Unclear and Present Danger - J. Edgar (feat. Beverly Gage)

Episode Date: November 19, 2023

This week on the Patreon, Jamelle and John were joined by Beverly Gage — a professor of history at Yale University and author of "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century" — to discuss Clint Eastwood's 2011 J. Edgar Hoover biopic, simply titled "J. Edgar." We had such a good time discussing the movie with Professor Gage that we thought we should share this episode on the main feed as a bonus! We hope you enjoy it and we hope you consider signing up for the Patreon if you haven’t already."J. Edgar" stars eonardo DiCaprio in the title role, with supporting performances from Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Josh Lucas and Judi Dench. The movie is available for rental or purchase on iTunes and Amazon.You can find Beverly's book at a bookstore near you.This episode was produced by Connor Lynch. Our artwork is by Rachel Eck.

When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes. A society unwilling to learn from the past is doomed. We must never forget our history. We must never lower our guard. Again. You will rise to be the most powerful man in the country. of the country. It is my belief that when a man becomes a part of this bureau, you must so conduct himself as to eliminate even the slightest possibility of criticism as to his conduct.

Do you remember that file we created on his wife? Mrs. Roosevelt. Will you make a copy for me, please? Is that legal? Sometimes you need to bend the rules a little in order to keep your country safe. Please leave the transcripts here with me. You'll free and share them with your brother. Mr. Kennedy, let him know that I have a copy of my own.

The president is afraid. All the admiration in the world can't fill the spot where love goes. We are the sinners, Edgar. We tolerated lawlessness in the land. The group of diabolical proportions. The blood is on your hands, Edgar. What are your exact qualifications for your position of leadership in this bureau? My qualifications, sir?

I don't know who I can trust anymore. I see right through you. You're a scared, heartless, horrible little man. Don't wilt like a little flower. Be strong. Yes, mother. It's time this generation learned the difference between villain

and hero. Even great men can be corrupted. Welcome to the unclear and present Patreon, a podcast about the political military and spy thrillers of the Cold War, for the most part, and what they say about the politics of the politics of the era. I'm Jamel. I'm John. And today we have a guest. We have Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale, and the author of G-Man, J.Ger Hoover in the Making of the American Century.

Hello, Beverly. Hi. Thank you for joining us to talk about a kind of bad movie. My favorite person, though. Yeah. Yes. So if you didn't catch your previous episode, previous episode of the podcast or this the Patreon podcast we watched um did we do the private it was the private files of jac grouwer so we previously watched the private files of jac grouver on the main feed podcast we we watched uh oliver stone's nixon that episode is out and so we're kind of in this like mid-century conservative thing right now and so we thought it'd be fun to kind of break the rule of the podcast a little bit which is

of watching movies that are made during the Cold War period and watching a movie that's made recently about the period. And so this week, we watched Clint Eastwood's 2011 Hoover Biopic that's simply titled J. Edgar. It is a look at the life of the longtime FBI director from his youngest days at the Bureau of Investigation. I think the movie kind of, that movie's timeline begins more or less with the Palmer raids in 1990, and that it ends with his death in 1972.

it presents Hoover as kind of a complicated and tortured guy who's sort of like projected image and internal image are at crossways which is sort of what the lead of the movie does best I think in his roles and so the Jayaker stars Lean Out of Caprio as Jake or Hoover which okay not to do too much color commentary but I think Leo gives a good performance

even if of the all the Hollywood actors that could possibly look like Jake or Hoover. Leonardo DiCaprio is just like not one of those guys. But it starts Leo supporting performances from Army Hammer, Naomi Watts, Josh Lucas, and Judy Dent. You'll also notice Dermot Mulroney floating around in the movie, Stephen Root and Leah Thompson. A lot of character actors in this movie,

kind of a classic Clint Eastwood production in that sense. the tagline for Jaeger was simply the most powerful man in the world and Jaeger is available for rent or purchase on iTunes and Amazon the movie did moderately well it cost about 40 million dollars to make pulled in about 85 million dollars which frankly I mean frankly 85 million dollars for a Jake Hoover biopic in 2011 is you know congratulations Clint Eastwood so normally listeners will know that we do the New York Times front page but our source for that

which is New York Times is Times machine ends in 2002 and so we don't we couldn't find a front page for the day this movie was released which was November 9th 2011 so we're going to skip that most of you will probably remember what 2011 was like Obama was in the White House I don't know. There is the debt ceiling business. I think there was just a new Pope. Pope Francis had just been chosen, if I remember correctly. Maybe I have the timeline off there. John Bainer was Speaker of the House. I don't know. It was American politics in 2011. Seemed crazy at the time. In retrospect, it was very normal. Oh, yes. So instead of doing that, we're going to jump right into discussing this movie. We obviously have Beverly here because she is the author of a fantastic

book, hefty book, but a fantastic book on Hoover that has been rightfully lauded for its, for, I mean, for everything, for the storytellers for the kind of pieces it's making about state building in the 20th century of the United States. So I want to start by asking Bev, what did you think of this movie, you know, having spent so much time with Hoover? What did you think of this, of Clint's depiction of this guy? Well, I watched it the first time in 2011, just as it was coming out, and I was just starting to work on the Hoover book. And so my first lesson was, I don't own Jay Edgar Hoover. Other people are going to weigh in on this. And then I watched it for the second time just yesterday.

I guess the second time around, I thought it was a significantly worse film than I had recalled the first time. Just as a film experience, it's very washed out. It's pretty slow. There's a lot of speechifying. But I think in its very broad depiction of Hoover and particularly the relationship between Hoover and Clyde Tulson, which is really the heart of this movie, you know, I think that they did reasonably well. There are lots of things that I could pick apart from a historian's perspective. And of course, there are lots of things that are left out.

But, you know, the basic thesis about this kind of tortured relationship between these two men and about Hoover as a very kind of tightly wound control freak, I think those things are basically true. John, your thoughts. I thought this movie I remember when I first watched it I don't remember having an opinion strong opinion on it

it's not a movie that I ever wanted to return to or thought about much since watching it I didn't have a strong and negative opinion about it when the first time I saw it I guess but watching again it's a drab movie in both content and form it's very the

I guess the color palette is done this way to have some signify something about Hoover's inner life or the the desert of his soul or something like that, but it's very hard to watch because it's not interesting. And yeah, I think that, you know, there are parts of the movie that are, you know,

historically, you know, you don't get a lot of movies to talk about the first Red Scare and it's kind of nice to see those things on screen and interesting. But yeah, I mean, I am obviously. no conception of the of the details of hoover's life to say what it got right or wrong but yeah i mean it was not it wasn't my it wasn't that different from the image of j ever hoover that i've constructed over reading about him and you know from other sources of popular culture and i think that what i did find kind of it's very interesting to hear that you thought the the representation

of his relationship with tolson was more or less actually accurate. Because I thought, you know, it was a little bit, I don't know, it came out at an interesting time maybe. And I wonder how it's politics. They're not, it's not a, it treats his romance with a certain degree of sympathy and pity. But it also kind of makes, you know, it, it, it, it kind of like presents him and Clyde, especially as sort of like catty gay guys who are like, it's, it just like kind of presents some certain. stereotypes about about about homosexuality that we have from the 20th century and kind of like pathologizes them in a certain way and makes his entire um and not entirely reducing it to it but but reduces a lot of his um behavior and neuroses to that particular problem um which i thought you know perhaps even in the 12 years that it's come out has not aged particularly well. It wasn't a horribly bigoted, bigoted movie, but I was just like, all right, you know. But yeah, I think that it was very, it's a, it's a, have you seen Bev, um, the private files of Jay Edgar Hoover, the earlier.

I have, but not a long, long time. Yes. I was wondering what, yeah, it's, I think my problem with both these movies, and I think I said this on when we were talking about Nixon recently, the movie. it's almost like his life is too long and his career is too long to really make a good movie about it. Like you can go into particular, and this movie kind of jumps around chronologically, which is, I think if you don't have any conception of American history of the 20th century or know anything about her, I mean, about Jay over, you could get very lost. So, yeah, I think his life is almost too long in a biography or a history is sort of the correct medium. to tell the story of his life.

And it doesn't quite lend itself to cinema, maybe. I mean, I don't, yeah. The, so the movie, as we've kind of alluded to, is structured non-linearly. It begins at the end of Hoover's life when he's narrating a ghostwritten story of his life to an agent who'll be writing about it. And then the movie kind of jumps into the,

past and sort of are going back and forth from Hoover's present to the past, Hoover's present to the past until we get the end of Hoover's life. And I think you're right, John, that there is, I think you can depict this cinematically, but it would have to be a narrowly focused depiction. It'd have to be on a particular episode, a particular couple of years in Hoover's life. it would have to take like what I think of as the the Lincoln or Selma approach like finding some emblematic moment in this person's life and then really drilling down into it and using that to illustrate something about the person's character you're not trying to tell the story of their life you're trying to tell the story of their character and this movie attempts to do both and I think I think again it does not succeed very much in and sort of capturing this guy's entire life but you're right it's like it's too long long for a two-hour movie. Like, it's, it's, you know, you, it would, I kind of hate mini-series.

I think they're overdone. But you would do this as sort of like an HBO miniseries if you really wanted to do this, right? Right. And the rights for an excellent biography to do exactly that are currently available for those of you out there. I would, and I would, I would happen. I would be like in the, you know, there is, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a

Perry Mason reboot that went for two seasons that takes place in the 30s that I was like totally completely into there's a there's a sequence in it where there's um Perry Mason walks through a bonus march and I was like hey it's a bonus march so uh I'm I'm I'm the audience for this sort of thing but yeah me too it it doesn't really hold together a film especially since I'm not I wasn't I'm not sure what Clint is or we're was entirely trying to do here. I think you're right that he seems to have a lot of sympathy for the Hoover-Tolson relationship. I may have this totally wrong, so please correct me if I do, but he seems to kind of maybe capture it the way Hoover may have thought of it, which is like

intimate but not necessarily physical, like an extremely intimate relationship, maybe his most intimate relationship, but one that he never quite conceptualized as being a physical thing. Right. When I think about, you know, having said my two generous things about the film and now we can begin picking it apart. But, you know, when I said that I thought that the Hoover-Tolson relationship was in some basic sense, the kind of faithful depiction of sorts, that's sort of what I mean, right? That we don't have a lot of material on what they said in their most private moments to each other. and as an imagination of what that might have been like, it's probably more tortured, I would say, than they actually were. But since we don't know whether it was actually a sexual relationship or not, I do think the film captured the sense of intimacy and intensity

that was certainly there in their relationship. And then the other piece that I found so interesting as a biographer was just how public the relationship was, right? And you do see them at least a little bit in the film, kind of moving through the bureau and the racetrack and the vacations and the whole thing, just as this social couple that's kind of widely regarded and accepted, and they have their special table at the restaurant and such. So I think they were trying to kind of remain faithful to what we do, in fact, know,

and then making this imaginative leap. And Dustin Lance Black, if I remember correctly, who is the screenwriter, with someone who in this period in the early part of the 21st century, century, you know, was writing a lot of kind of gay-themed films was really trying to capture new ways of depicting gay relationships. So what's so interesting to me about his relationship with Tolson is that, you know, he was a conservative and conventional man in many ways. He must have understood or was he or was there some kind of blindness or naivety that his

relationship with Tolson would look curious and be the source of rumors and innuendos. And he just didn't care or he wasn't conscious of that or that's what always struck me. I thought, you know, that would be the first place a lot of people's minds would go. What did you, what did you think of his own willingness to, not to be out, obviously, but have this intimate, as a very conventional conservative man, have this intimate friendship with another man in public like that. Yeah, it is one of the puzzles of Hoover's life. And I think that the film doesn't actually get very far toward explaining that,

in part because although I know this is all Cold War films, I mean, the film entirely skips, the 40s and 50s, which is a really weird choice because that's really Hoover's heyday, right? We see him as a kind of young up-and-comer, and then we see him as the bitter old man, you know, policing John Kennedy and Martin Luther King's sex lives. And that's really how most people think of him today. But the 40s and 50s, which are not in this film at all, are the period when he's the most influential, the most popular, the most public. But it's also the period of the lavender scare when they're very busy policing the sex lives of other people in the federal. service, right, because it was federal policy that you couldn't be employed by the federal

government and be gay. And so Hoover and Tolson are very actively doing that. They're still moving in public together, but they are also using the FBI to police exactly what you're saying, right? When rumors about them came up, they would actually send bureau agents to people's door and say, you were at a dinner party the other night. It got back to us that you said this thing about the director, and you should never say that because he's the most fine, God-fearing American, upstanding man that you've ever heard, and you'll never say that again, right? And of course, the people say, yes, I will never say that again. So he's really actively policing it, and the rumors are there during its lifetime. That's astonishing. I mean, I think that I, you know,

obviously we all know how authoritarian J. Edgar Hoover was and the abuses of the FBI, But that it reached that level, to me, is really an astonishing fact. When they don't, this movie does not, it shows some of the abuses, but I don't think it shows things like that. Right. It doesn't. And it kind of hints at a lot of those abuses. But then it gets, to me, it gets some things really wrong in a kind of outrageous way.

Like there's this suggestion that Hoover somehow blackmailed Franklin Roosevelt into keeping him in office with the judge? I mean, there's just no evidence that that happened. Hoover did play around with information. He had these, but the idea that he had to black, Franklin Roosevelt really liked him, right? I mean, a lot of liberals really liked him. I thought that story was true. I took that, I thought, I, I don't think I got it from it, but I thought that story of him putting the dossier with the Eleanor Roosevelt rumors on his desk and then Franklin putting it aside. I just thought that was historically, I've repeated that many times. But there's just nothing to it, I suppose. Right. Yeah, no. I mean, Roosevelt

generally liked Hoover. So they did ultimately, you know, do some spying on Eleanor Roosevelt, but much of that came somewhat later. And he is, you know, he's playing with information all the time. But just there's no suggestion that I've ever seen that Franklin Roosevelt ever wanted to do anything except, like, give the FBI a lot more power. I mean, that's what's, so what's, What's interesting to me is, so we have this movie about Hoover that's entirely focused on, for the most part, just kind of personal life is like inner turmoil. It skips the 40s and 50s. It presents a young and appealing Hoover and then an old and very unappealing Hoover and doesn't really even try to contend whatsoever with what you identified, Beth, which is that Hoover was this like popular figure for many Americans. For at least two full decades, for two decades in American life, he was a trusted and well-liked figure.

We don't think of him during that period because that raises, like, uncomfortable questions about, well, why did everyone like this guy so much, right? Like, if we acknowledge that this is like this guy was, he abused his power, he was sort of like, you know, paranoid and secretive and, you know, his influence really brushes up against notions of like what is appropriate in a democratic state. And yet no one really had a problem with him until kind of late, right? It's relatively late when it's sort of like this Hoover guy seems, you know, we don't like him very much. But there's no, I find it so interesting that this movie doesn't, whatsoever try to grapple with it. It just sort of takes as a given.

Like, oh, yeah, Hoover always sort of secretive, always sort of, you know, held with a certain amount of remove. To the extent that we're going to show public adoration for anything, it's going to be for the FBI. So there's that, there's the, there's the, uh, the scene where we see. I actually kind of really like this as a movie nerd, because we see there's a scene where Hoover is narrating how the public love, I love gangsters in the 30s, and there's like, there's a couple shots from the public enemy, which is a great movie.

A wild movie with James Cagney, like, kills a horse. It's crazy. And then we see a later film from the 40s where James Cagney is playing in FBI agent to demonstrate the change in public, public perception and public esteem. But I don't know. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just observing that like there's, it's really interesting to me that there's just like this refusal to sort of like situate Hoover as like a legitimately popular figure in American life. It would be as if someone made, it would be as if someone made a film about Donald Trump and then just sort of like decided to ignore the whole 20 years of Donald Trump was like a major and popular celebrity. Right. Or ignore the fact that millions and millions of people really like Donald Trump, right?

that he actually has a big constituency and a big base, and you might like that or not, but it is a fact in the world. And I think Hoover was a little like that. I mean, one of the things we're going to talk about the movie and not about my book, but one of the things... No, we can talk as much about your book as you want to talk about your book. One of the things that I wanted to do in that book

was precisely get away from this image that the only way that Hoover held power was by strong-arming people and that everyone around him is so, alarmed by what he's doing, but he's this kind of pathological figure, and he does it anyway. The movie very much buys into that image. But if you look at his actual career, he was there under eight presidents. He was head of the FBI for 48 years, which I agree makes him a very difficult two-hour film subject. But he had all sorts of strategies for kind of maintaining and

creating his own power, his own popular constituency that didn't have anything to do with strong-arming people. You look at someone like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, and a lot of the secrets that Hoover had about them were things they had asked him to do, right? Because they relied on him. They were pretty close to him. He did political favors. He did some stuff that was pretty outrageous. And mostly, they found him really useful. And that's the big secret, far more than or as much as the kind of trading of information. You know, and the same things with Congress, right? It's sort of weird to have a movie about Jay Edgar Hoover

that skips the McCarthy era entirely. And almost skips, you know, you get a lot of early anti-communism, but you have a lot of early sort of first red scare, but you get nothing about the second red scare, which is really his heyday. But it's also a period of which he very canally, you know, creates these relationships with all. all of these congressional committees, all these people in Congress, he's doing favors for them,

he's sharing information with them, and they rely on him for lots and lots of different reasons. So, yeah, I do think the film just kind of bought into the, you know, Hoover's doing these terrible things and everyone around him from the White House to his own secretary. They're sort of shocked by it, and they wish, but they couldn't stop him, right? Right. He's a monster. Right, exactly. Like the idea that Robert Kennedy, I mean, they didn't get along for sure, but Robert Kennedy did not sit there and say, you know, oh no, Edgar, you know, we cannot police Martin Luther King or something. Right. He signed the wiretap order. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That always, I think we discussed this actually when we discussed the last movie is that, you know, very much politically impossible for him to have survived as long as he did without a constituency and without making himself frankly just, you know,

useful to the people who are in power. And the FBI is obviously a repressive apparatus of state, if you will. But it's also one that the American people consent to. And that's what made it a powerful institution is that basically the idea that they could collect information, people have to give them information. And there has to be some kind of understanding that it's legitimate. it's legitimate and I think Hoover's Hoover really worked very hard to make the FBI appear

legitimate and appear not only legitimate but essential for the functioning of the country and I think that even it's very difficult for people now maybe things have changed to say imagine a rule without the FBI

you know or you know and that was his project to kind of make that happen in a certain way so yeah I think that the movie, you know, I really, your point about him as a political figure is so well taken, and I think that the movie, because it's obsession with his private life and his inner life and his tortured soul, doesn't make enough account of his political career, if you want to put it that way, and his efforts to create, you know, networks of influence and power and control and public facing. They show a little bit of his public relation stuff.

But I'm just curious, but they want to situate that in his, not so much in his political needs or his political life, but another side of his character, which I think is slightly related to the way they kind of have a somewhat pathologized view of his relationship with Tolson, is that he was extremely vain and extremely and petty. And I wonder how much that rings true. Did he come across to you as such a terribly vain person? Yes. And unfortunately, at least some of what is depicted in the film, which you're identifying, I think, quite rightly as kind of gay stereotypes. You know, he was super vain. He always wore fancy suits. He had, you know, his handkerchief pressed or a fresh flower in his lapel.

He lived with his mother. They went to Broadway shows. We could go on. He collected antiques. Oh, all right. So, you know. I have a theory when we discussed the movie, the previous movie, about Hoover and the FBI, which is a little speculative, and I would like to run it by you as a person who actually

knows what they're talking about. And it's about Hoover's political project, but almost like his ideological project or the project of his imagination. And I kind of proposed the idea that the FBI was almost like an arc for the type of white American manhood that Hoover idealized. And he was almost existed to protect that, but also to reproduce it internally. And that was, you know, one could say, okay, that was an eroticized vision of American manhood. But it's definitely an idealized one. And he was like, the G man looks a certain way, presents himself.

a certain way. This is what ideal Americans are supposed to be. And then I took this a little farther and compared it to perhaps the elite institutions of totalitarian states that were also meant to not just be the security forces, but a kind of container for the ideal subject of the state. Do you think there's anything to that or that's bonkers? Oh, I think that that's absolutely Right. And I think he was pretty explicit about it. I mean, certainly, yes, I'm here to affirm you. But especially, you know, in the 20s when he became director in 1924, and you get little hints of this in the film. You know, when he lines everyone up and says, we're going to be gentlemen, you're going to wear the proper suit. You're going to do all of these things. But he's pretty explicit in the 20s about wanting to take what was this tiny, tiny little group of agents. right, a couple hundred men pluck them kind of out of his own university, his own fraternity, like-minded organizations, have a particular kind of man who looked a particular kind of way, who would perform this kind of elite function for the world.

And then as the bureau grew and grew, that obviously became a much bigger phenomenon. But I think even he would have agreed with you in some sense. Maybe wouldn't have used your fancy language, right? I think that that was explicitly a part of the program that these were model Americans. You get that a little bit in the movie, but I don't think, you know, as much as probably should have been emphasized. I think like the weirdness, I think the, we get a lot about the weirdness of Hoover as a, as eccentric individual who's, you know, but not maybe enough about the weirdness of the FBI as an

institution. And I think that that's, and just the weirdness of. American politics at time, perhaps, where, you know, presidents essentially assented and, you know, the country did too, where it thought, you know, this is, I think the other thing, and I think this is interesting to think about in your idea of him as a conservative state builder is we talked about the idea of Hoover as a very interesting figure because he had a very archaic idea of Americana but he was also a modernizer and that I don't want to go so far as to say like it's a little not the correct term it's always say he was like a reactionary modernist

because that's not quite the right term but there was but I thought that that's so interesting that he he was sort of bringing the American state into the 20th century but also had a consciousness of himself, I think, as a very old-stock American and with an old view of America. Yeah, just to add to that, I think part of what maybe makes Hoover, makes the Hoover of the earlier, the pre-60s part of Hoover's life, hard to, or a little illegible for people today, is precisely this notion of a conservative state builder. It's just sort of not a thing that really exists in American politics anymore.

Or maybe it's beginning to come back in a little, in some sense. But like for, for a while, the notion of conservatives being at the forefront of trying to build up the administrative state, trying to build up federal agencies was just like not that much of a thing. The other just observation I note is a couple weeks ago I saw Killers with the Flower Moon. a movie that takes place in 22, 1922, 1923. And what is so interesting about that movie, thinking about it politically, is sort of at the halfway mark is when the FBI or the Bureau of Investigation enters the picture. And it enters a picture very explicitly as like, this is the modern state entering. This is the modern state taking over this investigation.

This is the modern state, exerting its hand on this region of the country. country that is still in a lot of ways very much the frontier and still very much sort of outside of, you know, normal society, not normal society, but outside of modern society. So that's just a random observation. But yeah, just just could you talk a little bit about like Hoover estate builder, which I find fascinating. That's like this is the thing about your book that I find super interesting. Well, I think what you just said was one of the reasons that I I wanted to write the book in the first place. So when I was in graduate school in the 90s and early 2000s, historians everywhere were getting super interested in writing about conservatives,

but tended to write about, you know, kind of conservative social movements or Buckley or other figures like that and electoral figures, et cetera. And it seemed to me that we needed a place for a figure like Hoover, who was a believer in kind of progressive ideas about nonpartisanship and professionalism and expertise and career government service and science, and who was also this deeply conservative and even reactionary figure on all sorts of social questions, right? I mean, certainly on crime and anti-communism, which were the FBI's two big missions in his life, but on race, on religion, on just.

gender, and who made himself into this incredibly powerful and influential conservative cultural figure, right? At a moment, when that seemed very ordinary, I mean, it's very weird to think about someone who is an appointed national security official, right, also making these speeches, which Hoover did all the time through his lifetime about how to raise your children and how to be a moral person and why you ought to go to church. And that fusion of things was fascinating to me. I agree it's something that particularly once we began to describe conservatism as anti-statist, right, sort of dropped out of being something that people could imagine. But it is who Hoover was. And I think is sort of the trick of his career, too, that lots of different kinds of people

could see things that they liked in him. So lots of liberals liked him. And so lots of liberals liked him. for his sort of state-building side, his professionalism. And they often viewed him as kind of the better option compared to someone like Joe McCarthy, who was a much trumpier figure, right, and a kind of tear it all down, get the headlines, send the big why out there, right? Hoover was a different kind of figure than that. They prefer that so, yeah, and I think there is a way in which that lineage is a, or survives today, where some forms of liberal have a lie trust for career bureaucrats and high officials of state security who they believe are professionals and trust and very frightened of demagogues.

I mean, there are some good reasons for that. I mean, at least you can count on someone to follow procedures. But, you know, I wouldn't say Hoover was a demagogue, but hearing about his, you know, campaigning on certain issues essentially in public is just really remarkable. And again, you know, I don't want to make a crude analogy. But again, something you might associate with a more authoritarian state, right, where a state security official is lecturing about hygiene, you know, the moral hygiene of the country. And it's really so strange that this happened in the United States, which we think those sorts of things don't happen here.

I have one question for you, Bev, just how racist was Jay O'Grober? He was pretty racist. So, you know, I guess I would say in a few different ways, one of the most interesting pieces of research that I did on his early life was about his college fraternity. So he was born in Washington. We saw his mother there in their home in Washington. But so he came of age in Washington when it was, you know, kind of a small southern city and was actively being segregated. So he went to segregated schools in D.C. and the public school system. He went to George Washington University, which was segregated.

But while he was at GW, he joined a fraternity called Kappa Alpha, which was this explicitly white southern fraternity kind of deep in the politics of segregation. It was a very political fraternity. And so it was really interesting to see all of that kind of being formed before he was director. So as director, you know, I think his racism showed mostly in two ways. One, he basically refused until the very, very end to hire black agents. All of the FBI's agents were white men. And then he tended to think about black people in general. activists and then especially radicals, right? Black radicals were among the most heavily

surveilled and they really got the kind of full weight of the FBI coming down on them at many, many moments. So this is most famous in the 60s when he's going after Martin Luther King so aggressively. And if you actually read, you know, the King materials, and a little bit of that is depicted in the film, at least gesturally. Although I will say, Hoover did not dictate that letter of the kind of dirty tricks letter that they said. That's a little bit absurd. That letter was actually written by the head

of the Domestic Intelligence Division, a guy named William Sullivan, and I know you take license in films. But at any rate, for the record, he did not dictate that, nor did Helen Gandy take that dictation of the famous King letter. But, you know, if you read those,

I mean, they're using racial epithets. They're kind of imagining King's sex life in this kind of outsized, super-sexualized, very racialized way. So, you know, it's deeply embedded in the Bureau. There are lots of moments where because he is, again, this kind of like he's a state builder and a conservative, he's a racist,

and he's also a lawman. And so there actually are then many moments where those things are in some tension, where the FBI does pretty surprisingly good jobs on things like operations against the Klan or attempts to investigate lynchings in the 40s when it's very, very difficult to do. And those tend to be moments where there's either a lot of violence involved or when a group like the Klan or the White South in general, they're explicitly attacking federal power, attacking the FBI,

saying we don't recognize federal law, right? And that gets Hoover, the lawman, pretty upset. And so he can be very aggressive toward them in those instances. That to me is what makes Hoover's conservatism so interesting because it does sort of, it's not just sort of like in the, in the contemporary interest in the rights, sort of like there is like this longstanding strain of conservative American thought that is very much about restraining. the influence of the federal government, of sort of deferring to local authorities, deferring to the kinds of people who make up the clan, right, and saying, you know what, they're going to do their thing.

And we're, you know, just like there's the state, the federal government has no legitimate role to play in in dealing with that. That is the prerogative of those people. And so to have this deeply conservative man whose conservatism. is is is is is centered on the national state as like this force for creating order moral order social order um political order uh it's it's it's very it's very interesting to me and i sort of part of me wonders if with the rise the recent rise of like quote unquote national conservatives if there's going to be an attempt to kind of reclaim hoover um as a figure as someone worth

if not emulating, but as someone who kind of represents some of what this movement hopes to do, right? Like a federal lawman lecturing, I'll say this. I can think of at least two of my colleagues who would look at a federal lawman lecturing about marriage and be like, yeah, that's what they should do. We won't ask you to name names. On the other hand, right, I mean, a huge section of the Republican Party right now is calling to abolish the FBI, right? So in some sense, I think the dominant strain is that the politics that we got at the time of Hoover's death, which is that liberals and leptists, we're pretty skeptical of the FBI. Conservatives tended to like the FBI mostly coming out of the politics of the 60s of what the FBI did to the civil rights and anti-war movement and such, right? That has really flipped now in which it's the Republicans who are on the abolish the FBI, you know, don't even build them a new headquarters end of things.

And then as I've been writing this book, particularly in the Trump years, you know, I had lots of liberals and leftists kind of come up to me and say, well, you know, I never thought I'd say anything nice about the FBI, but I sure hope, you know, Robert Mueller and James Coney save us from Christopher. foray, save us from, you know, the demise of the Republic. And they were following a myth almost that Hoover created, I mean, of a crusading G man and who, you know, would not stop until they got their man and so on and so forth. Right. And the one, the one upright man in the Den of Thieves, right? Exactly. It's very Hoover. Very dramatic. The drama of it is very. I have a question about Nixon because both movies, both films we watched, dramatize a little bit about his relationship with Richard Nixon,

who in some ways politically was similar in that he was a conservative, small C, kind of a reactionary in some ways, but not hostile to state power and sort of a believer in the executive. And I know that they had tension in their relationship, but how would you characterize his relationship with Richard Nixon? Yeah, I really wish they had done more with that in the film. I thought they had a pretty good Nixon actor and a pretty good Nixon voice. Yeah. But didn't really get into this.

I mean, Hoover and Nixon really liked each other. They were very close personal friends from basically the late 1940s onward. And we're extremely close when Nixon was vice president. And then when Nixon is kind of floating around in the early 60s, he's still coming to Hoover, asking for advice, they're having dinner, they're going on vacations and this sort of thing. So they were extremely close. And Nixon was a big champion of Hoover when he ran in 1968, basically ran on a kind of Hoover-style law and order platform, said he would keep Jay Edgar Hoover on, did all of this kind of trumpeting of Hoover when he got into the White

house. But then they ran into some real problems, actually, and sort of amazingly, mostly because Nixon wanted Hoover to do things that even Jay Edgar Hoover wouldn't do. So one of the reasons that Nixon ends up starting the plumbers is because Hoover doesn't want to do those sort of explicitly political dirty tricks that Nixon would like the FBI to do. So Nixon says he's going to have his own team of guys do it because Hoover won't do it for him. Interesting. But the one thing that I think they really focused on in the movie. I mean, to jump back a little bit, so much of this movie is devoted to Lindbergh kidnapping

for reasons that I don't understand. That went on and on and on. And honestly, it was a big case, but it wasn't that big a deal for the FBI. They came in late. You know, they did help to solve it in the end. But there's so many cases that are so much more important. And I guess my theory of that in the film

is that they wanted something that would kind of get us out from behind the desk, right? I think one of the reasons it's hard to make a film about Hoover is he basically, like, sat at his desk and pushed paper around and made an occasional speech. But as the movie sort of suggests, he really wasn't an investigator. He didn't go out and make the arrests. He was not a detective. He was a bureaucrat. And so that's not a great film subject.

But anyway, it was just very weird to me that I'm probably a quarter of, the film was about the Lindbergh kidnapping, and I just didn't get that at all. Which is such a strange, I mean, obviously, it's a huge deal at the time and the trial of the century and all this, so on and so forth. But it's not a huge part of the American memory anymore. You know, I think, so it's kind of strange to be like, you know, unlike, you know, as you pointed out, the Red Scare is extremely important part of American history. And Hoover was instrumental, a huge part of it. And his relationship, and as a. opposing or not more moderate but more low key figure than McCarthy is so interesting and it's just

such he makes one nasty remark about McCarthy in the movie I think but I think also the Lindberg kidnapping is not and I think this may have Clint Eastwood's politics are well known maybe it was easier to do something that wasn't as political that she felt it would be divisive for the audience I think every well at least until a few years ago the consensus was that the red second red scare was bad but you know perhaps it was too controversial in the mind of and also it might have it might have had too much stuff about Hollywood that he didn't want to get into because of his personal fault that's an interesting thing to think about sort of the influence of Clint's own politics on this movie because it's because Hoover seems like the kind of

figure it may I mean the movie is broadly sympathetic to Hoover and so that might that might be the thing reflecting Clint's politics more than anything because Is this Clint Eastwood, who would have been in his late 80s when this came out? That guy's really old. How could he have been in his late 80s 20 years ago? Sorry, sorry, his late 70s. Okay, okay. He's like 90-something now.

Right, right, right. So he would have, I mean, like Hoover's heyday is like, you know, in line with his basically his life, his younger life at the very least. And I have to imagine that that plus his own politics leads him to be a bit more sympathetic. But the exclusion of the second Red Scare is, is interesting. Yeah. And in some ways, I mean, I hadn't really thought about it, but I do think Clint Eastwood is sort of the air to a world that Hoover was very much embedded in, which is the world of conservative Hollywood, And of all of these figures, so we've, of course, got liberal Hollywood and read Hollywood during that period. But, you know, there are any number of figures, Ronald Reagan most famously, but the whole circle in which he moved, that really was, you know, a deeply conservative Hollywood circle or a figure like Ephraim Symbolist Jr., who became the star of the FBI TV series that came on ABC in 1965.

He was a Goldwater campaigner. I mean, he was deep into kind of Hollywood right-wing politics. And I imagine that that is at least in some sense, the world in which Clint Eastwood himself, you know, came of age and had some of his politics formed. I mean, I'm thinking of Rock Hudson, who was quite a conservative man, identified as a Republican. I believe campaign for Reagan later in life. So yeah, that's, that's, uh, sorry? Also Barbara Stanwick.

Yeah, Barbara Stanwick. Um, so yeah, that's, that's it's it, that, that, that is interesting. Eastwood as sort of representing that I, I also, I thought earlier just in terms of it be the afterlife of the image of the FBI that Hoover is responsible for. And I think it would be like Mississippi Burn. which still, I think, have quite a pull on people's image of what the FBI is, you know, decent, upstanding men, bringing the federal state to the places that have been untamed by it, right? Like, in that movie, Mississippi is presented as, like, yes, this is the United States. It's not the frontier, but it's like these people are still sort of outside the reach of the federal government and need to be brought to heal in some sense.

Right. And that year, you know, 1964, I think it's so, I mean, we've seen, we've got Selma, right? We saw Judas and the Black Messiah recently, which are kind of circling around sometimes more explicitly or less explicitly the FBI's role in kind of civil rights policing. But I think we're ready for, you know, a great new sort of answer to Mississippi burning because it's just a fascinating moment in 1964 where the FBI is. simultaneously conducting all of this surveillance and infiltration and disruption of civil rights organizations, you know, including King himself. They are also kind of going all out on some of these big civil rights murder investigations, right? So Mississippi Burning and those murders in 1964. And then they are also conducting these kind of disruptive and surveillance operations against the Klan and against white supremacist organizations that are unrelated to any particular crime. And they're doing exactly the same things to neo-Nazis as they're doing

to members of SNCC. And so it's just this stew of stuff. But I think, you know, for people who are on the ground, particularly doing civil rights work, there was this very difficult calculus of on the one hand, you know, this institution is really hostile. Hoover wouldn't protect civil rights workers, right? He said, you go do that. You're creating the disruption. We're not your personal bodyguards. And so was, you know, refusing to protect them, doing all of this surveillance and infiltration and disruption work. And yet, if you're in Mississippi in 1964 and you're a civil rights worker, you're still going to turn to the FBI before you're going to turn to the local police department. And in fact, the FBI is still your best bet. So it's a

really fascinating, I think pretty complicated stew of things going on that, you know, a film like Mississippi burning captures a little bit of, but is, you know, I think still pretty kind of heroic depiction of Hoover's Bureau during those years. I think you're right that the time is ripe for a serious examination of this exact tension, which is at the federal state. It's like tough to look at the history of the federal government and say it's necessarily been a friend to various groups, marginal groups in society. And yet, oftentimes people would prefer to federal government to step in.

versus state or local authorities. And that tension is very real in a civil rights movement. And you can see it in other points in American history, too. So we got to wrap up any concluding thoughts on the movie J. Edgar. I had a thought. I just had a thought about the way it shot, which I didn't mention earlier. But the deep shadows, the darkness, feels almost like

and this is a vibe I get from a lot of Eastwood's later movies like Eastwood a guy probably thinks about the end of his life a lot and the movie seems shot like it seems like it's like the product of a person who's like yeah I'm going to die soon and this is what reality looks to me

as a person about to die soon it's very dark but little did he know little did he know not only was he not about the die soon the guy has been cranking out movies on a schedule. Although I do think that the, you know, we see Hoover and Tolson, well, all of the characters, the main characters in these two guys. One is these kind of energetic young people.

And then I don't know about the makeup, right? The sort of elderly makeup, I just didn't work for me. I couldn't think anything except I am looking at Army Hammer and Leo DiCaprio wearing like a lot of makeup and their faces can't quite move well. and it's it's a lot apparently uh decaprio sat for six hours to get the makeup done this is a thing this is like not substantive but i don't understand why directors are so allergic to just or why producer i think it's more of a studio thing producers and studios are so allergic to just casting an older person just sort of like you need you need something to be an older Hoover just cast an older dude um and it's a movie we'll all we can all suspend our disbelief

and be like yeah that guy doesn't look like Leonardo DiCaprio but leona Caprio doesn't look like herbert uh jaker hoover uh who cares but like i with one thing i like about oppenheimer i like anything about the movie but the fact that chrish nolan was like you know what for young oppenheimer or just put some makeup on him and like tussle up his hair and people will be like yeah he's a young man. And for old Oppenheimer, we'll do a little bit of makeup, but we won't go to extreme. I think

that makes more sense than whatever was happening in this movie where they look like animatronics. Yeah, it's absurd. I want to note also as well, Eastwood has a movie coming out soon. Oh, what's it about? It's called juror number two.

A juror serving on a murder trial realizes he's at fault for the victim's death. oh wow all right that could go that could go a lot of ways sure could um but uh damn he is one two three four five six seven eight he eight eight movies in the ten years since jayaker very much like hoover he's been around forever yeah and he has a mixed legacy some people love him some people hate him actually i don't know who hates clint east with that much actually but uh some people don't like his politics. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I do, I do want to reiterate that if there is, you know, you know, fabulous young smart director out there, who's ready to take this subject on and really reinterpret it for 2023, you know, from the perspective of, generation. I know some source material that could be useful. I think a movie about Hoover in the

40s and 50s would actually be a series or anything would be actually really well taken. I think that is especially in this moment when there's so much scholarship on kind of like illiberalism. I think Stephen Hahn's new book is on illiberalism in America. Having a movie that sort of is like look at this figure who we recognize today as being extremely problematic. Look at how popular he was. A movie focused on that, I think would be well taken. But I, you know, I don't know if any Hollywood types listen to this podcast, but definitely the people who listen to this podcast will be very excited to watch that movie. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There will be at least, you know, a, a small town's worth of people interested to watch that movie. I think we can

wrap up now unless anyone has any last thoughts. Nope. No. Bev, any last thoughts? No, I'm good. I would just, you know, affirm that I do think it's, it's better to write a biography than to try to, an 800-page biography. I felt like I left out a lot of stuff, but actually the idea of trying to get a life like this into a two, two-and-a-half-hour film is an incredibly hard task to take gone. So I don't think this movie quite succeeded, but I think the task itself is just really daunting because I could barely, you know, get it all into 800 pages. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That is our show. Thank you everyone for subscribing to and listening to the Patreon. And also, I think, I think this one's going to go on to the main piece as well. So thank you for listening,

period. We appreciate your support. If you'd like, you can reach out to us over either. email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. We don't have any immediate feedback for recent episodes, but I'm sure we'll have some soon enough. And when we do, we'll talk about it on the show. Episodes of the Patreon come out every two weeks or so. And so our next episode, which we discussed on a previous episode because of the problematic title, our next episode is going to be on the 1970. Let me make sure I have the year right.

1973 film by Ivan Dixon. The Spook Who Sat by the Door starring Lawrence Cook. Quick plot synopsis. A black man plays in Uncle Tom in order to gain access to CIA training, then uses that knowledge

to plot a new American revolution. I'm really excited to watch this one. I've never seen it. And it seems like it's going to be exactly my speed of movie but that'll be next and we'll chat about that we'll chat about we'll likely talk I feel like we'll end up talking

a lot about the Black Panthers that's the most 1973 plot I've ever heard it really is it really is it really is it's it's sort of it does not I feel like from the perspective of today it may not seem like it fits the zeit guys but it's sort of like be most

zeitgeisty thing a movie could be So that's our next episode, the Spookusat But the Door. That's available to watch for free on YouTube and on the Internet Archives. You can search that. And they're both, I think, pretty high-quality DVD rips. So it's a very easy thing to find and watch for free. And until then, we will, until then, listen to back episodes, check out episodes in the main feed.

The Nixon episode was a lot of fun. good time talking about that guy, America's most, I don't know, most beta president. I feel like if Nixon heard himself described it, I'd be very, be very upset. Pretty much is not an easy man to, I mean, not a difficult man to wound. So, yeah. So check up the Nixon episode. And for Beverly Gage and John Gans, I am Jamel Bowie. this was the unclear and present

Patreon, and we will see you next time. Thank you.