Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
By Anthony Summers
Corgi Paperbacks. 621 pp. $16.95
Reviewed by Sean Lennon
J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972. Publicly, he was feted by successive presidents. Anthony Summers, however, shows Hoover as a corrupt, racist, sexist right-winger who had nothing but disdain for civil rights.
Hoover ran the FBI with an iron hand, often firing people for disagreeing with him. He also interfered in the personal lives of FBI agents. Drinking was forbidden, even off the job, and Hoover even tried to break up marriages that didn't please him.
Despite being gay, Hoover was extremely homophobic. At a time when homophobia was rampant, this gave the Mafia the sort of hold on him that meant the FBI went easy on them. But the Mafia didn't really require blackmail, for Hoover counted many mob figures as friends. Even with clear evidence to the contrary, Hoover insisted that the Mafia was no cause for concern.
Summers contrasts the lack of action against the mob with Hoover's vigorous efforts to stifle dissent. Hoover, like so many others, was paranoid about the Communist Party. His paranoia continued long after the CP had declined, suggesting that his real target was any form of dissent.
Hoover was extremely racist and anti-Semitic. Time and time again he had to be forced to use the FBI to investigate civil rights abuses.
Hoover was at his most vitriolic against Martin Luther King. He carried on a vendetta against King, even accusing him of sexual impropriety. His tactics against the Black Panthers late in the '60s led to a number of them being killed, while others were imprisoned, many falsely. Similar tactics were used against the antiwar movement.
Summers points out that while Hoover clashed repeatedly with successive presidents, none were willing to sack him. He suggests that Hoover kept files on most federal politicians. Most presidents had something to hide; if threatened with the sack, Hoover would remind them of this.
Summers quotes several psychologists who suggest that Hoover would have been at home in Nazi Germany, comparing him to Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. If Summers' book has one fault, it is to see Hoover's, and others', misdeeds as arising from their characters rather than the power structure that tolerated them. The witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy, according to Summers, was little more than a drunk. But what about the politicians who were content to endorse McCarthyism until it got too close to them?
That Hoover was able for so long to survive as head of the FBI is a damning indictment of the US system. The level of corruption in parliamentary politics detailed here is shocking.