The Complex Life of J. Edgar Hoover

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next, J. Edgar Hoover wielded an iron hand on the power — on the levers of power during his nearly 50 years as FBI director. He once was popular but Hoover’s legacy has become more and more controversial. He was considered an early seeder of modern conservatism. The Yale historian, Beverly Gage, examines his dominance in a new biography which she discusses now with Michel Martin.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Professor Beverly Gage, thank you so much for talking with us.

BEVERLY GAGE, AUTHOR, “G-MAN: J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY”: It’s great to be here.

MARTIN: You know, it’s remarkable that J. Edgar Hoover had such an enormous footprint in American life in the 20th century. I mean, you just – – you know, his name is literally on the door of the FBI headquarters. And yet, yours is the first, kind of, major biography of him in decades. I was just wondering, you know, why is that?

GAGE: Well, the divide is actually a part of what drew me to want to write the biography in the first place. Because, on the one hand, as you say, he’s this huge household name. We’re still getting Hollywood movies and all sorts of depictions of him in popular culture. And then on the other hand, I thought we didn’t have a very, you know, up to date historical examination of who he was for that amazing span of 48 years that he spent as director of the FBI.

MARTIN: Your biography, really — I don’t know, it’s such a cliche, but it — I can’t help but use it. It really complicates the picture that we have of him. You know, on the one hand — as one of the reviewers of the books said, on the one hand, you know, we see him as this kind of red baby, anti- communist racist which, you know, he was. On the other hand, this kind of stalwart law and order person who really professionalized the FBI. Who really believed in standards. What was the soil that created this person? And how did he become the person that he became?

GAGE: Yes, I think, you really hit on the political puzzle of the book which is that on the one hand, Hoover came out of this, kind of, progressive good government tradition. That was about modernizing and professionalizing. It was about expertise. It was about, you know, building up the federal government and creating nonpartisan career civil servants, right? All of these things that we tend to associate with are kind of liberal or progressive faith in the federal government and federal power. And on the other hand, he was this devout and extremely outspoken etiological conservative his whole like on race, on religion, on anti-communism, on law and order. And so, that was just a really fascinating combination to me because we don’t see those things put together all that often in our own time and day. But I think in Hoover’s period it is more common but also just something that made, sort of, the secret of his longevity and his success in the government. He could be lots of things to lots of people.

MARTIN: What was it that formed his view, his, sort of, virulent anti- communist view?

GAGE: Yes, I think it’s the big central theme of his life. The struggle between communism and anti-communism. And he came to it very early, as a young man. He was born in Washington D.C. and grew up there. And partly as a result of that, he graduated from law school in D.C. in 1917 and moved very quickly into the government. And 1917 is the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. And so, from his first moment that he enters the Justice Department, he’s interested in these issues. As a very young man. He becomes head of something known as the radical division which is basically the federal government’s first attempt to kind of conduct peacetime surveillance of left-wingers, communists in particular. And then he holds on to that for much of the rest of his life.

MARTIN: Well, the other thing, of course, is that many people subsequently have observed is his obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. And the civil rights movement writ — you know, writ large. There is this episode that you write about in the book, which other people have known about but you really amplify where he made a point of trying to let Martin Luther King’s family and inner circle know about his extramarital affairs and sent this letter. He didn’t personally send it, but he allowed it to be sent. A letter basically urging King to kill himself. And his wife, Coretta Scott King, found this package. They seem to have known immediately that it came from the FBI. What was that about?

GAGE: The King story, I think, is really one of the saddest and cruelest parts of Hoover’s history, I Mean, without question. And it is — it was outrageous and disheartening to read about it. And as you say, to get some of the new details that are now available. For instance, that anonymous letter that they sent this kind of faked up letter that went with real recordings they had made in King’s hotel room of his extramarital sex life. You know, when I was doing research in the archives, I came across the first unredacted version of that letter, and it really was, you know, just kind of shocking and in many ways, quite horrifying to read in its totality. But, you know, I think for Hoover, King came to represent a whole constellation of things that he had long despised, had a lot of animosity towards. I mean, he had always been conducting surveillance of black leaders, civil rights leaders. He believed that King, I think rightly and wrongly, had a couple of very close advisers who had been close to the communist party. So, that was another strike against him. King criticized the FBI, which was just about the worst thing you could do to J. Edgar Hoover. And then finally, as you say, as this surveillance, the wiretaps, the bugs expanded, he got really deeply interested and almost obsessed with the King’s sex life. In part because, you know, he felt King was presenting himself as this great moral figure, a Baptist minister, but had this whole secret life that no one was talking about. Put those things together and Hoover put this massive security bureaucracy really at work to destroy King in pretty explicit ways.

MARTIN: Did he just have a world view that black people are supposed to be sort of a permanent servant class and that anybody who challenge that was wrong? Like what was the origin of — what really does seem like an obsession?

GAGE: Looking back to his early life, I think there were a couple of things. One was, in fact, Washington D.C. itself, which was a city that was undergoing segregation, pretty explicit racial segregation during the years that he was coming of age, beginning in the 1890s. And he was shaped by that process. And then, the other thing that really came to fascinate to me was his college fraternity, which was a fraternity called Kappa Alpha, which was an explicitly southern, explicitly segregationist fraternity that had some of the countries sort of most famous segregationists among its alums. Thomas Dickson who wrote the novels that became the basis for the “Birth of a Nation” was one of the most famous Kappa Alphas, and he was sort of in Hoover’s orbit, a lot of Southern Democrats. And so, I think you can see sort of the origins of his racist worldview emerging during those very early years and he carried the mom for a long time.

MARTIN: I think this will be very interesting to people who have been interested in the contemporary FBI and the way it has addressed or not address kind of white supremacist movements in the United States in the current moment, right? He didn’t like the Klan much either. Hoover did not like the Ku Klux Klan. And really did want to disrupt their sort of efforts. Tell me a little bit more about that and why he felt that way.

GAGE: There are really two things that tended to draw Hoover in. One was the use of violence. So, he did not like groups of any sort that kind of took the law into their own hands and attempted to use extra-legal violence to enforce their point of view, and that was certainly the Ku Klux Klan. And then, he also saw the Klan, in particular, as kind of defying federal authority, right? So, particularly once the civil rights act is passed, if you allow that to go on, it’s a big, you know, kind of a lot thumbing your nose at the FBI itself. And so, I think he thought that the legitimacy of the federal government, the legitimacy of the FBI was at stake in containing groups like the Klan. And the really interesting thing is that many of the previous extreme in underhanded tactics that he used against King in that same moment he is also deploying against the Klan. Anonymous letters, fake newspaper articles. Informants going into disrupt meetings, et cetera.

MARTIN: The other complicating issue that I was fascinated by, I have no idea of this before, as you point out, he was alone among prominent federal officials in opposing the interment of the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Tell me more about that. Like why is that?

GAGE: This is another one of those really counterintuitive movements for Hoover but it is true that he opposed, and in fact, was one of the few federal officials who did oppose mass Japanese incarceration and interment in beginning in 1942. And I think that was a combination of a genuine, you know, kind of belief in certain ideas about what was constitutional and what was not. He really did genuinely think that you could not do this, in particular, to American citizens. That it was unconstitutional. It wasn’t going to stand up in court in particular. And then, he also had a certain amount of self- interest in the whole thing because the FBI have launched its own much more limited interment program that was aimed, in part, at very particular Japanese people that the FBI had determined to be disloyal or dangerous right by their own standards. But also, Germans, Italians, other citizens of belligerent nations. And so, his view was, we’ve already told you who’s dangerous. We’ll intern those people but you don’t need to intern everyone in the way that the Japanese internment ultimately did.

MARTIN: How did he stay in power so long?

GAGE: That, in many ways, is the great question of Hoover’s career. So, he became head of the bureau in 1924 under Calvin Coolidge and he stayed there until he died in his job in 1972 under Richard Nixon. So, it was a total of eight presidents. Four of them were Republicans. Four of them were Democrats. And that alone seems unthinkable in our own moment. But I think there were a combination of things that produced that. One was, it was kind of a luck at the moment. He happened to be there on the ground floor when suddenly the federal government began to expand so dramatically in the ’30s and ’40s and there just weren’t a lot of safeguards or mechanisms of accountability in place. You know, there were no congressional intelligence committees. There were no limits on the FBI director’s tenure. These things that we now have, the clause of Hoover, none of those were in place. And then, he was just an incredibly good bureaucrat. I mean, you had to do favors for powerful people. He knew how to kind of build his own political constituency. He knew how to maintain an image that was nonpartisan enough that he could make these transitions. And particularly, as you got into the later years, he also was just lucky because the last two presidents happen to be pretty good friends of his by the time they became president, that was Johnson and Nixon. So, at the moment, he should have really retired. He had two pretty close pals in office who wanted to keep him around.

MARTIN: Let’s talk about the fact that he never married and had a very close intimate, it seems like — I don’t — loving. I don’t know whether — what other word to use with his chief deputy, Clyde Tolson. For years you describe in detail what his relationship with Clyde Tolson was. The fact that they took their breakfast together every morning. The fact that they vacation together. But do we really know what their relationship was?

GAGE: They were a functioning social couple for about four decades. Restaurants, vacations, the track, you know, outings in Washington and York and Los Angeles. And then, on the other hand, it’s really difficult to get at particularly the question of whether they were involved in a sexual relationship. I think we just don’t know. It’s pretty clear that neither one of them was involved with a woman at any point in that time. But we don’t know exactly the nature of their relationship there. And then, it’s a little hard to get at the kind of interior nature of their emotional relationship to each other. Though, I think, the existing record does help us get a little closer. And as you say, it’s pretty clear that they cared deeply for each other, that in many ways, it was quite a loving and supportive relationship that lasted a lot longer than a lot of people’s relationships do. Of course, the other conundrum or paradox in there is that while they were involved in this very public relationship, they were also involved in policing and persecuting other people based on their sexual lives and sexual identities and sexual activities. And so, all of that is just this big stew and it all existed at the same time, and that’s kind of the challenge of being a biographer is letting people be a little messy and contradictory sometimes.

MARTIN: I like to hear from you about how Hoover shaped the country, because of his long tenure at this critical law enforcement agency. In terms of its reach and, you know, its reach into details of American life and all the sort of major, you know, both criminal justice and social justice kind of movements and episodes in American life, and the FBI has a big impact. I guess the question really is not just how J. Edgar Hoover shaped the FBI but how his leadership of the FBI helped shape the country?

GAGE: With Hoover, I think, we still see in today’s FBI, you know, a lot of his impact, both in, you know, real tradition of kind of professionalize expert service. You know, he had this mission of the FBI, as you say, as kind of the model police agency for the country. And I think the FBI still holds on to some of that identity internally. And then, it also ends up pretty deeply conservative internal culture at the FBI, which I think is also, you know, partly a product of the Hoover era. And so, we’re still living with that. More broadly, you know, what really drew me to thinking about Hoover was not just the kind of vast swath of his career but the fact that from that position of power, he was able to shape, and I think in many ways, contain practically every movement for social progress, you know, around race, surround civil rights, around labor, a whole host of factors, the anti-war movement, the new left of the 1960s. You know, none of those would have been at the same without J. Edgar Hoover at the helm. And I think in many ways, you know, he built this security agency and then he used it to really police the boundaries of what he thought was legitimate in American democracy.

MARTIN: One of the points that you make in the book, and I think that this is worth remembering, is that he wasn’t some rogue actor. I mean, his views were commonly held. Was he leading the country in those views or was he just a reflection? Was he mainly a reflection of the views of a lot of people at the time and happen to have a law enforcement apparatus that kind of maintain those guardrails? What’s your take on that?

GAGE: That’s a great question. And in some ways, I think though I’ve got all sorts of really interesting details about cases and investigations, maybe the most surprising thing in the whole book is the fact that Hoover was so popular, which is something that we tend to forget, right? We tend to see him as this villain or this rogue actor but, in fact, he was massively popular for most of his career in public opinion polls and he was incredibly widely supported in Washington itself. Again, among both Democrats and Republicans. And so, when we think about his history and legacy, I think we do have to think about what that tells us about the rest of the country and not simply say, oh, Hoover was this man who did these bad things. But in fact, he couldn’t have done them without this widespread support at many different levels.

MARTIN: Professor Beverly Gage, thank you so much for talking with us.

GAGE: Thanks a lot.