at Germans and Italians in the United States. That was very individualized. He had been working on that for a long time, and his position basically was, you don't need to intern everyone. That's a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. We'll tell you who's dangerous and we'll focus on those people. So it was also a position of defending the FBI's prerogatives and power. It's interesting to me, there's probably a Hoover equivalent in all of these big agencies, aren't there? These individuals, be they men or women,

or whoever they were, the federal government was really built by people like Hoover, maybe on a different scale as you go, but it comes down to individual ego and ambition, doesn't it? We tend to think about politics and about government as being this political parties and elections and elected officials and the president, the Congress. But most of the work of government, of course, goes on in the career government service, in the administrative state. And a lot of it is the kind of bureaucratic warfare that Hoover became so good at. I think he's unique in the sense that he was able to stay for so long. He was there under eight presidents, Democrats, Republicans, right? So he has this continuity that very few other people managed to achieve.

But he's also just this lens into the whole world of government work that we tend to not think about as much. I mean, the bureaucracy. Right. We chalk it up to presidents, but in fact, it's probably the bureaucrats. It's always the bureaucrats like a Hoover. He was just very good at promoting his own story. The story of the FBI really gets its polish, really takes off in the Cold War. That's when both the agency but also America itself is now flexing its muscle all around the world, and suddenly we are fighting the big fight against the Soviet Union.

And the FBI is right on the front line. 40s and 50s, the early period of the Cold War is, without question, the period of Hoover's greatest influence and also of his greatest popularity. So he really promoted himself and promoted the FBI as the front line. force for containing communism. And in particular domestic communism, there's a moment at the end of the Second World War when Harry Truman has become president and the country is looking out into peacetime, thinking, okay, we've built up all these wartime intelligence agencies. What is it going to look like after the war when Hoover makes a bid to not only have the domestic sphere, but to become the country's global intelligence service as well?

And Truman rebuffs him on that. We get the CIA instead. The FBI and CIA never like each other all that much. But certainly on the question of domestic communism, which was deeply related, of course, to the struggle against the Soviet Union. Hoover is the figure of the era and is much more popular than someone like Joseph McCarthy. Who he didn't like at all. Again, another contradiction. Right. Hoover and McCarthy were friendly in certain ways. They sometimes certainly. socialized together, and they certainly shared an anti-communist outlook, but Hoover thought McCarthy was a rogue actor. He thought that McCarthy lied and made things up, and he thought that McCarthy was just this loose canon who was endangering the legitimacy of the anti-communist cause. So he both

kind of works to take McCarthy down in the end, but he also promotes himself as, and many liberals embrace him as the responsible, law-abiding, institutionalist alternative to Joe McCarthy. I can't imagine the millions of pages you were faced with and all these famous files that he kept on everybody. I mean, the file on Jotho McCarthy must be amazing. Many of these files are really incredible. And that was the fun of doing this project was to just be able to jump in. You know, I'm an archive nerd. And I just love to see the history there in its.

original form. But of course, the challenge is when you've got someone who was there for 48 years, doing everything and the head of a massive bureaucracy that produced unbelievable amounts of paper, I tried to read a lot of things. I did read a lot of things. You certainly can't read everything. And so there are a whole set of choices that one has to make about when you've read enough, when you're done, right? You can't read every million page file. But there are overwhelming stories. And then there's the story of Jay Edgar Hoover. It's an incredibly long. story to go through. That's why we're taking it in two parts. This part, you actually begin the book in the introduction with this reference, which is to this Jimmy Stewart movie that J. Edgar Hoover

has everything to do with. Is it Mervyn Leroy as the director? He's really polished off this story. We've won World War II. We are toe to toe with the Soviets at this point. The FBI has had everything to do with defeating the mafia, the gangsters. I mean, he really puts his whole story into this movie, and he really likes what he sees. That's right. In 1959, this movie, the FBI story comes out, and it's a big, dramatic Hollywood production. It's a production that the FBI and Hoover himself had a very powerful hand in creating. And in many ways, it's sort of the peak of his popularity, his influence.

The 50s have been really an era of big success for him. Eisenhower loved him. The left never liked him all that much, but everyone else really supported Hoover. And I think had he retired in that moment, we would have had a very different understanding of who he was, what he accomplished, than what ends up coming along, which is the 1960s. Yeah. And huge amounts of revelations about him, both during his life and afterwards, which get very, very dark and even nefarious in their nature. It's a whole other story about Hoover, the FBI and America, which starts to become the 1960s and onward. We're going to get into that in the second part, along with a lot more about his personal life. Many people have probably listened to this part one part and said, you're skipping this, you're skipping that.

The point was to say he really created a machine that was a giant reflection of his own personality, and he crafted it in the manner he wished to be perceived as. And it was quite successful. Then he sticks around too long. That's kind of the way it looks, right? I think that's absolutely right. In 1959, Hoover is getting popularity ratings in public opinion polls in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We might now look back on some of what he was doing and say, oh, that wasn't so great. But at that moment, he had, I think, achieved quite a lot of what he set out to achieve. He, unfortunately, couldn't see it that way.

And so he didn't step down. He didn't declare victory and get out. He stayed on into years when he became much more controversial. And I think that most of our image and our understanding of Hoover, which is as one of the great villains of the 20th century, and I think in many ways, rightly so, really comes out of this period of the 60s, which is not only what most people remember at this point in time, right? that's the most visceral stuff, but is also when the FBI does some of its most outrageous and in many ways, cruelest things. And we'll cover that in our next episode airing on Thursday. The book is called G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and The Making of the American Century. The author is Beverly Gage, and it has been a great pleasure.

Thank you so much, Beverly. Thanks a lot. 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. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.