The Daily Beast Podcast - What You Don’t Know About the FBI Director Who Targeted MLK

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Attention political history buffs: This episode of The New Abnormal podcast takes us back in time, to the ’50s and ’60s to be exact, as Beverly Gage, author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” tells co-host Andy Levy all about the background of the first-ever FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Andy learns that racist Hoover, infamous for going after Martin Luther King Jr. and committing multiple abuses of power across the board, particularly under the protection of the surveillance program COINTELPRO, didn’t like the Klan and had an interesting relationship with former President Richard Nixon. Author Kal Raustiala also joins the show to tell Andy about his book “The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire” and everything we didn’t know about the famous Black United Nations mediator—including the fact that Nixon told him his son was going to be drafted, and the reason he didn’t stop it from happening. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hi there, today we're on a break for the holiday, but that doesn't

mean we don't have an amazing episode to fill your holiday weekend with some fun and historical insights so you can get your mind off family bickering or living in these crazy times. First, we're going to talk to Beverly G. Man, J. Edgar Hoover and The Making of the American Century. Then we're joined by Cal Rastiala, who's the author of the absolutely indispensable man, Ralph Bunch, the United nations and the fight to end to empire. And he's going to tell us about Ralph's amazing story. But first, we have the return of listening to some of the worst news clips of the week with our brand new co-host, Danielle Moody.

Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Hell yeah. So excited. Wow. That was Molly-esque. Some people might think, clips, why do you listen to these? But I want to show the political importance of clips. Here you will hear Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA and the cringest person.

on earth, Benny Johnson talking about why clips are important in politics. I got a question for you, Charlie may want to avoid the finger pointing right now, but I kind of don't. And I think that it's time for people to accept the reality of the civil war inside of the Republican Party. It does seem as though talking about doing nothing, man, I have never seen anything more flaccid and linguine spine than the way that the corporate GOP approach to this very winnable election. Now, I think there's a lot of synthesis. to be done, but you touched on McCarthy. I thought it was wild the way

they rolled out this plan for America. I saw nothing about it. Nothing. I am obsessed with following the news. I got an entire team of young kids, 20 years old. All they do is look at clips online. Never once did I get a clip about Kevin McCarthy going based,

going flame thrower. Kevin McCarthy, rip roaring. Never once. I didn't get a single clip that like the corporate GOP did a single fire thing in this election. And we cover this. Day in and day out, we have the best damn people on the internet covering the hottest clips out there.

And we go nuts for it. And if Kevin McCarthy did something best, I would have covered it. I have nothing against it. But I didn't get a single clip, Rich. Nothing. God bless you, Benny. And we'll talk over the book. And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to.

What in the entire fuck? First of all, who the hell is waiting for Kevin McCarthy to go, what did he say, base? Baste. What was that? Is that like some white man spleening and shit that I just am not a party to? Oh, are you seriously? Is that Lingu? Is that lingo?

Oh, it's lingo. Yeah. Unfortunately, it is a thing that, you know, the youth say about when somebody is saying the truth. It's very based. God, I hope. It's clipped of me doing that. So I'm out. It's just that like he's, I mean, he's stupid, so there's that.

But like that was just horrific acting, like, pretending that, like, he went from zero to screaming way too quickly. And he needs to modulate that if he wants to sell it better. Him and Charlie Kirk in a room, you couldn't get enough mental energy out of them to work a toast. put together. It's so painful to listen to. They have the best people on the internet. Are we serious? Clearly not true because my team found this clip.

Oh my God. They are just so pathetic. It sounds like it came from a whole troll farm. Was that a troll farm? That's what it sounded like. Okay, I'm going to prove that my team is better because here, Jesse Waters, as Andy has said, dumbest man on cable news.

He has some thoughts on the new special prosecutor that's been assigned to Mr. Trump. So who is this special counsel? His name's Jack Smith. He's a Democrat, so he'll probably hire a team of other Democrat prosecutors to investigate the former Republican president.

Mr. Smith began his career in New York and worked for the Clinton and Obama administrations, and right now, Mr. Smith's over in Europe. Oh, that was it? He's just so fucking stupid, like I don't even know. I mean, he's over in Europe. Yeah, he's at the Hague. Why does he say everything like with an alleged inflection in his voice?

Like Smith worked for the Obama and the Clinton administration. Like they were actual administrations. Like they were actual presidents of the United States. Like why does he say it as if it's just like it's not a given that we know that? And unlike all of what the collaboration that Republicans do with reaching across the aisle to do nothing more than to light their opponents on fire, I'm so confused about what Republicans would be doing. in this situation. They'd be hiring other people like themselves. I'm assuming that Jesse still thinks that the Obama administration was illegitimate because

Obama was born in Kenya. So that would explain that, I guess. To clarify, that's Jesse Waters, not me. Yes. Yes. Oh, yeah, that was a good distinction. See, that's production right there. I have managed to convince Jesse Cannon that Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. Hey, buddy, Trump convinced me up it. Watch your mouth. Put some respect on his name. of my accomplishments here at the new abnormal. Yeah, I don't, besides once again

saying that Jesse Waters is the dumbest person on cable news, I don't even know what else to say. He doesn't even know what he's saying there. That's the thing. Like he doesn't, he has no idea what he's saying, he has no idea who Jack Smith is, he has no idea what the Hague does, he doesn't know what a special counsel does, and I don't think knows how to button his own shirt. So I don't know what else to say about it.

He's just dumb. Just the inflection is what, like he works in Europe. Yes, that's an actual fucking place. Like, it's a place people go there, you know, like, I don't, I don't understand. It's just like everything with these people is just like, oh, yeah, and you know, it's like the oxygen we're breathing. Yeah, it's, you know, that's what we take in. Oxygen. And again, he's working at the fucking Hague.

Like, are we, does America not support the Hague now? And the war crimes court? Like, is that a bad thing now? He sure accuses a lot of people of being war criminals when they're usually not being. So I think so. God. The only thing weird about that was that he didn't say woke. You may have forgot, but this man named Paul Ryan was once a vice presidential nominee.

Oh, my God, he was. He has some thoughts on Mr. Trump running again. That's the point. He can get his people through the primaries, but they can't win general. elections. So what it's really clear, I think the Republican voter is going to move on. That's why I don't think he ends up winning the nomination at the end of the day. I think we have a great stable of good, capable of winning this primary for presidency and winning the election. And I think Republican voters know that. So that's why I think our voters, ultimately, who really want to win,

are going to give us candidates who can win. Well, now I'm convinced Trump is going to win the nomination. Yeah, 100%. And also, who is in this stable that they have? Is it, is it, is it, is it Herschel Walker? Are they going to bring back Dr. Oz? Like, who is in this stable of state, literal stable geniuses that they want to fucking usher out in this clown car called the Republican fucking primary? Hit me a break.

Yeah. No, that was my other thought. Like, is he talking about Ron DeSantis? Is Ron DeSantis the kind of guy he wants to have the nomination? Like, I don't know. Is it Marjorie Taylor Green? Are they going to pull her? Is she going to run?

Nikki Hallie. It's Nikki Hallie. Oh, my God. Is she still around? I think she's going to run. She's way too normal. Unless she comes out looking like crazy eyes, Carrie Lake. She's starting to do that.

I used to think that too. I thought like she was going to be the only person that maybe made it out of the Trump administration, like, whose reputation improved. But she's like going, I don't know, she hasn't gone full MAGA yet, but she's on the, on the path. So since we invoked his name, Danielle, we have a segment here called What in the Hell is Herschel Walker talking about? And we have

another installment of it. Bill back better. You probably want something written like Lord of Land, stating all men, to be treated equal. Oh, we have the Constitution. So you probably won't

to put people in charge who's going to fight for the Constitution. Just thinking, God bless you. Is that his tagline just thinking? Because you are not, my friend. You are not. Was that a poem?

It's free verse. Is it a haiku? What the fuck was that? My stance on Herschel Walker is I get nervous making fun of him because I do 100% believe he's suffering from CTE. Like if you weren't running for a really powerful position, I would just straight up feel bad for him and think we should show compassion toward him. But the fact that he's possibly going to be in a very powerful position means, no, we can't do that

right now. And yeah, he just, how is he in a runoff? That's honestly my question. Like, how is this even close? It's like, Persia Walker, he couldn't find his way out of a paper bag. Like, I just, what was he saying? What does he ever say? Oh, my God, Georgia, Jesus Christ.

And that's why we have this segment. Okay, I got one last one for you guys. On Fox and Friends, they have some thoughts on how based Elon Musk is. Hard. Do you want to stay? Are you not going to censor people? Because if you want to follow my rules, then you can stay. If not, I'll pay you for three months and you can go.

So he's not like picking and choosing who he's firing. He's saying you choose. He is, and he's draining the swamp of Twitter. And it needs to be drained. But the way that he's doing it to me is genius. He's saying, I want people that want to work here and that have some integrity that want to work hard. And that should be the standard. And the fact that we've moved so far away from that,

then now we're having headlines about him sending out a memo saying, I expect you to work extremely hard. That should be the standard for every job and every young person and young people need to understand. It's not all about six-month vacation, being an influencer, having a work-life balance. It's about working hard. And if you want to work somewhere like Twitter, you're going to have to work hard. And you're going to have to treat people fairly. And if that's too much, hey, there's the door.

I hate those people. Nothing in that was true. Obviously, that's not what Musk did. He put out an exceedingly dumb memo. And surprise, surprise, most of the people left. I love how they talk about, oh, he's draining the swamp of Twitter. You don't fucking know who works at Twitter. You don't know how to run a company.

Like, you talk on TV for a living. Trust me, you have it good. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. And some people, when they have no idea what they're talking about, no better than to talk. But that is not the case here. Other people get television shows. So there's that. I mean, they're just so embarrassing in their caping for Elon Musk.

And I'm actually really tired of people throwing the word genius around. Let us understand that there's a difference between inheriting wealth, right, and actually being a genius. I find that particularly on Fox and Friends, there's like a real thin line of them understanding. the difference between those two things. And to Andy's point, like, what the fuck swamp are you talking about at Twitter? You mean the people who are regulating hate speech and making sure that, you know, the N word wasn't used as often as the word the? Like, what are you talking about? They don't know what they're talking about. And then hard work for young people, because, yes, you're right. These young people who are not going to be able to buy a fucking home, a car, and are living with their parents because everything is out of control economically. Yes, they have no idea how to work hard for a living, unlike the way that these people were born with spoons in their mouth.

I'm done. Okay, I'm finished with my rant. Yeah, no, it is just, I mean, it's like going after young people is the easiest thing for older people to do, and it's also the dumbest. And it's like every generation does it, so you have to watch yourself. As you said, like Generation Z and, you know, look, I don't know how old those people are at Twitter. I don't know if they're all Gen Z. Some of them, a lot of them might be millennials, for all I know.

But every generation has its own troubles and its own. struggles and life is not easier for the younger generations. It should be. You would think ideally, that's the way you want your society to be, but that ain't the case. And it's just the easiest, hackiest thing in the world to talk about young people, they don't get it, they're lazy, they're this, fuck you, you have no idea what you're talking about. And, you know, the fact that the average age of your audience is 75 kind of speaks to that. But again, that's who you're talking to. And then you know that's who you're talking to. And those are people that want to hear that, you know, oh, look at these entitled young people.

What are they entitled about? They don't want to work 100 hours a week fixing shit that wasn't broken until Musk took over. So it's like, it's absolutely unbelievable. And the fact that Musk had a bag of a whole bunch of people to come back, like completely trashes this entire theory that he was cutting the dead wood out of Twitter and all that stuff. But these people, they have like an Ayn Randian view of businessmen. And it's speaking of. childish. I mean, I went through that phase in college. I'm well aware of how childish that view is.

And it's like you're too old to not realize that the world isn't like that. Grow up. Jay Edgar Hoover became director of the FBI in 1924 before it was even called that and held that position until his death in 1972. He served under eight presidents and for decades was a wildly popular figure among the American public. My next guest calls him the single most influential federal appointee of the 20th century. Joining me now, Beverly Gage, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale, and author of the fantastic new book, G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Beverly, thank you so much for being here. Thanks. It's great to be here. Before we get to the book itself, I'm curious. Was there anything in particular that initially

made you want to write a biography of Hoover? Well, Hoover was a minor character in the last book that I wrote, which was about a bomb attack on Wall Street in 1920. It was a big terrorist attack at the time. It was something a lot of people hadn't heard of. And so I encountered him in that story as a very young man. And two things struck me. One was that a lot of the ideas that he had already at the age of 24 in 1920 when he was working on that case would go on to be incredibly influential and ideas that he held on to for the rest of his life. And that also he was there for so long that he was actually just a great vehicle for telling a story that was not only about him as a person, but about the sweep of American government over the course of most of the 20th century.

Yeah, it really is amazing, just how long he was there and at the center. In the intro to the book, you wrote, after more than a decade of study, I do not count myself among Hoover's admirers, but this book is less about judging him than about understanding him and thus understanding ourselves and our national political past. And I was struck by that because here's a guy who for so long was so admired and now he is, if not universally reviled, he is at the very least he's sort of officially reviled. Yeah, I think he is perhaps the most reviled American political figure of the 20th century. It's extremely hard to find people who want to champion. J. Edgar Hoover, and that is not my goal either. But I do think there are more interesting and subtle

things to say about him than simply that he was a very bad man who did some very bad things. I joke with a friend of mine that the thesis of the book is that if Hoover sucked, we all sucked. Because, in fact, he was incredibly popular for most of his career, as you said, and he's was really widely supported by Republicans, by Democrats, by presidents, by Congress. And so we can't really just think of him as this rogue agent that we've now, you know, shunned from the American political story. He was right in the center of it for most of the time that he was in office. Back in 2020, there was a documentary that came out, MLK FBI. I saw it. And, you know, at the time, I wrote a little review of it. And I said that I was glad that the film made sure to point out

that Hoover wasn't some sort of rogue actor and that both he personally and what he did were very popular among the American people. And you obviously amplify this. And as you say, I, you know, would call it a main theme of your book, that Hoover had a lot of power. We like to think that that's because, oh, he was feared and there were people were afraid he could blackmail them and whatever. But it was also because everyone up to including presidents knew how popular he was. But to look at it that way, it's harder to reckon with because of what it says about. America, right? Exactly. One of the most telling polls that I came across in doing this research was a poll from 1964, which is a moment when Hoover has declared Martin Luther King the most

notorious liar in the country. The FBI is on a big campaign against King. And in our own contemporary consciousness, right, King is the great hero and Hoover is the great villain, and rightly so. But when you actually look at polls from that moment, 50% of Americans said they supported Hoover in that encounter. Only 16% said they supported King, and then a bunch of the rest were just sort of undecided. And so I think it's easy to think that our understandings now are also the understandings of the past, but the past is a lot more complicated and in some ways a lot darker than we often want to think. Yeah, beyond question. So let's get. into Hoover's life. You know, throughout his career, you point out time and time again,

he was really into myth-making, particularly about himself. And you say that he often spoke of his childhood as this sort of time of what I guess was one of the classic American myths, the learning to work hard to get ahead, being upright at all times, learning morals from every experience. But as you point out, the reality wasn't quite that cut and dry, correct? One of the things that I was really surprised to find was that his story about his own childhood. I mean, there's some truth to it. I think he was a kind of a hard worker and a shining star student and all of the things that he claimed to be. But he also had a much, much more difficult family life than I think we've understood going back a generation. I discovered that one of his

grandfathers had committed suicide. Another had died very young. And his parents kind of came together in the midst of those family tragedies, basically as teenagers, they had a couple of kids before Hoover. The little girl who was born right before he was born died as a toddler. And so there's this whole history of difficult family tragedies, and I think the one that impacted him the most was his father's mental illness. And it's very hard as a biographer to find out what that meant to Hoover, who didn't like to talk about it, or even to find the details of what was going on, but there are enough hints and clues to suggest that it was actually a pretty troubling experience. And he was able to use that ability that he had to mythologize himself,

and, you know, later on to mythologize the FBI. It was just an unbelievable gift to his career, that ability, wasn't it? The FBI had this huge public relations machine that really came into being in the mid-1930s and that was dedicated for decades, not only to building up the myth and legend of the FBI itself, first as great crime fighters and then as spy hunters, but specifically to build up Hoover's image. And so he just had this staff of men churning out sort of wholesome tales of Hoover's childhood and great conservative screens about crime and about communism and about the moral decay of the American family. Of all of this, you know, he's actually using the tools of government and using taxpayer money to build up his personal image. Right. Amazing. And then so he gets

to college and he joins an organization called the Kappa Alpha Order. And you say that that was incredibly influential on his subsequent career. We all kind of know that Hoover was racist in many ways. You can see that in the way that he built the FBI. You can see that in the campaigns that he carried out against figures like King. But one of my question is, going in was kind of where did his racial worldview come from? To some degree, I think it just came from growing up in Washington, D.C., which was a segregating city at that point. And he really came of age with the segregation of Washington. We tend to forget that our national capital was, in fact, explicitly segregated. But that's the world in which Hoover came of age. And then he went to

college at George Washington University, so still in D.C., still living with his mom. and ended up joining a fraternity called the Kappa Alpha Order, which had really at its core the romance and myth of the South, the lost cause, support for segregation. Some of its national leaders had even supported lynching and race riots. And so Hoover's kind of stewing in all of that. And I think it made a big difference in how he thought about race. And then he drew a lot of early FBI officials from inside of Kavanaugh. Alpha and GW.

Wow. So in the book, you get to the year 1919 and you say it was a big turning point in Hoover's career. I'm assuming that's sort of linked to what you were talking about with the 1920 bombing on Wall Street, that that's all part of the same thing or no? That's right. He leaves GW and he happens to graduate in 1917 just at the very moment that the United States is entering the First World War. And so he was probably going to go into government work anyway, but he happens to enter the government at this moment of massive wartime expansion when they really need skillful young lawyers. And it's also a moment when the federal government is experimenting with all sorts of forms of political repression that it had never

experimented with before. It's throwing left ring radicals like Emma Goldman, the anarchist, or Eugene Debs, the socialist leader. They end up in jail during the war. Hoover's first job is actually helping to manage German registration and internment. The United States ran internment camps for about 10,000 German citizens in the United States. And he's so good at all of that that at the age of 24 in 1919, they reach out and make him the head of this new experiment within the Justice Department called the Radical Division, which is really the first attempt by the federal government in peacetime to keep track of left-wing. radicals in particular, anarchists, communists, etc.

And then that was at the same time as the Palmer riots? That's right. His first actual major impact on American politics was as an architect of the Palmer raids, which were in late 1919 and early 1920. And these were deportation raids that were aimed at non-citizens who were members of anarchist groups, members of the Communist Party. And they turned out to be hugely controversial. There's a big backlash against them from a kind of newly developing civil liberties crowd.

The ACLU is just getting started in that moment as well. So he both learns how to do that stuff during these years and he learns about the kind of criticism that can come his way for abuses of civil liberties, basically. Right. As I said earlier, one of the things that you say in the intro to the book is that you wanted to understand him. So in terms of understanding him, how does the same guy approach, oppose the World War II Japanese internment camps, help to destroy, as you put it, Joseph McCarthy,

and also establish and expand the nefarious and often illegal surveillance program, Coentel Pro, that most famously targeted Martin Luther King Jr., was responsible for the assassination of Fred Hampton, and thousands of other illegal and immoral operations. What's the through line here regarding Hoover, in your view? I think Hoover really was a true. believer in two different political traditions that we often see as being at odds. One of those is, you know, kind of progressive, professional government service. You know, he was a career bureaucrat. He believed in the power of the federal government and believed in, you know, kind of legitimizing that

power in whatever way he could. On the other hand, he was also a devout social conservative, right, on things like communism, on race, on religion. He was constantly kind of exhorting people to go to Sunday school. And the funny thing is that he had both of these traditions together and sometimes one was outweighing the other. But above all of them was his interest in kind of the legitimacy of the FBI and the reputation of the FBI. And so at moments where he thought that was under challenge, he would do some surprising So the clan, he didn't like the clan, not only because the clan was overtly racist, but more importantly, because it was violent and because it was snubbing its nose at federal law enforcement. And Hoover did not like that one bit. And he thought the FBI's legitimacy

kind of depended on not letting this vigilante group do whatever it wanted. And actually, Japanese internment was a similar sort of thing. Hoover had been running his own much more targeted internment program. And his argument was the vast Japanese internment was not only unconstitutional and likely to ultimately kind of be unpopular in the judgment of history, but also that you didn't need to do it because the FBI had already figured out who the dangerous people are. And so you don't need to intern everyone will tell you who's dangerous and who's not. That's amazing. It sounds almost like he was more interested in the order part of law and order than the law party. He certainly himself exceeded the boundaries of the law when he thought that he could get away with it.

So talk to me more about Cointel Pro. It seems fair to say that at least from the vantage of 21st Century America, that's what Hoover is most remembered for. Cointel Pro is definitely the most notorious program of Hoover's career. And I think most people associate it quite rightly with campaigns against the new left, against the anti-war, movement against the Black Panthers, against the civil rights movement. And that was a big part of what CointelPro was. But there are some interesting aspects of it that I think are lesser known and that I try to explore as well in the book. One is pointing out that Cointel Pro was actually established in the 1950s and it was created as a program that was aimed at the Communist Party in particular. And it was sort of a defensive program. So Cointel Pro was not just a, just surveillance. It was a program of disruption or what the FBI described as counterintelligence.

So Co-IntelPro stands for counterintelligence program. What they meant by that were all of these kind of secret efforts basically to disrupt organizations from within. So everything from sending in informants to make meetings, you know, really long and boring or to ask irrelevant questions so that everyone will get annoyed and want to drop that. And anyone who has ever been in a social movement or tried to do any organizing knows that those are incredibly effective techniques for making people not want to come to your meetings anymore. And there were, of course, much more nefarious methods as well,

sending fake anonymous threatening notes, planting stories in the press. But all of this, the FBI sort of formalized in the late 50s because they were worried that they couldn't go after the Communist Party anymore publicly through court prosecutions and other methods because the country wasn't as supportive of it as it had been during the Red Scare. So in some ways, Cointelpro is very aggressive, but it is founded out of this sense of really a weakness on the part of the FBI in a sense they had to do everything in secret. And I think the other surprising piece about Cointelpro, which you already

mentioned is that while most of it is aimed at the left, there is a program called Cointel Pro White Hate, which is established in 1964 to go after not only the Ku Klux Klan, but neo-Nazi groups, white supremacist groups, everyone who is kind of violently opposed to the civil rights movement, part of massive resistance in the South. And they use exactly the same techniques. They really go after them quite aggressively. That's interesting. It seems like there was one of those programs that started out, and obviously I'm not defending even the way it started out, but it started out with a specific target, and then it sort of grew and grew and grew to encompass more and more targets and encompass more and more Americans. Thank God we don't do

that anymore with stuff like that. As far as we know. No, I'm being sarcastic. I'm absolutely being sarcastic. One of the funny things actually about Cointel Pro is that I think it is the great symbol of a kind of rogue FBI. And they were quite careful to try to keep a lot of what they were doing secret, to keep it controlled at FBI headquarters. And Hoover personally, or his top officials, had to approve every operation. But it's also clear from new documents that Hoover, in a general way, told Congress what he was doing, told the president what he was doing. And so it really wasn't in its generality, nearly a secret, as we imagine. It might.

a bit and it was kind of sanctioned within Washington. Nobody stepped up and said, you know, it's outrageous that you would run a disruptive program against the Communist Party. It was just, you know, kind of usual business practice. Yeah, the rare, sanctioned rogue operation. Two of the many things I didn't know before I read the book involved Richard Nixon. First, that in the lead-up to the 1960 presidential election, Hoover was giving Nixon info about the Kennedy campaign. And the second, that Nixon created the plumbers, the group responsible for the Watergate break-in, at least partly because he thought Hoover had become too cautious? It's an amazing thing to think about.

Yeah. Their relationship is really fascinating to me. They met in the 1940s when Nixon came to Congress, and Nixon from his earliest moments as a young congressman is a devout anti-communist. He kind of makes his name going after Alger Hiss, who was State Department of sort of shining son of the New Deal who was accused of being a secret communist party member and being involved in espionage. But from that moment on, Hoover and Nixon, who I think most people would think are two of the kind of least affectionate and maybe least appealing men in American

political life, they become really good friends and they sort of write these sweet notes to each other in moments of defeat and in moments of success. And they double date of a sort, Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his associate director, who was sort of his functional spouse. At any rate, so they have this long-term friendship, a lot of which, as you say, was about political information, giving each other political support. And that certainly happens both in 1960 and then in 1968. But then this weird thing happens when Nixon becomes president, which is that, you know, he's doing this massive pageant of public support for Hoover, but they're having all sorts of fights behind the scenes.

And Nixon is pushing Hoover to be even more aggressive in going after his political enemies, in targeting the anti-war movement. And there are these kind of funny moments where Hoover says no, and he won't do it. He's sort of the civil libertarian of the Nixon administration, which shows you how standards were really going awry. during that moment. And then, right, Nixon found the plumbers in part because he wants Hoover to do some of his dirty tricks. Hoover says that's not really the role of the FBI and I don't want to do them. And so he says, okay, I need operatives of my own who will do whatever I say.

Is that something that I know you had access to documents that previous Hoover biographers didn't because I had never heard that. Was that a gap in my knowledge or was that something that you discovered that really hadn't been out there before? I think among Watergate historians, it is pretty well known, that that was the case. But Watergate is such an incredibly convoluted story, but many, many details fall out. So before I let you go, I have a, I guess my sort of exit question is, are we still reckoning with the ghost of Jay Edgar Hoover? And I guess I would actually maybe even split that into two questions. Is today's FBI still reckoning with the ghost of Hoover and is America still reckoning with the ghost of Hoover? Yes. And yes. So with the FBI,

I think it still bears Hoover's stamp in all sorts of ways. It's a more law-bound and more constrained organization than it was during Hoover's day in many ways. But it's fundamental structure, which is this weird hybrid of being a federal law enforcement agency and a federal intelligence agency is very much from Hoover's era. It's the way that Hoover built the FBI. And then I think the cultural stamp of the FBI, still blends these two Hoover traditions, which is, one, a real pride in kind of professional objective investigation. And then on the other side, a kind of conservative internal culture. And he built both pieces of that. As for the rest of the country, I think we are definitely

still reckoning with Hoover. This is the 50th anniversary this year of his death. And I think these questions about to what degree you want to empower the federal government to police internal organizations who have ideas that you don't like, right? That is still really front and center in our politics. Today, we seem to be talking about it more in terms of the political right and threats of violent extremism from the right. But all of these questions about what the boundaries of that power are, how we make these judgments. are all very much part of our politics. The book is G-Man, Jay Edgar Hoover and The Making of the American Century.

And trust me, not only is it compulsively readable, it is far too comprehensive to give it justice here, no pun intended. So I really hope listeners will check it out. Beverly Gage, thank you so much for being here. That was fascinating. Thanks so much for reading that very long book. Ralph Bunch was once a household name in America or at least damn close to it. He had a ticker tape parade in his honor in New York City, Los Angeles.

had a Ralph Bunch Day, and among many, many other things, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. And amazingly, he did all of this while existing as a black man in Jim Crow America. Here to tell us more about Bunch's astounding career is Cal Rostialla, director of the UCLA Berkel Center for International Relations, promised distinguished professor of comparative and international law at UCLA Law School and UCLA International Institute, and author of the new book, The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Ralph Bunch, the United Nations, and the five. to end empire. Cal, I am afraid that after reading all that, we're out of time, but thanks for being on. Thank you so much for having me. So, Cal, is it hyperbole to say that Bunch's resume,

bunches career, it's damn near unparalleled in American history, it feels like? Yeah, I would say he was really a unique figure. For all the reasons that you mentioned at the top, he was one of the most famous Americans of the mid-century of any race, but as a black man in a, you know, traditionally white and upper class field like diplomacy, he was unparalleled. You know, I mentioned earlier the ticker tape parade and the Ralph Bunch Day. And it was his role in mediating between Israel and Arab nations in the late 1940s that led to this and also led to his Nobel Peace Prize. What did he accomplished there? Sure. So first of all, he was a UN official who really had no background in the Middle East and was sent there when the problem, the early version of what we now think of as the

Arab-Israeli conflict was handed to the young UN in 1947. The original mediator gets assassinated, and Bunch is actually supposed to be assassinated, and he narrowly escapes because he's not there. His plane was delayed, and luckily he avoids the ambush. He then becomes the mediator, and the idea is to mediate essentially an armistice between Egypt and Israel and Jordan and Israel, et cetera. And he does that very effectively in 1949, and that's what gives him the of a peace prize and kind of catapults him from someone who was certainly a successful guy without question into a household name. Obviously, he did this, as you mentioned, as part of the UN. His career and the UN's first several decades are incredibly intertwined, aren't they?

Yeah. So he was not only, in many ways, by the time he does, he's the most famous UN official probably of all, but he is there from the very beginning. And in fact, he begins his diplomatic career in the CIA, or the early version of the CIA. Then he's in the State Department, and he's one of the people who helps plan out the UN and actually kind of drafts a lot of the important provisions of the UN Charter. So he's there from the very beginning and spends the next 25 years working there. We're talking about a guy who served America and the world roughly from the Truman era to the Nixon era, and it probably would have been even longer if he hadn't died in 1971. You mentioned that he started at the State Department and OSS before that, and then he

moved over to the UN. And it seems like every president during the rest of his life tried to get him to leave the UN and go work for their administration. And yet he wouldn't. Yeah, he wouldn't for a few reasons. So first of all, he was a very kind of desirable person in cabinets. They had various times approached him to be an ambassador, to maybe be some kind of cabinet member. JFK commissioned some internal polling that looked at how he might poll as a candidate. So he was always viewed as someone who could jump into the political arena, though he never did. He didn't really want to do it. And in fact, talked about how he couldn't be one of those guys like going out and eating pizza or maybe like Gerald Ford just biting into a tamale with a husk on. He didn't want to do that sort of thing. And so they would try.

But one of the main reasons, honestly, was the atmosphere in D.C. in the 1950s when he was at the height of his fame, it was still a segregated place and a place that he really wanted to get both himself and his family out of. So moving up to New York and going to the U.S. win was pushed as much as Paul. That's interesting. The word I kept coming across in your book is decolonization. And you write, you know, this was a huge part of his career, a huge part of his mission. And one of the things you wrote that I thought was interesting was you said that he viewed racial justice as a global issue. And this was obviously, a lot of this was during a time of a huge push for racial justice in America. But you say he viewed it as a global issue. And you write that

the fight to end empires was a through line. in his career. What made him tie all this together and what role did he really play in the huge decolonization push of the 20th century? Yeah, that's a big question. I know. Sorry. Yeah, I know. It's great. Way before George Floyd, for example, became a kind of global movement, there were people as far back to the 1930s who saw the issue of civil rights and racial oppression in the United States as something that was akin to what was going on around the world, in particular in Africa. In fact, in Africa, Africa, which in the pre-war period was entirely basically governed by Europeans. It was just a bunch of colonies with very few independent states. So for someone like Bunch, he saw white supremacy as

something that he experienced right here in the United States, but he did his PhD at Harvard on colonial governance. So he also saw it in Africa. And he recognized that these were really two sides of a coin. And so for him, while he was very active in American civil rights, he marched arm an arm with Martin Luther King, Selma to Montgomery. He was there for the I Have a Dream speech. He was a pretty active participant in all of that. He also saw the global dimension as being equally, if not more important because there were just literally hundreds of millions of people who were being ruled by Europeans. And so that was something that he really devoted his life to. And for much of the 1950s and 1960s, when he was at his height of his powers, that was the big movement going on around the world,

was to slowly but steadily decolonize the globe. Well, one of the main areas that he was involved was the Congo, correct? Yeah, so he spent a lot of time in Congo. And Congo was like a super traumatic experience for him. And honestly, for the United Nations itself, in 1960, when Congo becomes independent, even a couple years before, no one really thought it was going to become independent for decades, including many people in Congo. So it was sort of a rushed process and a process that,

pretty quickly goes off the rails. And there's a, there's a civil war, it becomes one of the really major hotspots of the Cold War, and bunches there for all of it. I was going to say, like, in areas like the Congo, it's not, you know, this was not one of those times when America was on the side of the Angels. No. And here you have a guy at American working for the UN, not for, quote, unquote, America, but he is basically working against his home country's interests in the view of his home country. Yeah, definitely in a sense he was, though one of the things I point out in the book is that I think in part because Ralph Bunch starts off as you mentioned the OSS, that's like the precursor to the CIA. He starts off there. He goes to the State Department. He goes to the U.N. He's very

close with the highest levels of power in the United States. And he's an extremely patriotic American. So while he's not always happy with the positions of the U.S. government, especially when Vietnam comes around, he's totally at odds at that point. But even for Congo, he definitely had some differing views, but he's still working pretty closely behind the scenes in many instances with high-level Americans from the Secretary of State, the President, you know, all the way down. So there's an interesting kind of back and forth, and the Soviets view him always as just an American stooge. As far as they're concerned, he never left the State Department. Oh, that's interesting. You brought up Vietnam, and I wanted to get to that because at that point,

it is, you know, as you said, he was very much opposed to the U.S. war there. What kind of relationship did he have with President Johnson? Well, it's interesting. So Johnson, so Johnson, you know, pretends throughout the period of Vietnam to want to find some peaceful solution. And he's constantly looking to the UN as a vehicle for that, though, you know, whether he really wanted that is pretty, I guess, doubtful. I think that's sort of dubious. But he would pretend to. And Bunch was very interested in trying to broker some kind of peace there because he felt, unlike World War II, which he was completely on board with, he felt like the Vietnam War was just, or even the Korean War, felt like the Vietnam War was just an immoral and imprudent fight on the

part of the U.S. And then to add to it, his youngest child, his son, Ralph Jr., is drafted. And Bunch doesn't do anything to get him out. As we know, you know, some powerful parents were successful at putting their kids in places like the Texas Air National Guard. Bunch can do that. Richard Nixon writes him a letter when it's clear that Ralph Jr. is going to be deployed to Vietnam. So, you know, he's on a first name basis with Nixon. But Bunch doesn't pull any strings. And so his son actually goes off to the war. He comes back safely. But the point is it was a person. war for him, as well as one that he thought was just a huge strategic mistake for the U.S. I mean, had his son never heard of medical deferments? I understand there are a lot of things with

feet that can suddenly arise. Yeah. Well, it's funny. Bunch himself tried to enlist in World War II, and he had like a piece of hay stuck in his ear and somehow like his hearing was off. That's, that's one of the ways he ends up going into the U.S.S. instead, which was probably a much better use of his time. But yeah, his son did not do any of those things. And as I said, did come back safely. So in the end, it was fine, but that was a sore point. I think it appears between the two of them. But the most important thing is Bunch just really found the Vietnam War appalling, in part because he understood that it was really a war of decolonization. It was not about communism. And in fact, you may know when Ho Chi Minh sort of issues his Declaration of Independence, he's quoting the American

declaration. Right. And hoping that Americans will see this as a kindred movement. And instead, the Americans are like, fuck of you, we're going to blow you up. And so that's, just a total misapprehension in the view of bunch and an immoral one on top of it. So shifting back to something you said earlier, you mentioned that Bunch marched alongside Dr. King and the Selma March and King obviously later became the second Black American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And the two of them, from what I gather from your book, had an excellent relationship. There was an interesting story in the book about a letter that Bunch got from two Howard University students regarding his overall role in the civil rights movement. Yeah, so Bunch is kind of reaching the end of his UN career. He's getting more active again in the civil rights movement. And of course, this is like the mid-60s and it's all heating up. And he gets this letter where these two students, he had taught it, Howard. They say, you know, we were wondering like what you're up to. There was a debate in the dorm about whether you were doing anything. And he was pretty pissed off when he gets this letter. So he sends this kind of testy reply back saying, you know, I'm actually really active. And here's all the things I'm doing. But it was a kind of message.

that he was increasingly out of step with where Black America was, certainly by the mid-60s. So, you know, Muhammad Ali gives a couple of jabs at Bunch, not literal jabs, but metaphoric jabs. And kind of pointing out that Bunch was one of these guys who seemed to always be on the front page dealing with some foreign problem, I'm paraphrasing, but not someone who is dealing with the problems at home. And so I think Bunch was a little concerned about the way he was being perceived at his image. definitely kind of got under his skin. But he was very close with King. He really respected King. They did fight over Vietnam a little bit, but they basically were very much of a mind and saw value in each other. So they worked together quite a bit. And you mentioned that Muhammad Ali took

some jabs at him, Malcolm X as well, I think, right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, Malcolm X, so, Bunch, just to contrast, Bunch's view was, I'm an American through and through. I have no interest in kind of a separate black world or state or something like that, which was an idea that was occasionally floated, of course, most prominently, most recently in the nation of Islam. Whereas Malcolm X was like, I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million victims of Americanism. So they couldn't have differed more in terms of their view of how the black community should relate to or understand this country. But in addition, Malcolm X was just a person who was embracing a kind of fiery and even violent politics. And Bunch was a very sober

guy and that was not his style. So they differed quite a bit. I would. will say that there are reports I came across old New York Times stories where apparently Malcolm X kept a picture of him in his office. So maybe it was not as heated of a dispute as it appeared, but they definitely didn't see eye to eye. And you also mentioned, and this was, you know, obviously earlier chronologically, but you mentioned there was a little, an odd little clash with W.E.B. Du Bois. So Du Bois was a huge figure in 20th century America and quite a bit older than Bunch. And so Bunch had, when he was a young man, had written as he's going off to Harvard to Du Bois, to try to kind of get on his radar screen and say, can I do something? Can I help you? And Du Bois doesn't

really give them the time of day. But then later, when Bunch is negotiating between the Arabs and the Israelis in 1949, Du Bois goes to Madison Square Garden and speaks before the annual convention of the American Jewish Congress and a tax bunch publicly for this huge audience on the grounds that he is not helping the Israelis enough, that he's insufficiently pro-Jewish and actually sort of apologizes on behalf of Black Americans. for Bunch, which is a totally crazy thing to do because, one, bunch, actually, the Israelis loved him. They wanted him to keep negotiating. They thought he was the best mediator by far. But two, it was just an interesting way to look at how things have changed. You know, at that time,

there was very little sense in the part of black intellectual thought that the Palestinians were any way similar. In fact, it was the Israelis who were seen as kind of similar and the side that really needed the most help, the beleaguered minority. That was the viewpoint. So a bunch gets pretty pissed off about that. And years later, when Bunch is super famous and Du Bois is kind of getting old, he refuses to ever talk to Du Bois and basically writes him out of his life. See, holding a grudge like that is the most Jewish thing you can possibly do. Yeah. Well, Bunch was always intrigued by the Jews. It was funny. He, you know, he grew up in, in L.A. in the early 20th century did not have a lot of experience. But then he moves to New York. He gets to know some Jews. And then, of course, he spends a ton of time in Israel. And so he's constantly in his notes writing about, he's always misspelling Yamika, but he's kind of talking about the Yamika tradition and then the jaunty hats,

which I guess he was referring to kind of Orthodox. And he didn't really like the way they would wear their hats. And so anyway, he was sort of fascinated by Jewish people, but it wasn't really his world. It was a milieu he came into late in life. Right. Here's a big question. How did we forget about him, about bunch? I'll have to cop to it.

I'll include myself in that way. After I first talked to you about your book, I mentioned it to my mom. And I said something like, oh, yeah, you know, the book is about the first black Americans to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And she pretty instantly was like, oh, Ralph Punch. And she explained that everyone knew about him when she was growing up. And again, we're talking like, you know, ticker tape parades in New York, days named after him in Los Angeles. And my guess is if you went out on the street now and surveyed 100 people, 99 of them would literally really either have never heard the name or wouldn't be able to place it at all. How did this happen? Yeah, yeah, especially white people. But yeah, it's kind of amazing because not only that, he'd get one of the ways I opened the book is he actually gives the Best Picture Award at the Oscars in

1951. He's called on stage by Fred Astaire. He's handing out, you know, the envelope. So he was really famous. So I'm impressed that your mom knew that and remembered that. I mean, I think it's a little bit perplexing to me why he's so forgotten. To be fair, he's been dead for 50 years. It's a long time. But, you know, there's a lot of breakthrough figures in 20th century life. Jackie Robinson, who Bunch, knew well and was considered a friend, who we revere and everybody knows who they are. What made Bunch stand out was the fact that he wasn't an athlete. He wasn't a singer. He wasn't an actor. Those were the profession that in the mid-century, black people were allowed to be famous in. It was instead as a diplomat that he became famous.

So on the one hand, that made him incredibly special at the time. On the other, I think he's just fallen out of our consciousness, in part maybe because the Cold War makes that stuff seem less important. So I think at the time, it was hugely important to be someone who was really skilled at diplomacy. Today, maybe less so. I don't know. It's a mystery to me, honestly, but that's why I wrote the book. Yeah, no, and I'm glad you did.

Again, the name was vaguely familiar to me. It's not that I had never heard it. But I definitely did not remember all the things that he, did not even close. This may be more of a white thing than anything else. But it certainly does seem that, at least that back in the day, his fame and the respect for him jumped way through color barriers. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, by the end of his career, in the 60s, when people like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali are sort of coming into their fame and prominence, bunch is seen as sort of stodgy. And, you know, he's a kind of throwback to an earlier era in their minds. Now, of course,

not everyone saw it that way. And for a lot of people, they still loved Ralph Bunch and he was still a really important voice. So he's someone who's around, but he was viewed as a kind of older model of a black leader, not fiery enough, not aggressive enough, not willing to really speak his mind. That was a kind of charge that was leveled against him by many people by the end of his career. I don't think totally fairly. I think he was pretty effective, but there's no question he was like the favorite black person of the white establishment. That was pretty clear. Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it.

What would you say is the biggest thing that you learned while writing the book? First of all, I knew only maybe slightly more than you. I'm even sure I knew what you knew when I started. So, you know, I learned so much about him and about the milieu. But I think the biggest thing was just really understanding the importance of kind of black oppression worldwide and the way in which I think Bunch was absolutely right to draw this connection between the civil rights movement that I think we all, you know, to some degree as Americans understand and hopefully, you know, appreciate and learn from. And also this global movement of

decolonization, which is sort of vaguely in many of our minds, but without a real strong understanding. And I say that even as someone who teaches international affairs for a living, I didn't fully appreciate how significant that process was. And so putting those things together as kind of a a way to have a more just world was something that Bunch lived his life aiming to do. And it's something that I came away from the book really appreciating. So I have a lot of respect for him and I certainly learned a lot from him. And it's interesting. You wrote, I guess it must have been right at the beginning of the book. You wrote UCLA where you are, there's a building with his name on it. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I've got an office in it. That's how, you know, when I first got the office there, I was like,

who is this guy? And there is a sort of bust at the bottom that honestly looks nothing like him. There's a birth date that's wrong. There's like all these mistakes. And it just got me started on wanting to understand more and learn a little more about him. But yeah, he was there for the dedication in 1969. He comes out. He's pretty excited about that building, actually, because he loved UCLA. And he got to meet Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

And one of the things that Bunch was most proud of in his life was that he had been on the UCLA basketball team. So meeting Kareem was just like this huge event for him. But that was a huge moment for Bunch to have a big. building named after him at a school that he really loved. So yeah, the building's still there, still standing. Still looks good. Amazing. And so he passed away in 1971, and it was a bit untimely, wasn't it? Yeah, he was young. He was 68. And one of the things was he had just terrible health. You know, he was a chain smoker. He never slept. He was traveling constantly at a time when travel was

pretty, you know, there were not like live flat beds. And so he's jetting all over the world. He's in Congo for three months in 1960 and who knows what different bugs he caught. And so he had a pretty rough life and did not take great care of himself while he did it. So by the time he's in his 60s, he's aging really, really quickly. And in fact, he tries to get out of the UN and retire at various times. And the title of the book actually comes from the fact that Dean Rusk, who is the secretary of state at that time, is basically, you know, almost ordering him like, you can't leave the UN. You're the only one there we can deal with. And so he's for various reasons, of pressure to stay and stay. And right up until the end, he does. And then eventually he sort of

succumbs to his many, many ailments and dies peacefully, but it's much, much premature. So in that sense, a sad story of someone who, who kind of overworked themselves. Yeah, that is really sad. And obviously, with someone like that, you always wonder how much more could they have even accomplished if they hadn't left so quickly. Yeah, a problem you and I won't have. So we're not working at heart. The book is the absolutely indispensable man, Ralph Bunch, the United Nations, and the fight to End Empire, and it's out on December 1st. Kyle, thanks so much for coming on. My pleasure. Anytime. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal.

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