April 22, 2024 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Beverly Gage, author of the new definitive biography on J. Edgar Hoover, "G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and The Making of the American Century," tells the story of the most important lawman of the 20th century.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story of the most important lawman of the twentieth century,
the first director of the FBI, Jay Edgar Hoover. Although
he himself never arrested anybody, his influence over his bureaucracy
took what would become the FBI from a corrupt and
nearly powerless body to the investigative behemoth that it is today.
(00:35):
Here to tell his story is Beverly Gage, author of
g Man j ed Go Hoover and the Making of
the American Century. Take it away, Beverly.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Well.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I found him really interesting as a person, in part
because I thought that he had become such a kind
of caricature in our own time, this sort of one
dimensional villain, And when I saw him pop up in history,
he was a little more complicated than that. He was
actually really popular for most of his life, And then
(01:11):
I also thought he was just a great vehicle for
talking about some of the big themes of the twentieth century.
He became FBI director in nineteen twenty four, and he'd
never actually retired. He just died on the job without
ever being forced out of office, and that meant that
he was there under eight different presidents. Four were Democrats
(01:34):
and four were Republicans, which I think is a lot
harder to do now and almost impossible for people to
imagine in our own kind of partisan world. So what
that really meant is that he got the job under
Calvin Coolidge.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Back did back from everyone at Proud of Histy.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
He then stayed on through Herbert Hoover and the dawn
of the Great Depression.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It is a contact between two lad I'm gone.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
He stuck around for Franklin Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt's three
plus terms in office, so the New Deal of the
Second World War. He stayed around under Harry Truman. So
as we started getting into the Cold War, McCarthyism, the
fight against communism, the world will.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Note that the first atomic bomb was dropped off Hiroshima.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
He was there for both Eisenhower terms. He was there
under John Kennedy.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
We choose to go to the Moon and miss Decay
and do the other thing, not because they are easy,
but because they are on.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
He was there under Lyndon Johnson, and finally he was
there under Richard Nixon and died at the very end
of Nixon's first term in office, So he was there
for forty eight years, this huge swath of time. He
shaped every movement, from the labor movement to the civil
(02:59):
rights who went to the conservative movement. He had his
fingers in pretty much everything. I think the kind of
popular Hollywood depiction is that he had the goods on
everyone and he kind of coerced everyone into keeping him
in office by threatening to reveal their secrets. And there
is some truth to that, particularly toward the end of
(03:19):
his life. But I think he was also really, really
useful to most of these presidents. He did what they wanted.
For the most part. They thought that he was politically
advantageous to them, and he kind of served their agendas,
and so it's another reason they didn't fire him. He
(03:45):
was born in eighteen ninety five in Washington, and the
Goover always had very idyllic descriptions of his own childhood.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Right it was the time of innocence, when everyone was good,
it got along, and you know, they made the moral code,
et cetera, et cetera, the way that many people later
mythologized their own childhoods.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
But when you really look at the historical record, you
can see a much much more complicated story. He came
from a Washington family, a family that had worked in
and around the government for a long time, which was
actually pretty unusual in the late nineteenth century, but it
was a family that nonetheless had been pretty troubled. His
(04:29):
grandfather committed suicide in a very dramatic and public way.
He basically tied himself to a stake in the Anacostia
River and drowned himself while leaving behind a note denouncing
many of the people in his life. And that incident
was precipitated by a banking crisis of the era that
(04:50):
brought down the German American bank that his family had
been very invested in. You know, all of your friends
and in this case, in the German communities put their
money in the bank. There was no federal deposit insurance,
so if there was a run on your bank, you
often just lost all of your money, and in this case,
(05:11):
it meant that the leadership of the bank had lost
much of the money of their own community. And then
there was the big shadow of his own father, who
really suffered from pretty severe depression. He died when Hoover
was just in his twenties, and the death certificate says
(05:33):
he died of melancholia, which was sort of the term
of the time for depression, and of inanition, which basically
means that he just he kind of just stopped functioning,
stopped eating, just sort of lost the desire to live.
But Hoover's mother was incredibly important to him, not least
because you know, his father was absent in so many ways.
(05:55):
Hoover was also kind of the pet of the family.
He had had an older brother and an older sister,
but they were fifteen and sixteen years older than he was.
He had had a sister who was just a couple
of years older, but she had died as a toddler.
And he was kind of this amazing late in life child.
(06:17):
He was born on New Year's Day, you know, this
kind of new gift to the family. And he was
very close to his mother his whole life, and in fact,
he lived with her in his childhood home until the
day she died, long after he had become a national celebrity.
She was an interesting person in her own right. She
(06:39):
came from a kind of family of Swiss diplomats who
had come to Washington in the eighteen fifties, and you know,
I think she really saw her role as kind of
holding everything together, providing Hoover's moral education, providing some stability
and love in what were often pretty difficult circumstances. But
(06:59):
he was deeply loyal to her, So that material was
really interesting for Hoover's psychology. And then I think Washington
itself is really important for thinking about his worldview. First
of all, the fact that he comes of age in
the federal city. He's born on Capitol Hill, he never
(07:21):
lives anywhere else besides Washington. He comes of age at
a time when the government was beginning to grow by
leaps and bounds. And then he comes of age in
a city that is actively segregating on racial lines. You know,
we tend to think of segregation as being this kind
of static thing. You put up signs and people use
(07:42):
different water fountains, but in fact, it was a really,
very very aggressive process of separating people, building segregated institutions.
And that was a big piece of his childhood too,
and I think is a lot of where he got
his racial views. Is a really interesting combination of different
(08:03):
political strains that we don't see operating together all that often.
On the one hand, he is from his very early
life kind of imbued with this progressive, scientific career, federal
service tradition that we would tend to associate, I think
with liberals or progressives. And then on the other hand,
(08:26):
on lots of issues, particularly cultural issues, race, religion, law
and order, anti communism, he's a very devout conservative, and
he sort of puts those two traditions together to build
the FBI and build this bureaucracy. But sometimes those things
(08:47):
are just in conflict, and I think you can see
that in cases like his sort of complicated history around
race and civil rights enforcement. So there's no question that
Hoover has had pretty deeply racist views in many ways.
But he did also even as he was investigating the
civil rights who have met really going after figures like
(09:10):
Martin Luther King, he also was going after the plan,
white supremacist groups, etc. And I think in those latter
cases it was often his belief in law enforcement and
the need to enforce federal laws, whether you liked them
or not, that really led him to go after groups
(09:31):
like the Clan, particularly when they were groups who were
employing violence.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And you're listening to author Beverly Gage tell the story
of j Edgar Hoover, a man replete the paradoxes and
contradictions like so many of us. When we come back
more of the story of j Edgar Hoover here on
our American Stories, and we continue with our American stories
(10:12):
and the story of the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover, the most influential man in law enforcement
during the twentieth century and in our nation's history. Here
telling the story is author Beverly Gage, and she's written
g Man, j Edgar Hoover and the Making of the
American Century. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and
(10:35):
pick up this book. Let's get back to the story.
Here again is Beverly Gage.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
His first job in the federal government was not at
the Justice Department, but was in fact at the Library
of Congress. Sorry, it's not entirely clear how he got
the job, but he certainly had plenty of kind of
mid level connections in Washington. You know, some of his
relatives belonged to the same club as the head of
(11:03):
the Library of Congress. But a lot of kids from
his high school did what he did, which was to
stay in Washington, go to school at a place like
gw which was at that point actually really mostly a
night school for future federal servants. So you worked for
the government by day in some sort of clerk's position,
(11:24):
and you went to GW at night. And that's basically
what Hoover did. I think what's really interesting about that
as his first job is that these are the years
when the Library of Congress classification system, which was sort
of the rival to the Dewey decimal system, was coming
into being, just as a way to organize information retrieve
(11:44):
library books. So he's learning all about that at the
Library of Congress and it was actually pretty cutting edge
stuff for its time, was hugely useful to him when
he went into the Justice Department and the bureau. Know,
we tend to think about Hoover and law enforcement, but
he was not a policeman. He actually didn't do investigations.
(12:07):
There's really no evidence that he himself ever investigated or
solved any sort of crime. He never really made arrests,
except for a few kind of showy stagy arrests when
people pointed this out in the nineteen thirties. He and
his skill set was the bureaucracy and the file system,
and he was really good at it. So from his
(12:28):
very early years. Right out of college, he went straight
into the Justice Department and never left, but it was
clear that a lot of his talents very early on
were in keeping massive numbers of records. His first job
was in helping out with German internment and registration during
the First World War, and it turned out he was
(12:49):
so good at that that he got a promotion at
the age of twenty four to lead a new part
of the Bureau that was called the Radical Division, which
was basically the federal government's first attempt to keep tabs
and to keep files on left wing radicals in the
United States. Almost all law enforcement in this country then
(13:10):
as well as now, but especially then, was really done
at the local and the state level. The federal authorities
basically didn't have a lot of jurisdiction to do very much,
and so until nineteen oh eight, the Justice Department had
no investigative Division, but they were starting to get some
new duties, particularly antitrust investigations, where they were tired of
(13:34):
going to the Treasury Department and basically begging for investigators
from the Secret Service, so they decided they needed or
wanted their own investigators. And that's really how the Bureau
of Investigation was born, but even at that they didn't
have all that much to do during those early years,
but it was a real grab bag and they were
(13:56):
not a super professional organization. There were a lot of
CIVI liberties abuses as well as corruption. There were lots
of accusations that they, particularly during the war, used a
lot of physical violence when they were trying to, say,
arrest someone who was due for deportation. As the early
(14:18):
years of Prohibition, there was a lot of bribery going on.
There was a lot of backroom dealing. There were poker games.
There were a lot of people who ended up deputized
by the Bureau of Investigation who didn't really have any qualifications.
The Attorney General was brought up on impeachment charges more
(14:38):
than once for everything from outrageous labor injunctions to spying
on senators. Their files were disorganized, tried sort of very
basic things. So Hoover was actually there for most of that,
but he was seen as the man who had kind
(14:58):
of kept himself apart, sort of the squeaky queen youngster
who was close to it all but kept himself enough
apart from it that he was able to make the
leap into something else. He became head of the FBI
when he was just twenty nine years old. Of course,
it was a much smaller organization, but even at that
(15:21):
it was a pretty extraordinary thing because, of course most
of the people working there were older than he was,
at least many of them. So the man who really
gave him the job was the Attorney General in nineteen
twenty four, who was a pretty famous law professor named
Harlan Stone who went on then to be Chief Justice
(15:42):
of the Supreme Court. I think when he first looked
to Hoover was just looking kind of for a placeholder.
Stone ended up firing Hoover's boss, who was a famous
kind of swashbuckling private detective named William Burns, and he
kind of just needed someone to hold the bureaucracy together
while he went around looking for who the real director
(16:04):
ought to be. But Hoover was pretty determined in that
year to show Stone that he was the right choice
for that. So when he was appointed acting director, he
just engaged in this kind of blurry of energy and
of trying to appeal to Stone and appease Stone and
impress Stone. A lot of that entailed firing some of
(16:29):
the you know, kind of dead weight at the bureau,
beefing up professional standards, make the FBI, which was still
just called the Bureau of Investigation, sort of into an
elite model for the rest of law enforcement. So they
didn't have, you know, very broad law enforcement jurisdiction. But
(16:50):
what Hoover thought they could do was number one, kind
of set high standards and number two sort of perform
certain kinds of scientific and professional services to police departments
throughout the country that would be really useful. So on
the kind of personnel front, he hired only people with
(17:11):
college educations, or mostly people with college educations. He liked lawyers,
he liked accountants. He wanted his core to be these
sort of professional men, and in order to do that,
he waged battles again and again to keep his agents
out of civil service rules so that he could be
(17:32):
the one who personally picked them, hired them, fired them,
rather than having to go to some pool of qualified applicants.
It's the reason when you think of an FBI agent, right,
even today, I think we have a very specific vision
of who that person is, right, Paul white guy in
the suit and the shiny shoes, and the hat people
(17:55):
who were a lot like him and who shared his values,
who were really thought that appearances mattered. He had very
strict standards for everything, from you know, how high the
sheaedes at the Bureau of Investigation on the windows ought
to be so that people could look in and see,
you know, precision at work, to whether you could wear
(18:17):
goal washes and like eat in the office. I mean,
everything had a rule. Under Hoover. He was very concerned
about presentation as well as practice. And then he found
a bunch of different areas which are still things that
the FBI does. So that included the Fingerprint Division, in
which the FBI became a repository for criminal fingerprints. They
(18:40):
began collecting the first national crime statistics. He set up
the famous FBI Lab, which was full of chemists and
other scientists using the latest technology. And he set up
a training academy not only for his own agents, but
to bring in policemen from around the country to be
trained in the latest of professional techniques. And that was
(19:02):
his vision and it was very important to the Bureau then.
I think it remained important throughout his life, and I
think in some ways is really still part of the
DNA of the FBI, and.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
You're listening to author Beverly Gage tell one heck of
a story, a complicated story, a powerful story of j
Edgar Hoover. When we come back, more of the story
of j Edgar Hoover here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
we continue with our American stories and the final portion
of our story on the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover. When we last left off, Beverly Gage
was telling us about how Hoover created the FBI in
his image. Now let's get into some of the greatest cases.
Here again is author Beverly age Well.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
John Dillinger was a kind of small time to big
time bank robber. Basically, he was, in the early nineteen thirties,
part of a kind of generation of criminal operators often
operating in the Midwest, often using various new technologies like
fast getaway cars and high powered guns that had just
(20:27):
come in to create and carry out pretty dramatic acts
of robbery, murder, et cetera. John Dillinger in particular was
very famous because he would rob banks and then he
would manage to evade the police. Most famously, you know
when the police in Indiana finally managed to lock him
(20:50):
up in nineteen thirty four. He ended up whittling a
fake gun in his cell, tricking all of the guards
into thinking that he had real gun, and escaping from jail,
once again, having already been someone in the headlines saying
no jail could hold me. So by the time he
and Hoover began to sort of become adversaries, Dillinger was
(21:15):
already very famous, and he was more famous than Hoover.
But in the nineteen thirties, the FBI did begin to
get jurisdiction over bank robbery and kidnapping in particular as
federal crimes, and that sort of led them on the
(21:35):
Dillinger manhunt. It became one of these really legendary stories.
But the truth is the Bureau really didn't know what
they were doing when they first started out, And one
of the biggest embarrassments of that period for Hoover was
a moment when they thought that they had figured out
(21:56):
where John Dillinger was sort of hiding out with his
gang out in the woods in Wisconsin at a lodge
called Little Bohemia. These Bureau agents, who are pretty new
to this kind of criminal law enforcement, many of them
have never shot a gun before. They sneak up to
this lodge, don't really know what they're doing. There are
dogs there. The dogs bark warned the Dillinger Gang. The
(22:19):
Dillinger Gang escapes, Some civilians come pouring out of the
lodge and have Bureau agents shoot the civilians. Members of
the gang ultimately shoot a few Bureau agents and it's
a real disaster for Hoover and he's under a lot
of pressure from the Roosevelt administration. Coover is paying attention
to this from Washington. He is trying to work a
(22:41):
straight at all. He's putting a lot of pressure on
his agents to do this. So it didn't start out
very well. But in the final equation, after a lot
of man hunting and a lot of headlines and a
lot of pressure, they do manage to track down John Dillinger,
largely through through an informant who turned to them and
(23:02):
gave them information someone that Dillinger was staying with in Chicago,
and they managed to kind of entrap him as he's
going to see a movie and they have a very
bloody shootout and the FBI finally guns down John Dillinger,
you know, in cold blood in the light of day
there in the streets of Chicago, and it becomes one
of the great FBI legends. He is incredibly adept at
(23:30):
responding to crisis and kind of rising to the moment
when the war comes along, and both Roosevelt and the
British intelligence authorities come to Hoover and they say, you know,
the moment has come. We need a domestic intelligence agency.
You need to become a counter espionage agency. And they
(23:50):
really don't have much skill in it. Franklin Roosevelt even
tells Hoover to go ahead and set up a special
spy service to cover latinumer America sort of the whole
Western hemisphere, and you know, Hoover says, okay, we will
go ahead and do that. Really has no agents who
speak Spanish, they have no idea what they're doing. But
(24:12):
he kind of is able to turn on a dime,
very diligently sets about learning how to think about espionage,
and they improve really dramatically, really quickly. There's usually a
little bit of a learning curve to really come through.
And you see that again and again that as the
challenges and the politics of the moment shift, he has
(24:33):
enough control over his bureaucracy that he's able to make
the institution turn pretty quickly too.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Ladies and gentlemen, I have some very sad news for
all of you and people who love peace all over
the world. Martin Luther King was shot and was killed
tonight in Memphistops.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You know, the FBI had its successes and failures, as
any institution does, but the investigation into the assassination of
Martin Luther King was the largest investigation of Hoover's career.
It was, of course, one that the FBI was under
a lot of pressure and suspicion for because Hoover had
(25:17):
been so openly critical of King, so disdainful of King.
The FBI's campaign to undermine and discredit and disrupt the
life of Martin Luther King is one of the most
outrageous things that Hoover's FBI ever did. And it really
was an escalating series of efforts that went from what
(25:41):
started in the late fifties and early sixties as an
investigation of a couple of advisors and colleagues who had
been in the orbit of the Communist Party and were
now close to King, so starting in this national security
type investigation that then it extended into placing wiretaps on
(26:03):
King's home, beginning to put bugs in his hotel rooms
and recording his sex life, to then engaging in really
active intimidation and disruption operations, trying to spread that information
around in Washington in the press, and even going so
(26:23):
far as to write up a fake threatening letter, anonymous
letter to King, sending along some of the reels of
tape from those hotel room recordings, trying to get him
as King interpreted to kill himself as others have said,
to drop out of public life, but engaged in a
(26:44):
whole array of really outrageous, sometimes illegal, dirty tricks aimed
at King, who of course was doing nothing illegal and
in fact, was engaged in a campaign of racial justice
that the FBI was deeply opposed to. What that meant
in April of nineteen sixty eight, when King was assassinated
(27:08):
was that many people blamed the FBI for helping to
create an environment in which that assassination was more likely.
Some people suspected the FBI even then of being involved,
and for Hoover, it really meant that the FBI was
then under enormous pressure to show that it could solve
(27:32):
this assassination, even though it had shown such animosity to
King himself, and so that became an incredibly large, very
difficult investigation to figure out what had happened. So Hoover
really set out, you know, I don't remember the exact numbers,
(27:53):
but I think there was something like two thousand agents
working on the King assassination at its peak. It really
was a matter of tracing the little bits of evidence
that were available, the gun that had been left behind,
you know, engaging in sort of large scale forensic investigations,
(28:14):
and then ultimately trying to get on the trail of
this man who had changed his name many many times
and was pretty adept at hiding from the authorities. There
are two big moments in that investigation which really proved
to be big breaks. One was the suspicion, based on
(28:34):
what they were learning of Ray's movements, that he might
be a fugitive from justice. He might be someone who
had broken out of prison at some point therefore had
been changing names, and so that sent them into being
able to look to those records of prison escapees, and
that was a big breakthrough. And then the other was
(28:56):
deducing that he might have been fleeing the country, maybe
through Canada, and so they actually literally sat down with
the cooperation of the Canadian authorities and began to go
through every single sort of passport material that they could
find that seemed like it might be related to Ray,
just you know, a kind of paperwork effort of a
(29:18):
tremendous scale. That's how they finally tracked down Ray in England.
And then the big challenge was getting him back to
the United States without him meeting the fate that Oswald
had met because of Oswald had, of course himself been
assassinated while in police custody, and be Hoover was very,
very worried that that was going to happen in this
(29:40):
case as well. Now there are lots of people who
are still critical of that investigation, sometimes for good reason.
But it was a pretty extraordinary feat of detective work
in its day.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monte Montgomery. And what a story Beverly
Gauge told. She's the author of g Man, j Edgar
Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Pick it
up wherever you buy your books. The Good and the Bad,
The Story of J. Edgar Hoover. Here on our American stories.
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story of the most important lawman of the twentieth century,
the first director of the FBI, Jay Edgar Hoover. Although
he himself never arrested anybody, his influence over his bureaucracy
took what would become the FBI from a corrupt and
nearly powerless body to the investigative behemoth that it is today.
(00:35):
Here to tell his story is Beverly Gage, author of
g Man j ed Go Hoover and the Making of
the American Century. Take it away, Beverly.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Well.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I found him really interesting as a person, in part
because I thought that he had become such a kind
of caricature in our own time, this sort of one
dimensional villain, And when I saw him pop up in history,
he was a little more complicated than that. He was
actually really popular for most of his life, And then
(01:11):
I also thought he was just a great vehicle for
talking about some of the big themes of the twentieth century.
He became FBI director in nineteen twenty four, and he'd
never actually retired. He just died on the job without
ever being forced out of office, and that meant that
he was there under eight different presidents. Four were Democrats
(01:34):
and four were Republicans, which I think is a lot
harder to do now and almost impossible for people to
imagine in our own kind of partisan world. So what
that really meant is that he got the job under
Calvin Coolidge.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Back did back from everyone at Proud of Histy.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
He then stayed on through Herbert Hoover and the dawn
of the Great Depression.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It is a contact between two lad I'm gone.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
He stuck around for Franklin Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt's three
plus terms in office, so the New Deal of the
Second World War. He stayed around under Harry Truman. So
as we started getting into the Cold War, McCarthyism, the
fight against communism, the world will.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Note that the first atomic bomb was dropped off Hiroshima.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
He was there for both Eisenhower terms. He was there
under John Kennedy.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
We choose to go to the Moon and miss Decay
and do the other thing, not because they are easy,
but because they are on.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
He was there under Lyndon Johnson, and finally he was
there under Richard Nixon and died at the very end
of Nixon's first term in office, So he was there
for forty eight years, this huge swath of time. He
shaped every movement, from the labor movement to the civil
(02:59):
rights who went to the conservative movement. He had his
fingers in pretty much everything. I think the kind of
popular Hollywood depiction is that he had the goods on
everyone and he kind of coerced everyone into keeping him
in office by threatening to reveal their secrets. And there
is some truth to that, particularly toward the end of
(03:19):
his life. But I think he was also really, really
useful to most of these presidents. He did what they wanted.
For the most part. They thought that he was politically
advantageous to them, and he kind of served their agendas,
and so it's another reason they didn't fire him. He
(03:45):
was born in eighteen ninety five in Washington, and the
Goover always had very idyllic descriptions of his own childhood.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Right it was the time of innocence, when everyone was good,
it got along, and you know, they made the moral code,
et cetera, et cetera, the way that many people later
mythologized their own childhoods.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
But when you really look at the historical record, you
can see a much much more complicated story. He came
from a Washington family, a family that had worked in
and around the government for a long time, which was
actually pretty unusual in the late nineteenth century, but it
was a family that nonetheless had been pretty troubled. His
(04:29):
grandfather committed suicide in a very dramatic and public way.
He basically tied himself to a stake in the Anacostia
River and drowned himself while leaving behind a note denouncing
many of the people in his life. And that incident
was precipitated by a banking crisis of the era that
(04:50):
brought down the German American bank that his family had
been very invested in. You know, all of your friends
and in this case, in the German communities put their
money in the bank. There was no federal deposit insurance,
so if there was a run on your bank, you
often just lost all of your money, and in this case,
(05:11):
it meant that the leadership of the bank had lost
much of the money of their own community. And then
there was the big shadow of his own father, who
really suffered from pretty severe depression. He died when Hoover
was just in his twenties, and the death certificate says
(05:33):
he died of melancholia, which was sort of the term
of the time for depression, and of inanition, which basically
means that he just he kind of just stopped functioning,
stopped eating, just sort of lost the desire to live.
But Hoover's mother was incredibly important to him, not least
because you know, his father was absent in so many ways.
(05:55):
Hoover was also kind of the pet of the family.
He had had an older brother and an older sister,
but they were fifteen and sixteen years older than he was.
He had had a sister who was just a couple
of years older, but she had died as a toddler.
And he was kind of this amazing late in life child.
(06:17):
He was born on New Year's Day, you know, this
kind of new gift to the family. And he was
very close to his mother his whole life, and in fact,
he lived with her in his childhood home until the
day she died, long after he had become a national celebrity.
She was an interesting person in her own right. She
(06:39):
came from a kind of family of Swiss diplomats who
had come to Washington in the eighteen fifties, and you know,
I think she really saw her role as kind of
holding everything together, providing Hoover's moral education, providing some stability
and love in what were often pretty difficult circumstances. But
(06:59):
he was deeply loyal to her, So that material was
really interesting for Hoover's psychology. And then I think Washington
itself is really important for thinking about his worldview. First
of all, the fact that he comes of age in
the federal city. He's born on Capitol Hill, he never
(07:21):
lives anywhere else besides Washington. He comes of age at
a time when the government was beginning to grow by
leaps and bounds. And then he comes of age in
a city that is actively segregating on racial lines. You know,
we tend to think of segregation as being this kind
of static thing. You put up signs and people use
(07:42):
different water fountains, but in fact, it was a really,
very very aggressive process of separating people, building segregated institutions.
And that was a big piece of his childhood too,
and I think is a lot of where he got
his racial views. Is a really interesting combination of different
(08:03):
political strains that we don't see operating together all that often.
On the one hand, he is from his very early
life kind of imbued with this progressive, scientific career, federal
service tradition that we would tend to associate, I think
with liberals or progressives. And then on the other hand,
(08:26):
on lots of issues, particularly cultural issues, race, religion, law
and order, anti communism, he's a very devout conservative, and
he sort of puts those two traditions together to build
the FBI and build this bureaucracy. But sometimes those things
(08:47):
are just in conflict, and I think you can see
that in cases like his sort of complicated history around
race and civil rights enforcement. So there's no question that
Hoover has had pretty deeply racist views in many ways.
But he did also even as he was investigating the
civil rights who have met really going after figures like
(09:10):
Martin Luther King, he also was going after the plan,
white supremacist groups, etc. And I think in those latter
cases it was often his belief in law enforcement and
the need to enforce federal laws, whether you liked them
or not, that really led him to go after groups
(09:31):
like the Clan, particularly when they were groups who were
employing violence.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And you're listening to author Beverly Gage tell the story
of j Edgar Hoover, a man replete the paradoxes and
contradictions like so many of us. When we come back
more of the story of j Edgar Hoover here on
our American Stories, and we continue with our American stories
(10:12):
and the story of the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover, the most influential man in law enforcement
during the twentieth century and in our nation's history. Here
telling the story is author Beverly Gage, and she's written
g Man, j Edgar Hoover and the Making of the
American Century. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and
(10:35):
pick up this book. Let's get back to the story.
Here again is Beverly Gage.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
His first job in the federal government was not at
the Justice Department, but was in fact at the Library
of Congress. Sorry, it's not entirely clear how he got
the job, but he certainly had plenty of kind of
mid level connections in Washington. You know, some of his
relatives belonged to the same club as the head of
(11:03):
the Library of Congress. But a lot of kids from
his high school did what he did, which was to
stay in Washington, go to school at a place like
gw which was at that point actually really mostly a
night school for future federal servants. So you worked for
the government by day in some sort of clerk's position,
(11:24):
and you went to GW at night. And that's basically
what Hoover did. I think what's really interesting about that
as his first job is that these are the years
when the Library of Congress classification system, which was sort
of the rival to the Dewey decimal system, was coming
into being, just as a way to organize information retrieve
(11:44):
library books. So he's learning all about that at the
Library of Congress and it was actually pretty cutting edge
stuff for its time, was hugely useful to him when
he went into the Justice Department and the bureau. Know,
we tend to think about Hoover and law enforcement, but
he was not a policeman. He actually didn't do investigations.
(12:07):
There's really no evidence that he himself ever investigated or
solved any sort of crime. He never really made arrests,
except for a few kind of showy stagy arrests when
people pointed this out in the nineteen thirties. He and
his skill set was the bureaucracy and the file system,
and he was really good at it. So from his
(12:28):
very early years. Right out of college, he went straight
into the Justice Department and never left, but it was
clear that a lot of his talents very early on
were in keeping massive numbers of records. His first job
was in helping out with German internment and registration during
the First World War, and it turned out he was
(12:49):
so good at that that he got a promotion at
the age of twenty four to lead a new part
of the Bureau that was called the Radical Division, which
was basically the federal government's first attempt to keep tabs
and to keep files on left wing radicals in the
United States. Almost all law enforcement in this country then
(13:10):
as well as now, but especially then, was really done
at the local and the state level. The federal authorities
basically didn't have a lot of jurisdiction to do very much,
and so until nineteen oh eight, the Justice Department had
no investigative Division, but they were starting to get some
new duties, particularly antitrust investigations, where they were tired of
(13:34):
going to the Treasury Department and basically begging for investigators
from the Secret Service, so they decided they needed or
wanted their own investigators. And that's really how the Bureau
of Investigation was born, but even at that they didn't
have all that much to do during those early years,
but it was a real grab bag and they were
(13:56):
not a super professional organization. There were a lot of
CIVI liberties abuses as well as corruption. There were lots
of accusations that they, particularly during the war, used a
lot of physical violence when they were trying to, say,
arrest someone who was due for deportation. As the early
(14:18):
years of Prohibition, there was a lot of bribery going on.
There was a lot of backroom dealing. There were poker games.
There were a lot of people who ended up deputized
by the Bureau of Investigation who didn't really have any qualifications.
The Attorney General was brought up on impeachment charges more
(14:38):
than once for everything from outrageous labor injunctions to spying
on senators. Their files were disorganized, tried sort of very
basic things. So Hoover was actually there for most of that,
but he was seen as the man who had kind
(14:58):
of kept himself apart, sort of the squeaky queen youngster
who was close to it all but kept himself enough
apart from it that he was able to make the
leap into something else. He became head of the FBI
when he was just twenty nine years old. Of course,
it was a much smaller organization, but even at that
(15:21):
it was a pretty extraordinary thing because, of course most
of the people working there were older than he was,
at least many of them. So the man who really
gave him the job was the Attorney General in nineteen
twenty four, who was a pretty famous law professor named
Harlan Stone who went on then to be Chief Justice
(15:42):
of the Supreme Court. I think when he first looked
to Hoover was just looking kind of for a placeholder.
Stone ended up firing Hoover's boss, who was a famous
kind of swashbuckling private detective named William Burns, and he
kind of just needed someone to hold the bureaucracy together
while he went around looking for who the real director
(16:04):
ought to be. But Hoover was pretty determined in that
year to show Stone that he was the right choice
for that. So when he was appointed acting director, he
just engaged in this kind of blurry of energy and
of trying to appeal to Stone and appease Stone and
impress Stone. A lot of that entailed firing some of
(16:29):
the you know, kind of dead weight at the bureau,
beefing up professional standards, make the FBI, which was still
just called the Bureau of Investigation, sort of into an
elite model for the rest of law enforcement. So they
didn't have, you know, very broad law enforcement jurisdiction. But
(16:50):
what Hoover thought they could do was number one, kind
of set high standards and number two sort of perform
certain kinds of scientific and professional services to police departments
throughout the country that would be really useful. So on
the kind of personnel front, he hired only people with
(17:11):
college educations, or mostly people with college educations. He liked lawyers,
he liked accountants. He wanted his core to be these
sort of professional men, and in order to do that,
he waged battles again and again to keep his agents
out of civil service rules so that he could be
(17:32):
the one who personally picked them, hired them, fired them,
rather than having to go to some pool of qualified applicants.
It's the reason when you think of an FBI agent, right,
even today, I think we have a very specific vision
of who that person is, right, Paul white guy in
the suit and the shiny shoes, and the hat people
(17:55):
who were a lot like him and who shared his values,
who were really thought that appearances mattered. He had very
strict standards for everything, from you know, how high the
sheaedes at the Bureau of Investigation on the windows ought
to be so that people could look in and see,
you know, precision at work, to whether you could wear
(18:17):
goal washes and like eat in the office. I mean,
everything had a rule. Under Hoover. He was very concerned
about presentation as well as practice. And then he found
a bunch of different areas which are still things that
the FBI does. So that included the Fingerprint Division, in
which the FBI became a repository for criminal fingerprints. They
(18:40):
began collecting the first national crime statistics. He set up
the famous FBI Lab, which was full of chemists and
other scientists using the latest technology. And he set up
a training academy not only for his own agents, but
to bring in policemen from around the country to be
trained in the latest of professional techniques. And that was
(19:02):
his vision and it was very important to the Bureau then.
I think it remained important throughout his life, and I
think in some ways is really still part of the
DNA of the FBI, and.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
You're listening to author Beverly Gage tell one heck of
a story, a complicated story, a powerful story of j
Edgar Hoover. When we come back, more of the story
of j Edgar Hoover here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
we continue with our American stories and the final portion
of our story on the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover. When we last left off, Beverly Gage
was telling us about how Hoover created the FBI in
his image. Now let's get into some of the greatest cases.
Here again is author Beverly age Well.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
John Dillinger was a kind of small time to big
time bank robber. Basically, he was, in the early nineteen thirties,
part of a kind of generation of criminal operators often
operating in the Midwest, often using various new technologies like
fast getaway cars and high powered guns that had just
(20:27):
come in to create and carry out pretty dramatic acts
of robbery, murder, et cetera. John Dillinger in particular was
very famous because he would rob banks and then he
would manage to evade the police. Most famously, you know
when the police in Indiana finally managed to lock him
(20:50):
up in nineteen thirty four. He ended up whittling a
fake gun in his cell, tricking all of the guards
into thinking that he had real gun, and escaping from jail,
once again, having already been someone in the headlines saying
no jail could hold me. So by the time he
and Hoover began to sort of become adversaries, Dillinger was
(21:15):
already very famous, and he was more famous than Hoover.
But in the nineteen thirties, the FBI did begin to
get jurisdiction over bank robbery and kidnapping in particular as
federal crimes, and that sort of led them on the
(21:35):
Dillinger manhunt. It became one of these really legendary stories.
But the truth is the Bureau really didn't know what
they were doing when they first started out, And one
of the biggest embarrassments of that period for Hoover was
a moment when they thought that they had figured out
(21:56):
where John Dillinger was sort of hiding out with his
gang out in the woods in Wisconsin at a lodge
called Little Bohemia. These Bureau agents, who are pretty new
to this kind of criminal law enforcement, many of them
have never shot a gun before. They sneak up to
this lodge, don't really know what they're doing. There are
dogs there. The dogs bark warned the Dillinger Gang. The
(22:19):
Dillinger Gang escapes, Some civilians come pouring out of the
lodge and have Bureau agents shoot the civilians. Members of
the gang ultimately shoot a few Bureau agents and it's
a real disaster for Hoover and he's under a lot
of pressure from the Roosevelt administration. Coover is paying attention
to this from Washington. He is trying to work a
(22:41):
straight at all. He's putting a lot of pressure on
his agents to do this. So it didn't start out
very well. But in the final equation, after a lot
of man hunting and a lot of headlines and a
lot of pressure, they do manage to track down John Dillinger,
largely through through an informant who turned to them and
(23:02):
gave them information someone that Dillinger was staying with in Chicago,
and they managed to kind of entrap him as he's
going to see a movie and they have a very
bloody shootout and the FBI finally guns down John Dillinger,
you know, in cold blood in the light of day
there in the streets of Chicago, and it becomes one
of the great FBI legends. He is incredibly adept at
(23:30):
responding to crisis and kind of rising to the moment
when the war comes along, and both Roosevelt and the
British intelligence authorities come to Hoover and they say, you know,
the moment has come. We need a domestic intelligence agency.
You need to become a counter espionage agency. And they
(23:50):
really don't have much skill in it. Franklin Roosevelt even
tells Hoover to go ahead and set up a special
spy service to cover latinumer America sort of the whole
Western hemisphere, and you know, Hoover says, okay, we will
go ahead and do that. Really has no agents who
speak Spanish, they have no idea what they're doing. But
(24:12):
he kind of is able to turn on a dime,
very diligently sets about learning how to think about espionage,
and they improve really dramatically, really quickly. There's usually a
little bit of a learning curve to really come through.
And you see that again and again that as the
challenges and the politics of the moment shift, he has
(24:33):
enough control over his bureaucracy that he's able to make
the institution turn pretty quickly too.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Ladies and gentlemen, I have some very sad news for
all of you and people who love peace all over
the world. Martin Luther King was shot and was killed
tonight in Memphistops.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You know, the FBI had its successes and failures, as
any institution does, but the investigation into the assassination of
Martin Luther King was the largest investigation of Hoover's career.
It was, of course, one that the FBI was under
a lot of pressure and suspicion for because Hoover had
(25:17):
been so openly critical of King, so disdainful of King.
The FBI's campaign to undermine and discredit and disrupt the
life of Martin Luther King is one of the most
outrageous things that Hoover's FBI ever did. And it really
was an escalating series of efforts that went from what
(25:41):
started in the late fifties and early sixties as an
investigation of a couple of advisors and colleagues who had
been in the orbit of the Communist Party and were
now close to King, so starting in this national security
type investigation that then it extended into placing wiretaps on
(26:03):
King's home, beginning to put bugs in his hotel rooms
and recording his sex life, to then engaging in really
active intimidation and disruption operations, trying to spread that information
around in Washington in the press, and even going so
(26:23):
far as to write up a fake threatening letter, anonymous
letter to King, sending along some of the reels of
tape from those hotel room recordings, trying to get him
as King interpreted to kill himself as others have said,
to drop out of public life, but engaged in a
(26:44):
whole array of really outrageous, sometimes illegal, dirty tricks aimed
at King, who of course was doing nothing illegal and
in fact, was engaged in a campaign of racial justice
that the FBI was deeply opposed to. What that meant
in April of nineteen sixty eight, when King was assassinated
(27:08):
was that many people blamed the FBI for helping to
create an environment in which that assassination was more likely.
Some people suspected the FBI even then of being involved,
and for Hoover, it really meant that the FBI was
then under enormous pressure to show that it could solve
(27:32):
this assassination, even though it had shown such animosity to
King himself, and so that became an incredibly large, very
difficult investigation to figure out what had happened. So Hoover
really set out, you know, I don't remember the exact numbers,
(27:53):
but I think there was something like two thousand agents
working on the King assassination at its peak. It really
was a matter of tracing the little bits of evidence
that were available, the gun that had been left behind,
you know, engaging in sort of large scale forensic investigations,
(28:14):
and then ultimately trying to get on the trail of
this man who had changed his name many many times
and was pretty adept at hiding from the authorities. There
are two big moments in that investigation which really proved
to be big breaks. One was the suspicion, based on
(28:34):
what they were learning of Ray's movements, that he might
be a fugitive from justice. He might be someone who
had broken out of prison at some point therefore had
been changing names, and so that sent them into being
able to look to those records of prison escapees, and
that was a big breakthrough. And then the other was
(28:56):
deducing that he might have been fleeing the country, maybe
through Canada, and so they actually literally sat down with
the cooperation of the Canadian authorities and began to go
through every single sort of passport material that they could
find that seemed like it might be related to Ray,
just you know, a kind of paperwork effort of a
(29:18):
tremendous scale. That's how they finally tracked down Ray in England.
And then the big challenge was getting him back to
the United States without him meeting the fate that Oswald
had met because of Oswald had, of course himself been
assassinated while in police custody, and be Hoover was very,
very worried that that was going to happen in this
(29:40):
case as well. Now there are lots of people who
are still critical of that investigation, sometimes for good reason.
But it was a pretty extraordinary feat of detective work
in its day.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monte Montgomery. And what a story Beverly
Gauge told. She's the author of g Man, j Edgar
Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Pick it
up wherever you buy your books. The Good and the Bad,
The Story of J. Edgar Hoover. Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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