Rebroadcast: Understanding J. Edgar Hoover's America
This rebroadcast originally aired on December 9, 2022.
J. Edgar Hoover, former FBI director.
History has cast him as powerful, paranoid, a man not afraid to use the power of the FBI to intimidate and investigate his critics. But that’s how he’s seen now.
What about then?
“He was more popular than most of us remember in these days,” historian Beverly Gage says. “That’s really important because it means that his story, the things that he did, the things that he stood for, were also popular.”
So popular that he held his job for 48 years and eight presidencies.
“He really had his fingers in almost everything that happened in American politics from the 1920s up through the 1970s,” Gage adds.
“How his power worked is really critical to understanding how politics and social movements and culture worked itself over the course of that period.”
Today, On Point: Understanding J. Edgar Hoover’s America.
Guests
Beverly Gage, professor of 20th-century U.S. history at Yale University. Author of 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.
Transcript
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: J. Edgar Hoover was the quintessential government man. He grew up in Washington, D.C. He went to college there in 1913, got his first job there, and then spent his entire career there — a legendary 48 years as the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. And Hoover devoted most of that career to hating and going after communists.
J. EDGAR HOOVER [Tape]: The Communist Party of the United States is a fifth column, if there ever was one.
CHAKRABARTI: That was Hoover testifying at a congressional hearing on March 27, 1947. He goes on to say that the Communist Party was “far better organized than the Nazis,” and that their goal was to overthrow the U.S. government. Hoover’s goal? To destroy them.
HOOVER [Tape]: Communism, in reality, is not a political party. It is a way of life, an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And, like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation.
CHAKRABARTI: Including his five decade career against communism, J. Edgar Hoover is also known for how he took down his enemies: through intimidation, blackmail, and illegal wiretapping through his famous counterintelligence program, now known as COINTELPRO.
NEWS BROADCAST [Tape]: Lawyers under oath to place into the record a litany of FBI dirty tricks and illegal activities conducted against the women’s movement, war protesters, civil rights groups and individuals deemed a threat to domestic security.
CHAKRABARTI: That was a news broadcast covering the 1975 congressional hearing on an investigation into the practices of the FBI under Hoover. Lawyer Frederick Schwarz testified that the worst offenses were directed at civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when, in 1964, the FBI sent King a tape recording of his alleged adultery, along with a letter telling him to commit suicide.
FREDERICK SCHWARZ [Tape]: The Bureau went so far as to mail anonymous letters to Dr. King and his wife, which were mailed shortly before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And finishes with this suggestion: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it.” This exact number has been selected for a specific reason. It has definite practical significance. It was 34 days before the award. “You are done.”
CHAKRABARTI: Again, these congressional hearings took place in 1975, three years after J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972. While alive, Hoover’s public image was remarkably different. On May 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson changed the law so that Hoover would not be forced to retire at age 70 — making J. Edgar Hoover, effectively, the FBI director for life.
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON [Tape]: Edgar,
