0:00

Alright listeners. Welcome

0:02

to episode sixty six of Know Your Anime.

0:04

I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast cohost, and

0:06

I'm here with my great

0:07

friend, Sam Edlerbelle. Hey, Sam.

0:09

Hi, Matt. How are you doing? I'm doing

0:11

well. I'm getting in the holiday

0:13

mood. That's what I was gonna ask. Do you

0:16

have holiday cheer, holiday

0:18

spirit? Yeah. I expanded some

0:20

of my holiday spirit and cheer

0:22

on doing Hanukkah with

0:24

my dad and little brother. Stepmother

0:26

yesterday, but there's more cheer

0:28

to come. Yes. This will

0:30

probably be our final episode of the

0:32

year, I imagine. And thank

0:35

you listeners for sticking with us all year.

0:37

And whatever holidays you celebrate,

0:39

we hope you have a great time.

0:41

Yeah. Now we got

0:43

you a meaty episode to chew

0:46

on from now until when the next know

0:48

your enemy drops. And it's one we've been

0:50

looking forward to for a while. We had

0:52

on Beverly Gage. She's a historian

0:54

at Yale. She teaches courses

0:56

and has written on Gildanage in twentieth century

0:58

political history government, political

1:01

development, and for our purposes,

1:03

she just came out with a really brilliant

1:06

book called GMan, Jedgar

1:08

Hoover and the making of the American

1:10

Century. It just came out last month from

1:12

Viking and we had her on to talk

1:14

about it. Jedgar Hoover Seems

1:17

like a piece of work. Not

1:20

the best guy, but a fascinating one

1:22

nonetheless. Yes. It really is fascinating.

1:25

As listeners know, Jared Gohoover ran

1:28

the FBI for basically forty eight years,

1:30

almost his, you know, entire adult life

1:32

was spent in government service in

1:34

that capacity. He was around so

1:36

long that his life and work and

1:38

career was a really fascinating entry

1:40

point into all kinds of

1:42

episodes in American history and kind

1:44

of twentieth century American political history,

1:47

especially. His life as a lens

1:49

into the history that we deal with

1:51

on the podcast. That was

1:53

really great. Indeed. So let's get

1:55

to some housekeeping items. As always,

1:57

we're grateful to our partners at Descent. They

1:59

sponsor the podcast. One of the things

2:02

they do is if you subscribe on

2:04

Patreon to know your enemy and you can do that

2:06

at patreon dot com slash know your enemy,

2:08

For ten dollars a month, you get access to all of

2:10

our bonus episodes and, of course, a free

2:12

digital subscription to descent. And for

2:15

five dollars a month, you get access to

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all of our bonus episodes. one

2:19

thing I did wanna say last episode, we

2:21

put in a plug for descent to donate

2:24

to them around the holidays, you know, like

2:26

us, they're small and independent, they

2:28

really, I think, work with young writers,

2:30

new writers. I know Sam and I have both

2:32

written for them and kind of owe them a lot.

2:34

And one of the things they do is right

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now, if you subscribe for, like, fifty

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dollars or two hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred

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dollars, there's different gifts you get.

2:42

A tote bag, a tote bag filled with gifts. Even

2:45

a food tour of the lower east side. So in

2:47

our show notes, we're gonna put in the

2:49

link to donate to Descent. Please

2:51

do consider checking that out. They're great to us.

2:53

And they certainly need the support. Yeah.

2:55

Support to set. Come on. As

2:57

always, we wanna thank Jesse

2:59

GMan, our intrepid producer. Who's

3:02

done such a great job on the podcast all

3:04

year, and we wanna thank Will

3:06

Epstein who does the music for the That's

3:08

right. We'll shall we get to it, Sam?

3:10

Yeah. Let's get to it. Here's our conversation

3:12

with Beverly Gage about Jay Edgar

3:14

Hoover. Enjoy. Alright,

3:32

Beverly Gage. Welcome to Know Your Enemy.

3:34

Thanks. It's great to be here. This book

3:36

new biography of Jadegar Hoover, there's

3:39

so much we wanna say about it and talk about

3:41

it. It's long. It's eight hundred and

3:43

sixty four pages. But it the

3:45

sense funny to say, but it reads very briskly.

3:47

It's an incredibly absorbing book and

3:49

I actually was a little upset I had to kind of

3:51

rush through it. For the podcast rather

3:53

than leisurely reading it over a couple weeks

3:55

maybe. Yeah. I had the same experience, which

3:57

is that every time I would tell myself,

3:59

oh, I need to pick up the pace here, like, you know,

4:02

not just read every word like I was reading

4:04

a novel, I would have a hard time doing

4:06

that just because the the writing from a

4:08

sentence to sentence level is really so

4:10

thrilling. And it's hugely

4:12

impressive given how much information you're

4:14

wrangling into that story.

4:16

Well, thank you. That's great to hear and

4:18

for anyone who's listening, The book

4:20

is long, but the chapters are short,

4:23

so it can be read very episodically

4:25

as well. And there are lots of pictures.

4:27

Yes. It's a beautifully produced

4:30

book. And, you know, we wanna start by

4:32

talking about how you wrote this book

4:34

because, I mean, there's a

4:36

lot of information in it. The feet of

4:38

research you pulled off here was really

4:40

incredible. But it's also a biography.

4:42

And, you know, one of the things I wanted to ask

4:44

about to start with was the

4:47

process of writing a biography and how you

4:49

kind of settled on this project. And I

4:51

was thinking, you know, one of the most amusing

4:53

arguments from Toqueville's democracy in

4:55

America is that in Democratic ages,

4:58

biography as a form of history

5:00

might decline. Right? Equality teaches

5:02

us not to really believe in the great man or

5:04

great woman theory of history, to

5:06

also describe it's kind of harder in

5:08

Democratic ages for individuals to feel

5:10

powerful. And so I've always thought

5:12

that the continuing American appetite

5:14

for biography was a way in which

5:16

we've kind of resisted Tony's prediction.

5:19

And I just wondered, you know, as

5:21

a historian, how did you

5:23

decide to write a biography of

5:25

Jacob Hoover? And maybe just

5:27

talk about, like, biography as a form

5:29

of history to get us started. Yeah.

5:31

It's something that I have given

5:33

a lot of thought to as I have

5:35

sat here for more than a

5:37

decade with this one

5:39

GMan. And this is

5:42

not a celebratory biography. This

5:44

is not a biography of

5:46

someone who I love and

5:48

admire. And in certain ways,

5:50

it is a kind of old fashioned

5:52

biography in the sense that it's

5:54

about you know, a man with a lot

5:56

of power, but I don't think of

5:58

it as a great man biography. So

6:01

I like to read biography, and

6:03

I like thinking about

6:05

history not only kind of as an

6:07

intellectual enterprise, but as

6:09

as a way of forging human

6:11

connections with the past and

6:13

I think biography is really good

6:15

for that. I do think

6:18

that Hoover is one of

6:20

the few biographies that

6:22

really spoke to me as

6:24

a historical project in

6:26

part because he is such a

6:28

good vehicle goal for telling kind

6:30

of a bigger story about

6:32

his moment, his time,

6:35

and he has the great advantage

6:38

of not really having a boring

6:40

period. I mean, maybe childhood, but, you know,

6:42

we moved through childhood pretty And I

6:44

found his channel totally fascinating.

6:46

But a lot of people have one moment

6:48

in their lives where they're significant

6:51

and then moments when they're a lot

6:53

less significant. And Hoover really

6:55

didn't have that because he was the

6:57

head of the FBI from the time

6:59

he was twenty nine to

7:01

the time that he was seventy seven and then he just

7:03

died while he was in

7:05

office. So as a life, it'd

7:07

have a lot of appeal to be for that reason

7:09

too. You mentioned just how

7:11

much time you spent with

7:13

this one man and his deeds

7:15

and GMan. His

7:18

deeds, his demons, and and the archive

7:20

of his life and work. I'm

7:22

always interested in this with with people who

7:24

spend a long time on a biography. How

7:27

did your sort of estimation of him

7:29

as a sort of companion in a way

7:31

through this project change over

7:33

time? Did you get sick of him? Did you

7:35

get angry with him? Did you become

7:37

more sympathetic to him at different

7:39

times? Just how was that kind of relationship

7:42

That's funny. I was on a panel

7:45

maybe a decade ago or so.

7:47

I was in very early stages on

7:49

this project, but it was with two of

7:51

my colleagues here at David

7:53

Blight and John Gattice, and we

7:55

were all writing biographies, and it

7:57

was a panel about biography, but

7:59

one of the things turned out to

8:01

be really interesting was how different

8:03

our relationships with our

8:05

biographical subjects were.

8:07

So John Gatiss was writing about George

8:10

Kennon who is someone that he

8:12

knew, he had a relationship

8:14

with Kennen. Kennen had invited him

8:16

into his private papers, and Kennen

8:18

had said, just don't publish

8:20

the book until after I'm but then

8:22

Kennen lived a really long time,

8:24

so they got to know each other very well.

8:26

Right? So that's That's one kind of

8:28

relationship that you could have. David

8:30

Blight was writing about Frederick Douglass

8:33

who is someone that he deeply

8:35

admires, someone that everyone buyers.

8:37

And that kind of biographical

8:40

relationship has its own dynamics where

8:42

am I gonna romanticize my

8:44

subject? Am I gonna critical enough of my

8:46

subject and I had sort of the

8:48

opposite problem of that, which is that

8:50

I was writing about this man that

8:52

nobody likes and that

8:55

I had, you know, a pretty

8:57

critical, and in many ways, a quite

8:59

distant relationship with. Right? There weren't

9:01

a lot of parts of him that I I

9:03

identified with personally much

9:05

of this wanted to

9:07

champion. But I did I kept

9:09

finding him really fast meeting the

9:11

whole time that I was writing

9:13

about him. So I didn't

9:15

get bored. I sometimes

9:17

got perplexed about you

9:20

know why I was spending

9:22

so much time and

9:24

care on someone who stood

9:26

for so many things that I

9:28

didn't agree with and who probably

9:30

wouldn't have liked me very

9:32

much. But I

9:34

I never got bored actually and

9:37

that's partly because his

9:39

files and his papers just lead you

9:41

into so many other

9:43

directions and so many other people's lives. Beverly,

9:46

one quick question. It does strike me that

9:48

there's certain things you pick up when you meet

9:50

someone, the tenor of their

9:52

voice. They're they're kind of physical

9:54

habits, whether they're fidgety or not. In

9:56

that sense, writing about someone you've never

9:58

met and trying to capture them, how

10:00

did you handle that part of it? Yeah, there

10:02

are a lot of tapes

10:04

of hovered often in pretty

10:06

formal settings, so

10:08

him testifying for a

10:10

congressional committee or making, you

10:12

know, a cameo appearance in a

10:14

Hollywood movie, things

10:16

like that. There's no shortage

10:18

of being able to see hoover

10:20

and hear his voice. The stuff that

10:22

was actually the most interesting for

10:25

me, just in a intimate way

10:27

on that front, were

10:29

that he shows up a lot in Lyndon

10:31

Johnson's tapes and in

10:33

Nixon's tapes. And so There,

10:36

you're hearing relatively unfiltered

10:38

conversations. It's not even

10:40

clear, certainly in Nixon's case and

10:42

Johnson's as well. the people

10:44

they're talking to, including Hoover,

10:46

know that they're being recorded.

10:48

So those are probably the

10:50

most direct access

10:53

that I had to what was it

10:55

like to to sit down and talk with Jay

10:57

at Gohr. Just as a follow-up to

10:59

that, I was wondering writing this biography over

11:01

the past ten years. You know,

11:03

what was available now that wasn't

11:05

maybe to earlier biographers?

11:07

And what's left to learn you

11:09

know, what materials didn't you have

11:11

access to, if any? Anything you

11:13

really hope to see, but couldn't. Yeah.

11:16

A part of the appeal of doing

11:18

this project was how much

11:20

material had come out,

11:22

particularly in the wake of

11:24

the cold war. There were

11:26

couple of collections and

11:29

file releases that were really, really

11:31

important. So one was

11:34

all of the material that came

11:36

out about various Soviet

11:38

espionage investigations. So,

11:40

Vynona, which was this famous decryption

11:43

program that the FBI and the

11:45

army ran. Another

11:47

was the Solo

11:49

Files. These were to informers

11:51

that the FBI had within the

11:53

Communist Party from the

11:55

fifties through the eighties,

11:57

One was the international representative

12:00

of the communist party, one was

12:02

his brother who was the secret

12:04

courier of money

12:06

between the Soviet Union and

12:08

the and the CPUSA. So

12:11

those are amazing files, both for,

12:13

you know, the informer experience in

12:15

what the FBI was doing, but they're

12:17

actually these great social

12:19

history files because they're just

12:21

going to all of these meetings around

12:23

the world, you know, gatherings of

12:25

radical organizations, getting

12:27

all the minutes and the publicity

12:30

materials, everything that's happening and

12:32

bringing them back. So that was a

12:34

great source. Some of what

12:36

I had assess too is just that the technology

12:38

has changed now.

12:40

So I found out really interesting

12:42

things about his early

12:44

life because cause I was able to

12:46

do different kinds of genealogical

12:49

research that then let me

12:51

do newspaper searches, which

12:53

then turned up things like

12:55

his grandfather's suicide and

12:57

his aunt's murder and these

12:59

family scandals that he had never

13:01

talked about and that if you didn't know to

13:03

go looking for them, you you couldn't

13:05

have done that. I think the

13:07

greatest still relatively

13:09

untapped resource what

13:11

was hugely useful to me, but I couldn't

13:13

get through all of the material is

13:15

that under the JFK

13:17

assassinations Act, national

13:19

archives has been releasing

13:21

all sorts of documents, many of

13:23

them related to the assassination. But in

13:25

this case, in twenty seventeen and

13:27

twenty eighteen, they

13:29

released materials of the church

13:31

committee, and there are just

13:33

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands

13:35

of pages in there. They're a little

13:37

hard to get through, but that

13:39

has lots of new

13:41

detail about some

13:43

of the most famous episodes in

13:45

FBI history. I know that's where

13:47

I found evidence that

13:49

in fact Hoover had

13:51

informed the White House, the attorney

13:53

general, Congress, to some degree, about

13:55

certain parts of Co Intel

13:57

Pro, which I think people had

13:59

often thought the FBI was doing without

14:01

telling anyone about it. So

14:03

there's lots of rich material in in

14:05

all of these files. I tried to get through as many

14:07

of them as I could. It's

14:09

a huge bureaucracy. I did

14:11

not read everything that Jay and

14:13

Gohoover touched and no one could.

14:15

And then of the nature of

14:17

FBI files is that a lot of them are

14:19

still pretty heavily redacted. One

14:22

file that is very funny to read

14:24

is if you file for

14:26

the FBI's file on the

14:27

CIA. A lot of those documents, you

14:30

know, have a date, they'll have

14:32

an author, they'll have an opening

14:34

line that is something like the

14:36

most amazing thing just happened

14:38

and then all the rest of it is redacted.

14:41

Yeah. The public is allowed to know that

14:43

something amazingly good has happened,

14:45

but everything else about it, we're not allowed

14:47

to know. Think one of the things that

14:49

struck me right away is that the

14:51

public image that

14:53

Hoover and really his acolytes

14:56

and fans cultivated for

14:58

him of this powerful sort

15:00

of cowboy figure

15:03

obviously deeply conservative and

15:05

Christian and a Maverick

15:07

and Mammoth figure on

15:09

the American scene for all of these

15:11

years, a moral political

15:13

force for law and order there

15:15

is a really big gap between

15:17

that sort of carefully cultivated public image

15:19

and sort of maybe how he felt to himself and

15:21

how people most intimate with him

15:23

may have seen him which is much more

15:26

as deeply

15:29

self divided sometimes

15:32

anxious, meek, small.

15:34

As I wrote down here, more banality,

15:37

less evil. More

15:40

in line with sort of the g man, you

15:42

know, the government this figure

15:44

of a sort of bureaucrat, an office

15:46

goer, and that he sort of built the

15:48

FBI as this kind of,

15:50

you know, there's there's moments where you call it

15:52

this flawless paperwork machine.

15:54

That his sort of self concept for the office

15:57

especially in the beginning was

15:59

much more about adding

16:01

sort of technological innovations

16:03

and your accreditation into

16:06

the work of law enforcement GMan that that

16:08

this kind of figure of

16:11

that government employee as this

16:13

kind of office worker was

16:15

much closer to sort of the way that he sort

16:17

of conceives himself and and conceived of

16:19

the work in his

16:20

Gage. Yeah, that's so interesting

16:23

to look at some

16:25

of the divides as well as some of the

16:27

places that these themes

16:29

overlap. So if you look at

16:31

Hoover's public image by

16:33

the late nineteen thirties, which is when

16:35

he first becomes really

16:37

famous, He is

16:39

America's number one law

16:41

man. He's often depicted

16:44

holding a Vanquishing

16:46

criminals, etcetera, etcetera. Right?

16:48

This kind of hyper masculine

16:51

top cop image And

16:54

what's really interesting is not

16:56

only that that doesn't

16:58

reflect a lot of who he actually

17:00

was, but also that that's not

17:02

really what he intended for

17:04

the bureau. So as a child

17:06

and then coming of age in

17:10

Washington, First of all, he's

17:12

born into this world of

17:14

government service, of career government

17:16

service, which is really unusual because

17:18

the federal government didn't do that many

17:20

things in the nineteenth century. So

17:23

he's kind of born into what

17:26

he becomes, which is a

17:28

lifetime government employee.

17:30

And as a kid, he's basically

17:32

a kind of brainy anxious

17:35

child. He's not much of an athlete

17:37

KYE is valedictorian

17:40

of his public high school, this

17:42

white public high school, kind of the top

17:44

public high school in Washington at the

17:46

time. He's a debater. He is

17:48

the cadet captain for a kind of

17:50

early ish version of a of a kind of

17:53

ROTC at the cadet level in

17:55

high school, but he doesn't

17:57

join the military. And

17:59

it's not even clear to me that he

18:01

ever shot a weapon or knew how

18:03

to do

18:03

that. He didn't investigate crimes, etcetera.

18:05

It seemed like his interest in the ROTC stuff

18:07

was like that it was very fastidious and

18:10

ordered and it had that

18:12

kind of of hierarchy and ceremony,

18:14

but not so much the Braun

18:16

and and weapons or anything like

18:18

that. Right. Hierarchy ceremony

18:21

clear rules and I think, you

18:23

know, the camaraderie of

18:25

other boys. It's clear

18:27

that throughout his childhood, then

18:29

into college and then into government and

18:31

the bureau itself. He's really

18:34

drawn to these

18:36

worlds in which you

18:38

know, men are bonded together

18:40

through kind of common purpose as

18:42

well as

18:43

friendship. And he's just in those organizations

18:46

over and over and over again. And then he builds one around himself

18:48

so he never has to leave one

18:50

ever. Exactly. To pick up from

18:52

what Sam was saying,

18:54

I thought one of the fascinating details

18:57

from Jaeger Hoover's youth

18:59

was his time in college, right,

19:01

working at the library of congress. And the

19:03

kind of buzz new collections coming

19:05

in, and the catalog card

19:07

system, and processing

19:09

forms and files and

19:12

texts. Just how similar his

19:14

work was in some ways that the library of

19:16

congress is a young man to

19:18

his place as a g man as a

19:20

government

19:20

bureaucrat. This was his great talent

19:22

in many ways. Right? It wasn't

19:24

actually investigation or

19:26

crime fighting. It was the

19:28

ordering of information, and

19:30

he learned that in his first government

19:33

job, which as you say, was not at the

19:35

justice department or

19:37

the bureau, but was at the

19:39

library of congress where he worked

19:41

during the day while he went

19:43

to law school at George

19:45

Washington University at night

19:47

and continued living at home for

19:49

all of college right there in

19:51

Washington. And what was

19:53

fascinating to me when I started

19:55

looking at the library of congress material

19:57

was that he was

20:00

there on the kind of cutting

20:02

edge of information technology

20:04

of that moment which was the library

20:07

of congress classification

20:09

system for books which was just being

20:11

invented during this period and

20:13

kind of formalized and operationalized like

20:16

the Dewey decimal system, which was its

20:18

rival. And so hoover is

20:20

there learning all of this and it turns out

20:22

he's just phenomenally good at

20:24

it because it's the way his mind

20:26

works. He is this kind of

20:28

academic kid And so

20:30

he really takes to it, and then it's

20:32

super useful when he moves

20:34

into maintaining and creating

20:36

files in the justice

20:37

department. I think there's a chapter later

20:40

on that is comes from an

20:42

accusation against his FBI

20:44

at some point later in the twentieth century

20:46

that's called terror by index

20:48

card. I remember this is a chapter name

20:50

or it just comes up in the book, but the

20:52

index cards are already

20:54

from his very beginnings in government work GMan

20:56

important, the idea of just keeping track,

20:58

keeping tabs. Yeah, I think that

21:00

was a quote from Vito Mark Antonio

21:03

who was what if the

21:05

the KYE kind of few true labor

21:08

vaguely communist affiliated representatives

21:11

in congress.

21:12

Well, before we move on from this earlier

21:15

period, the other important thing about

21:17

his college years, of course, was

21:19

his fraternity kappa alpha at

21:21

George Washington. Yes. Which

21:23

had that camaraderie with men, of course, that

21:25

continues to be so important in his

21:27

life. And he really quite deliberately recruited

21:29

from the fraternity for many many

21:30

years. It was a explicitly

21:33

southern fraternity that had

21:35

been founded in the aftermath of

21:37

the civil war to carry

21:39

on basically the the lost cause of the

21:42

White South to honor the memory

21:44

of Robert E. Lee. And so by

21:46

the time Hoover joined it,

21:48

in the early twentieth century, it had

21:50

spread throughout the south and was

21:52

this sort of a validly

21:55

southern segregationist faternity

21:58

that have lots of southern

22:00

democrats in congress who are members

22:02

and alums and would hang

22:04

out at the local DC chapter

22:07

house. Where Hoover was. And its most famous

22:10

figures were people like Thomas

22:12

Dickson who was famous

22:16

novelist, he had written this book called KYE Klansman

22:18

that became the basis for birth of a nation,

22:21

which came out during the years

22:23

that Hoover was in

22:25

college. And so it was just a

22:27

fascinating way into

22:29

thinking about, you know, what was his

22:31

his racial and racialized thinking

22:34

early on, where did his racism

22:36

come from? Capa Alpha just

22:38

opened up a whole new

22:40

world to me that was fascinating to

22:42

explore. I thought you very definitely

22:44

showed that segregation

22:47

was ramping up in a way in

22:49

the aftermath of of reconstruction. There

22:52

there were moments where you say in Washington, D. C.

22:54

Is the federal city, especially

22:56

African Americans had some rights. It wasn't

22:58

totally segregated Gage. But

23:00

over the course of Hoover's life, it was becoming

23:02

more segregated and kind

23:04

of capturing that it wasn't just like

23:07

a static thing that he was born into, but

23:09

a process that that he experienced

23:11

over his life. And so

23:13

that phase of American history, especially in

23:15

a place like Washington DC, I

23:17

just thought you really captured those dynamics

23:20

well. Thanks. That was one

23:22

goal was to think about segregation

23:25

during these years as a

23:27

process and a process that's

23:29

happening around him and

23:31

that he ultimately comes to participate

23:33

in in pretty explicit

23:35

ways. So he goes

23:37

to segregated schools but

23:40

his neighborhood is not fully

23:43

segregated at this point. And

23:45

so he's kind of in the mix of this

23:47

multiracial Washington but

23:49

being channeled into a segregated school

23:52

system, ultimately into a segregated

23:55

university and into CAPA

23:57

Alpha, and it's also really interesting

24:00

that the federal government itself

24:02

is beginning to segregate

24:06

employment in much more rigid ways

24:08

at just the moment that Hoover

24:10

is entering the federal service.

24:12

So this really happens under the Wilson

24:15

administration, which is exactly the

24:17

moment that Hoover enters the federal

24:19

government. And so You can

24:21

just see this kind of

24:23

education and observation

24:26

of a certain kind

24:28

of racial order really taking

24:29

root, but as you say, not in a

24:32

static way as something

24:34

that's being invented and

24:36

that's being enforced. Which is what he,

24:38

of course, goes on to to take as part

24:40

of his mission. Well, I think we

24:43

should maybe talk for a moment about

24:45

the beginning of the

24:47

FBI, what Hoover was setting

24:49

out to do, and then what what sort

24:51

of political surveillance that starts to

24:53

become a part of that

24:53

work? In many ways, it was

24:56

kind of chance that he ended up going into

24:58

the justice department as quickly as he

25:00

did and never leaving because

25:03

he happened to graduate from law

25:05

school in the spring of nineteen

25:07

seventeen. And many of

25:09

you out there know, what happening

25:11

in in the spring of nineteen seventeen, which

25:13

is that the United States was entering

25:15

the first world war. And

25:19

So he goes into the justice

25:21

department. At just the moment

25:23

that the justice department is getting

25:25

all of these new duties

25:27

which require it to both track

25:30

wartime dissenters, political

25:32

radicals, non citizens

25:34

who are deemed dangerous to the

25:37

nation, and then to contain

25:39

them and figure out how

25:41

to repress or

25:43

make cases against the and the federal

25:45

government really hadn't been doing much

25:47

of that before. And so he

25:49

is one of the the first people

25:51

who learns how to do this, he

25:54

goes to work for the justice

25:56

department and gets assigned to

25:58

German internment which is something we

26:00

don't think a whole lot about, but there

26:02

were several thousand Germans

26:04

GMan turn during those years

26:06

of the First World War And

26:08

then he's so good at that, that when

26:11

the war ends and these

26:13

new concerns emerge about

26:16

revolutionary radicalism in

26:18

the United stage, radical movements, the

26:20

creation of the communist parties,

26:22

anarchist violence, he

26:24

at the age twenty four

26:27

is put in charge of this thing

26:29

called the radical division, which

26:31

is a new experiment GMan kind

26:33

of keeping track of left wing radicals in the

26:35

United States, his main task is

26:37

to help orchestrate what become

26:39

known as the Palmer Raids, which

26:42

were deportation raids aimed first to anarchists

26:44

and then communists. And he's

26:47

incredibly important and really instrumental

26:49

behind the scenes in ways that he

26:52

later denied because they

26:54

became so controversial. I think it's

26:56

worth stressing here the keeping

26:58

tabs aspect of this, keeping files

27:00

on people we mentioned he went to law

27:02

school at GW and how much he

27:04

hired from his fraternity and

27:06

GW. And he was looking mostly

27:08

for lawyers and account Right?

27:10

And I think that

27:12

says something about, like, the intentions with

27:14

which he went into this government service.

27:16

I really appreciated the way you

27:18

kind of portray Hoover as

27:21

almost reluctantly getting

27:23

into some of the high profile

27:25

John Dillinger, Bonnie and

27:28

Clyde, you know, the photos of Hoover with the

27:30

Tommy Gun, the big

27:32

raids, the shootouts. Those kinds of things we

27:34

associate with the FBI. That was not what

27:36

Hoover started doing, and he kind of resisted

27:38

that as across the twenties and

27:40

thirties that came to be more and

27:42

more of what would become the FBI, what

27:44

they would take up. Yeah. When

27:46

Hoover took over the bureau

27:48

in nineteen twenty four, He

27:50

came in first of all as a reformer. He

27:52

is twenty nine years old at

27:54

that point and is appointed first

27:57

as a kind of placeholder as the

27:59

acting director because

28:01

the KYE previous director that I

28:03

named William j Burns, who was

28:05

this like a very spectacular

28:08

KYE detective type. There have been

28:10

a whole series of corruption scandals,

28:13

abusive power scandals, both

28:15

the kind of political abuses of

28:18

power in the polarades and then

28:20

just, you know, basic poker

28:22

games, whiskey peddling, bribery,

28:24

stuff of the early twenties. And so when Hoover Cavan,

28:26

he was charged with cleaning

28:29

things up, getting away from

28:31

all of that. And he

28:33

took it pretty seriously for the

28:36

remainder of the twenties, and his vision

28:38

was very much a kind of progressive

28:40

and progressive era vision

28:43

that the bureau was going to be this kind of

28:45

small, tight knit group of

28:48

college educated lawyers

28:50

and accountants who were going to use, know,

28:52

the latest scientific methods

28:54

and filing systems and

28:57

efficiency, forensic science

29:00

statistics. Right? All of these

29:02

kind of forms of professionalism

29:04

and expertise to kind

29:07

of clean up not only the

29:09

bureau, but to be a resource to

29:11

other police departments around the country, but

29:13

that it was gonna be a white collar

29:15

environment. They didn't regularly

29:18

carry guns they didn't

29:20

have jurisdiction over very

29:22

many things. Right? I mean, still today

29:24

almost all, criminal law

29:26

enforcement is at the local level in

29:28

the United States, so the federal government

29:30

has a very specific

29:32

set of duties. And that was his

29:34

vision and he was pretty happy

29:36

about it. He kind of perfected it

29:38

by early thirties and thought I

29:40

think that he was just gonna ride that

29:42

out for the rest of his life, but then

29:44

not only the depression, but

29:46

this this crime wave comes along in

29:48

the thirties with figures like

29:51

John Dillinger and others. And

29:53

Franklin Roosevelt says, you know, this is matter

29:55

now. We're gonna have a war on crime. And

29:57

so all those nice gentleman

29:59

lay lawyers and accountants have

30:01

to learn to shoot guns and

30:04

go out and fight criminals,

30:06

and they eventually learned to

30:08

do it, but it it wasn't what they thought they

30:10

were signing on for, and

30:12

they grew it up a few times as they're learning what

30:14

what on Earth they're supposed to be doing. Yeah.

30:16

It didn't become the FBI until nineteen

30:19

thirty five. Which listeners will know

30:21

is a few years into Franklin

30:23

Roosevelt's first term. It was

30:25

among the Alphabet Soup agencies rights

30:27

civilian conservation corps, that kind of thing,

30:29

the three letter initials. But you

30:31

mentioned FDR's were on crime.

30:33

How much you situate what

30:35

we now think of as the FBI as a

30:37

kind of new deal project

30:39

or a new deal institution

30:42

alongside similar three

30:44

letter government agencies. I think it

30:46

was almost a pure new

30:48

deal institution especially in

30:50

the thirties when it's expanding in

30:52

this way. One of the things that really

30:54

interested me about looking

30:56

at Hoover's life and

30:58

career was to think about

31:00

these moments when Liberals

31:02

from presidents like

31:04

Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson down

31:07

to Democrats in Congress, Republicans

31:10

as well, and then the liberal

31:12

establishment more broadly really

31:14

supported Hoover, helped

31:16

to empower him and

31:18

that's particularly notable in the

31:20

thirties when the BI gets lots of new

31:22

crime fighting power. Franklin

31:24

Roosevelt pushes them back into

31:26

political intelligence work, domestic

31:28

intelligence during the war. And

31:30

he also really encourages Hoover

31:33

to ramp up the FBI's

31:35

public relations and kind of sell the

31:37

work of government to the American people

31:39

And I think for Roosevelt and for

31:42

many other New Deal Liberals, this

31:44

didn't seem like a great contrast

31:46

with the social welfare state.

31:48

Right? Which is how the new deal.

31:50

It was kind of part of this

31:52

big program to use activist

31:55

government to bring security and stability

31:57

to the American people

31:59

and fighting crime

32:02

and fighting political disorder

32:04

were part of that and they didn't seem necessarily

32:07

to be in contradiction with what

32:09

we tend to think of as New

32:11

Deal

32:11

Liberalism. Yeah, that comes through so clearly

32:13

in the first couple hundred pages of the

32:15

book about just obviously,

32:17

the predecessor organization of the FBI bears

32:19

the marks of the progressive era,

32:21

as you were saying, you know, they start fingerprinting.

32:24

You know, they there's technological innovation

32:26

and efficiency in the service

32:29

of government work GMan in service of the

32:31

problem of crime and sedition. And then with the

32:33

new deal, it's that, but it's

32:36

also the federal government is

32:38

going to be doing more, and it's

32:40

going to be leading and sort

32:42

of projecting this sort of federal power

32:45

on the national scene in this

32:47

much more activist

32:48

way. And so it sort of bears the marks of

32:51

of a new deal organization too. Yeah, title

32:53

of the book, which is G Man,

32:56

was a name that came out of the

32:58

nineteen thirties. It was the

33:00

nickname for FBI agents

33:02

and for Hoover himself, but it stands

33:04

for government man. And

33:06

that I think was the image of

33:08

the FBI that they were

33:10

sort of the avenging enforcers

33:13

of this newly empowered

33:15

federal government, and they're actually

33:17

great cartoons from that era.

33:20

You know, everybody labeled like

33:22

federal government fighting for

33:24

the American people kind of things and and

33:26

there about the FBI and the way

33:28

it's part of that

33:29

vision? Well, we've kind of alluded to

33:32

this, but something that was so important

33:34

to Hoover from the beginning was the kind

33:36

of man that he imagined as

33:38

the ideal FBI Gage. And

33:40

of course, that sort of begins to

33:42

implicate sort of his sort of

33:44

homosexuality and even homosexuality, which comes through

33:46

in the book too. Which is sort of

33:48

his ideal man is sort of manifested in the ideal

33:51

FBI agent that he can see so of.

33:53

Of course, you follow his lifelong

33:55

relationship with

33:57

Clyde Toulson, which was fascinating

33:59

to me and a kind of very

34:02

deaf, careful examination

34:04

on your part of that relationship. But could we talk a

34:06

little bit about Hoover's sort of

34:09

ideal FBI agent and then

34:11

how that relates

34:13

to how he thought about and lived among

34:15

GMan. Big question. How did Hoover

34:18

live among

34:20

men? Well, he had a very

34:22

particular idea of who

34:25

he wanted as

34:28

his representative as his

34:30

agents, as the people who were going

34:32

to be closest to him, and all of those

34:34

things were part of the kind of

34:36

same stew,

34:38

So in his early years as director

34:40

when the FBI was pretty

34:42

small, it was pretty tight knit.

34:45

He set up these personnel policies

34:48

that gave him enormous

34:50

control over who was gonna be in the

34:52

agent KYE in

34:54

particular. So some of the basics will be of no surprise

34:56

to anyone who thinks, what

34:58

does a mid century FBI agent

35:01

look like? So is a tall white

35:03

guy wearing a suit and a hat and shiny

35:06

shoes, I'm really trying to

35:08

project this

35:10

image of not

35:12

only this kind of

35:14

upright, incorruptible figure, but

35:16

also of being a sort

35:18

of white

35:20

collar figure someone who is not like an

35:22

ordinary cop. You know, the FBI

35:24

often had to work with police forces,

35:26

but also Hoover had a

35:30

lot of saying for other levels of law

35:32

enforcement as being kind of fuggish

35:34

or uneducated, and

35:36

he took his mission to

35:38

kind of create this shining

35:40

core of of GMan agents.

35:42

He also chose them

35:44

from institutions he knew as

35:47

we said a lot of George Washington University, a lot

35:49

of Capa Alpha, and one piece that was

35:51

really fascinating to me

35:54

was that he was very explicit

35:56

about taking advantage of

35:58

basically a loophole, which meant

36:01

that his agents were not part of any

36:04

formal civil service process.

36:06

So if you have been part of the civil

36:08

service, you know, people take an exam, there's

36:10

a pool of employees, you choose

36:12

from those potential people and that that's

36:14

who becomes your employee.

36:16

Well, Hoover was dedicated

36:19

his whole life to maintaining personal control

36:22

over the hiring of his

36:24

agents, keeping them out of the

36:26

civil service pool so that he

36:28

could choose

36:30

basically KYE same man over and over and over again.

36:32

And so he would have this kind

36:34

of identical core of agents who basically

36:36

were just a lot like him. I

36:40

mean, Beverly Sam mentioned Tulsen who was

36:43

who was longtime companion to

36:45

use the the euphemism from obituaries

36:47

in the early eighties. before

36:50

that, I thought one of the most

36:52

fascinating parts was the correspondence you found

36:54

between Hoover and another young man,

36:56

Melvin Pervis. And

36:58

the complicated dance of

37:00

their letters, the way you kind of

37:02

interpret them and kind of see

37:06

the way I don't want to put it a

37:08

low level flotation in those

37:10

letters, I thought that correspondence

37:13

It was where maybe you didn't have to guess quite as

37:15

much and was one of the richer, I think,

37:17

kind of, sources were thinking about Hoover's

37:20

sexuality, if I can put it that way, that

37:22

you drew on. Yet one of the

37:24

frustrations of writing about Hoover is

37:26

that a lot of his personal

37:28

papers and correspondence were

37:30

destroyed at his death by

37:32

his request. And so there

37:34

aren't that many collections

37:36

that allow that sort of

37:38

really kind of intimate view into

37:41

his more personal side but the

37:43

the purpose collection really is amazing for that reason.

37:45

Melvin purpos became

37:48

famous in the mid

37:50

nineteen thirties as the guy who got

37:52

John Dillinger, right, the head of the Chicago

37:54

field office, the big shootout

37:56

at the Biograph Theater, and And

37:59

so he kind of had this burst of celebrity

38:01

during that moment in his own right,

38:04

but the correspondence is

38:06

from the period

38:08

before that which is his rise beginning in the mid

38:10

twenties and then into

38:12

the thirties through Hoover's

38:14

FBI. And he's really fast

38:17

fascinating. So like many agents, he was

38:19

a kappa alpha. That's why

38:22

Hoover went ahead and hired

38:24

him. He entered the bureau as a really

38:26

young And as he's rising through the ranks, he

38:28

develops this kind of intimate

38:30

personal relationship with Hoover that's

38:32

then documented in these

38:34

letters KYE often

38:36

they're, you know, exchanging tips about their pets

38:39

or their ear infections or

38:41

a variety of

38:44

things. Some of it is about bureau business, and then

38:46

some of it is this very flirtatious,

38:50

almost actualized

38:52

banter both about each

38:54

of their, but in particular, purposes,

38:57

good looks, his

38:59

relationships with women, and I read a lot

39:01

of that as as as a kind of, you know, code for

39:04

Hoover's real kind of

39:06

flirtatious interest and purpose.

39:09

You can see purpose both responding to that. I'm trying

39:11

to hold it off. There's a really

39:14

fascinating set of exchanges. You know, it

39:16

has a kind of KYE too vibe to

39:18

it because,

39:20

like, Your hoover's writing these letters saying don't call

39:22

me mister hoover. Just call

39:24

me j e and purpose

39:27

rates back and says, I'd be really more comfortable just

39:30

calling you director and

39:32

whoever says, don't call me that much.

39:34

I really really want you to call me

39:36

by my first name. So then purpose kind of does that. I mean,

39:38

it's just it's a

39:40

complicated work relationship, personal

39:42

relationship, flotation, and

39:46

they're just fantastic letters. I kind of thought one of the the

39:48

real telltale signs for

39:50

me was the way Hoover would

39:52

sometimes kind

39:54

of displace thoughts

39:56

on to his secretary, a woman.

39:58

Right? He would say, oh, the

40:00

last time you were here, purface,

40:02

she was all a titter. Because you're so

40:04

handsome or something like that. And he would kind

40:06

of talk about purpose and the

40:08

secretary. And there was like a running joke in the

40:10

office even, like, Hoover would

40:12

say it, you know, to other colleagues in in the

40:14

office. I thought that

40:16

was, to me, one of the real tales of

40:18

that correspondence. Right. He's trying to

40:20

get them to go to, you know,

40:22

bureau balls together. There's a whole

40:24

set of jokes about whether his

40:26

secretary is going to be wearing a cellophane

40:28

gown because purposed -- Yes. --

40:30

has so overwhelmed her with his,

40:32

you know, powerful good looks and

40:34

sexuality. And you

40:36

think, wow. K. There are a lot of ways to read this. It's

40:38

somewhat embarrassing for me, but Beverly, we

40:40

had dinner in New Haven a couple weeks

40:42

Gage. And KYE first

40:45

thing I asked you was, is the cross dressing true? That's the first

40:47

thing everyone asks. Really? Yeah. But

40:49

you come to the conclusion, that

40:51

probably didn't happen. Well,

40:53

I come to the conclusion that we don't

40:56

have any evidence that it

40:58

happened. And therefore, I think we

41:00

should say that it it it

41:02

didn't happen. That comes

41:04

from a very useful

41:06

biography, somewhat sensational at

41:08

GMan, but really valuable, useful biography

41:11

from British journalist named Anthony Summers,

41:13

who did a lot of kind of muck

41:15

breaking work about Hoover's personal

41:18

life in particular KYE the

41:20

early nineties. That is where the

41:22

dress story showed up. But the dress

41:24

story comes from

41:26

a woman who says

41:29

that she was an orgy at the

41:31

plaza with Roycomb and

41:34

her ex husband, a

41:36

guy named

41:38

Rosenstein, was in fact a showed up

41:40

there and Hoover was there waiting

41:42

in a dress, an Ebola,

41:44

and all of this. So

41:47

So that is the story.

41:49

It obviously has had legs. It's

41:51

part of Hoover's public image

41:54

now in indelible

41:56

ways, but She's not a very reliable narrator. She served

41:58

time in jail for perjury

42:00

on something else. She was

42:02

also in a very contentious divorce with

42:06

Lewis Rosen deal. And, you know, a lot of this stuff came

42:08

out -- Right. -- kind of in the wake of that.

42:10

But that's the dress story.

42:11

Yeah. Well, I was gonna say that

42:13

that narrative is

42:16

sort of stand in for, you know, the kind of

42:18

swirl of rumors about

42:20

his intimate life. It

42:22

it kind of like annoying ham fisted

42:24

American way. It's like this this

42:26

man who is probably just gay

42:28

got translated into, oh, he wore

42:30

dresses. But in your book,

42:32

as he sort of settles on

42:34

and with Clai Tulsa as

42:36

his lifelong companion, his right

42:38

hand man at the FBI, and a person

42:40

who basically they Gage socially

42:42

together as a as a couple. I mean,

42:44

when invitations were extended to Hoover, they were always extended

42:46

to you and Clyde. And

42:48

if Hoover missed something, he would say,

42:50

I'm sorry that me and Clyde couldn't be

42:53

there. You know? If you just looked at

42:56

it from the standpoint of today, you

42:58

would think, okay, there's Hoover and his

43:00

partner. But I wanted to point out in this moment

43:02

in the nineteen thirties, this sort of,

43:04

abstemius buttoned up young

43:07

life does give way

43:09

to some amount of liberteen indulgence as

43:11

he and Clyde are able to move through

43:13

worlds, especially the world of Broadway

43:15

and Hollywood a

43:18

little bit. And make friends in a in a place where the

43:20

kind of hardcore manliness,

43:22

conservative Christianity that was

43:25

his main

43:27

life up to this point, gave way a little bit? Yeah.

43:30

The relationship with Tulsa, which as you

43:32

say, plays a pretty big

43:34

role in the book because they were

43:36

together for so long

43:38

for more than forty years, both

43:40

professionally and personally, is

43:42

a really interesting combination

43:45

of openness and

43:47

then sort of secrecy and inaccessibility.

43:50

So their public relationship and their

43:52

social relationship and their

43:54

professional relationship was extremely open.

43:56

Tolleson was the number two

43:58

at the FBI, but he

44:00

was also hoover's social

44:02

companion, basically his spouse. They

44:05

how to lift their meals together. They

44:07

travel together. They, as you say,

44:09

went to to

44:12

nightclubs, racetracks, and dinner dates and the whole thing,

44:14

family gatherings, funerals,

44:16

etcetera. And all of

44:19

that is extremely open It's

44:21

really well respected and

44:24

is just in Washington, in

44:26

New York, in LA,

44:28

just a part of

44:30

their social fabric that everybody goes with and accepts. And

44:32

then, of course, there's an element of it that's

44:34

very secret, so we don't

44:36

know if they were having

44:38

a a sexual relationship or what

44:40

that entailed. We, of

44:42

course, do know that

44:44

they themselves denied that this was a gay

44:46

relationship and then they as

44:48

heads of the FBI

44:50

went on to

44:52

police the lives of many other

44:54

federal employees who end up being fired for

44:56

being gay. Right. But

44:58

the thirties is just a really

45:00

interesting moment because

45:02

while those elements of of kind

45:04

of openness and secrecy are pretty constant,

45:07

The thirties are this this

45:09

moment before the lavender

45:12

scare when

45:14

they are In fact, going up to the Stork

45:16

Club in New York hanging out with

45:18

Walter Winchell going to

45:20

Broadway shows, hanging out in

45:22

Hollywood, Hoover's becoming a

45:24

celebrity, and they're moving in

45:26

worlds where the existence

45:28

of gay people,

45:30

of gay culture, it is not at all

45:32

unusual, is pretty widely known

45:34

and they're just like

45:36

club hop And the

45:38

interesting thing is that that's all really

45:40

well documented in gossip

45:42

columns, Walter Wintol, Leonard

45:44

Lyons, had a hopper, And there's lots

45:47

of kind of jokey innuendo in there as well

45:49

about, you know, Hoover and his right

45:51

hand man or the the

45:53

well dressed lads who are always

45:56

together. I appreciated Beverly,

45:58

your retrieval of the now it's

46:00

out of favor as a term, but the concept of the bachelor. I actually

46:03

thought that was really helpful and it

46:05

is a kind of forgotten semi

46:08

euphemism. Yeah. And that was how Hoover

46:10

was identified for his whole

46:12

life. And, you know, some of

46:14

the funnier moments with that are

46:18

when he is held up as, you

46:20

know, one of Washington's most

46:22

eligible bachelors and to look

46:24

at the the list of other men, many of

46:26

whom we now know, we're gay. And

46:28

he occasionally would have, particularly when his mother

46:31

died, he had a

46:34

kind of performative public moment. He lived with his

46:36

mother till he was forty three years old,

46:38

which is when she died

46:40

and for The first

46:42

part of his life, that was part of

46:44

how he explained why he was

46:46

still single. Once she

46:48

died, there's

46:50

this flurry of interest in the press about whether

46:52

he will now get married,

46:54

start dating women, and so

46:58

he briefly kind of pretends to have

47:00

this romantic relationship with

47:02

Ginger Rogers' mother of

47:04

all

47:04

people. She

47:06

plays along. Right? They were friends. I don't think that was

47:08

really much of a much of a relationship. It

47:10

was sort of a PR move. And I

47:12

don't think he ever seriously dated

47:15

a woman. It is interesting to me that at

47:17

this moment GMan he is in his private life

47:19

beginning to indulge a bit, go to

47:21

nightclubs, you know, be friendly with Broadway

47:23

stars and live this sort of more open yet

47:26

secret life with Clyde. At the

47:28

same time,

47:30

Hoover is beginning to

47:32

embrace talking about crime

47:34

as a moral struggle and

47:36

sedition as a moral struggle. There's

47:38

a line somewhere where he says, crime will

47:40

play bridge with you. The crime dances with your sons and

47:42

daughters. So at the very same time

47:44

that he's allowing himself some more what

47:47

we might call moral indulgences in his

47:49

life, the position he has at the head of the

47:51

FBI is much more sort of telling

47:53

a story about

47:55

disorder, which relates it to

47:58

vice and abnormality. Yeah.

48:00

He never makes it really easy

48:02

on his biographer

48:04

by being super consistent. There are a couple of issues that he's super

48:06

consistent on, but this is one of these

48:08

fascinating moments of contradiction

48:10

to some degree between

48:14

public and that life, but even between different

48:16

aspects of his public image,

48:18

one of the pieces of Hoover's

48:20

life that I found the most

48:22

interesting was his

48:24

role as this kind of

48:26

conservative cultural figure. Right?

48:28

So if you're the head of the FBI, you

48:30

could say, you know, My job

48:32

is to just enforce places where there's

48:34

federal jurisdiction and, you

48:36

know, that that's it. That's

48:38

my job. But Hoover had a

48:40

much more expansive view. And so in the thirties, he starts

48:42

to make speeches and

48:46

right columns or have

48:48

them go straight in for him. He writes

48:50

his first books or has them

48:52

go straight in for him

48:54

about this idea of prime as

48:56

a matter of personal morality, as

48:59

religion, in particular, as one of

49:01

the solutions and that becomes his

49:04

loves to lecture American parents

49:06

about sending their kids to Sunday

49:08

school and about

49:10

attending church. KYE really doesn't

49:12

like women who, you know, sit around

49:14

during the daytime playing

49:16

bridge and gossiping with their

49:18

neighbors and

49:18

of, you know, dutifully attending to their children and keeping them away from

49:20

a licensed crime? Well, before we leave the

49:22

thirties, I I wanted to just get in here just

49:24

that this is the moment where political

49:28

surveillance, the sort of work he was doing when he first

49:30

entered the the justice department,

49:32

comes back into the

49:34

main kind of remit of

49:36

the FBI. Because FDR in the summer of nineteen thirty

49:38

six basically asks Hoover

49:40

in a confidential meeting to

49:42

investigate communism

49:44

fascism. The the memo I liked the quote from Hoover's memo about

49:46

this meeting where he said the president

49:49

was, quote, desirous of discussing

49:51

the question of subversive activities

49:53

in the United States, particularly

49:56

fascism and communism. And you

49:58

implied too that, like, FDR's

50:00

concern was really

50:02

exacerbated by strike waves, of course, of nineteen thirty four, and then

50:04

later on of nineteen thirty

50:06

seven. And that importantly, this is not

50:08

about investigating particular

50:10

crimes, but

50:12

obtaining a quote unquote broad picture of the

50:14

movements and their potential effect on political life

50:16

in the country and their capacity to

50:20

you know, shut down the economy. This is, of course, the moment

50:22

of the CIO. Hoover is very preoccupied

50:24

with John Lewis, the CIO. Harry

50:26

Bridges of the of the Long Sherman

50:30

Union. And Harry Braun, the newspaperman and the founder of the

50:32

newspaper Guild. So Hoover's was

50:34

already had these preoccupations, of course, with the with

50:36

the radical movements, but

50:38

FDR is giving him this task again. And it's, you

50:40

know, this is the moment of the second red

50:42

scare. GMan Bauchner: Yeah, we tend

50:44

to think

50:45

about a slightly later moment as

50:48

being sort of the heyday of political

50:50

surveillance, but a lot of that really

50:52

has its roots in this

50:54

period in the late thirties and

50:56

then in the war itself,

50:58

which more than anything

51:02

else really spans the FBI, gives it new

51:04

powers, and it's Franklin Roosevelt,

51:06

who does a lot of that as you say, he kind

51:08

of brings

51:10

Hoover in he very

51:12

explicitly says Hoover's

51:14

going to be in charge of espionage,

51:17

sabotage, subversion within the

51:19

United States and that to this huge hiring

51:22

boom at the FBI, a

51:24

quadruples in size more or

51:26

less during the second World War

51:28

and its just

51:30

all domestic surveillance of one

51:32

sort or another. Some of it is just

51:35

fingerprinting wartime workers, but a

51:37

lot of it is kind of setting

51:39

the foundation for this

51:42

expansive domestic intelligence system

51:44

that's going to then be an essential

51:46

part of the FBI's work from that

51:48

point

51:48

on. And I think it's interesting the

51:50

way you try to establish a sort of balance

51:54

both FDR, but Hoover's more in particular

51:56

preoccupation with homegrown fascism and

51:58

homegrown communism. There was

52:00

Nazi plots during the war

52:02

that were figured out by the

52:04

FBI. And even before that, there was sort of

52:06

as even just as the sort of political

52:08

surveillance was taking off this the investigation of these

52:10

kind of Nazi youth camps in

52:12

America. But overall,

52:14

in terms of the kind of broad picture

52:16

that Hoover was gleaning from this

52:18

new era of political

52:20

surveillance, I got the impression that Hoover always seemed a little bit enthusiastic

52:22

about going after the left. Yeah, domestic

52:24

fascism, I think we tend to

52:26

forget, was a big concern in

52:30

the late thirties and early forties. And then, of course, once the war

52:32

is on the question

52:34

of Nazi agents in

52:36

the United States's

52:38

fascist agents of one sort or another, wasn't

52:40

just hypothetical. You know, one

52:42

of my favorite case

52:44

chapters in the book is about these these

52:46

saboteurs who come over

52:48

and are, you know, dropped off from

52:50

u boats on Long Island and Florida

52:52

to basically go around things up in the

52:55

United States and they immediately

52:57

turn and, you know, a couple

52:59

of them turn themselves into the FBI and

53:01

the FBI rounds them all up

53:03

and They're executed by military

53:05

tribunal, actually a secret military

53:07

tribunal, but it's a it's a kind of

53:09

fascinating little set piece. But

53:11

those were real concerns, and the

53:14

FBI actually made a lot of its

53:16

name doing that sort

53:18

of thing. But the other piece that was really see

53:20

the ways that the FBI's

53:23

infiltration of the communist

53:26

party, in particular, really starts during

53:28

the period of the Nazi Soviet

53:30

pact, so between thirty nine

53:32

and forty one when you know, in that

53:34

context, there's actually pretty

53:36

good reason to be doing some of

53:38

that, but then the Soviet Union

53:40

becomes a US

53:42

wartime ally and the

53:44

FBI still doesn't stop going into the

53:46

communist party and you get this kind of

53:48

continuous line up to the

53:50

Red scare.

53:50

Right. Well and also that, you know, so the post years were

53:52

the years where the Communist Party had

53:54

its sort of highest and

53:58

most sunny profile in American life. Even though their their numbers never

54:00

got that large, the era of the popular

54:02

front and of the victory of

54:04

of our ally, the USSR against

54:07

the access. I mean, it seemed to me that Hoover sort of

54:10

never gave up on communism

54:12

as number one enemy, and obviously, that becomes

54:14

more important next few

54:16

decades, but the contrast between the this

54:18

sort of brief moment where the Communist Party was thought

54:20

of kind of fondly by more people in

54:22

American life whether they were just Liberals

54:24

or fellow travelers or actual

54:25

members, the FBI doesn't

54:28

ever get one over. Right.

54:30

Yes. Hoover was never a convert, though,

54:32

of course, at certain

54:34

GMan, it's hoover and, you know, the

54:36

few people in the communist party who

54:38

are the only people in the country who really

54:40

think the communist party is know enormously

54:43

powerful organization. You

54:45

know Beverly, one thing

54:47

I wanted to mention this,

54:49

and I think it's right to do so here.

54:52

We've talked a lot about what he did,

54:54

his approach to to running a government

54:56

bureaucracy, so on and so forth. But

54:58

Hoover's ideas How did he actually

55:00

think about communism? Anti

55:02

communism is definitely one of

55:04

the central

55:06

causes of Hoover's life.

55:08

It is kind of part

55:10

of something that organizes

55:12

his worldview in part because

55:15

he doesn't view it in kind of narrow

55:17

national security terms, but

55:19

thinks of the struggle

55:21

against communism as really this

55:23

kind of massive existential

55:26

struggle. And I think that was one

55:28

piece where I thought it

55:30

really matters that it is

55:32

Jay Edgar KYE in particular in

55:34

this position at this moment in time because

55:37

you can conceive of someone else.

55:39

Right? I mean, the early cold

55:41

war, there's gonna be some

55:44

domestic intelligence. Right? You're gonna be

55:46

looking into Soviet espionage,

55:48

which was real. You'll probably

55:50

you're gonna be looking at the communist

55:52

party, which in fact did have a relationship with

55:55

the Soviet government, and so anyone in that position

55:57

would have done some

56:00

of that. But you can

56:02

conceive of a different

56:04

FBI director kind of stopping

56:06

there. Right? Treat this as a national

56:08

security matter. That's it. You're gonna try to figure

56:10

out who the spies are and let it go.

56:12

But but Hoover had a much more

56:14

expansive vision and that had

56:16

pretty dramatic consequences. I mean

56:18

his view was that,

56:20

you know, communism was

56:22

a broad ideological, cultural,

56:26

social, practical

56:28

threat to the American way of life. He thought of

56:30

the communist party as a

56:34

subversive organization literally

56:36

seeking the overthrow of the

56:38

American government, but more

56:40

importantly that

56:42

this was kind of a

56:44

struggle between religiosity

56:47

and atheistic communism. Right. These

56:49

are the big themes of

56:51

this much broader cultural campaign, which

56:53

then of course licenses the

56:56

FBI in Hoover's mind

56:58

at least to be doing surveillance

57:00

of almost anyone who

57:02

comes into the orbit

57:05

of touches upon the Communist

57:08

Party in contrast to something that would be would

57:10

be much narrower. Yeah. It struck

57:12

me that one of the things that's tough about

57:14

Hoover is that we know him

57:16

from today instead of at the time

57:18

and a post war period is a really

57:20

sort of striking turning point in your

57:22

book in terms of

57:24

his Because there was an extent to which him and the FBI did

57:26

have this image as the sort of this

57:28

good government

57:30

administrative vehicle,

57:32

and he even had a reputation for liberalism

57:34

on certain issues, sometimes being

57:36

on the side of civil liberties against some

57:38

other forces in American life. He opposed

57:40

at least internally Japanese internment during the

57:43

war. But after forty five, this is

57:45

when as you as you just

57:47

described that he becomes this

57:49

political embodiment of the anti

57:52

communist cause, which then,

57:54

you know, his vision of it becomes

57:57

really important to people like McCarthy,

58:00

to the John Burch

58:02

Society, and people with

58:04

whom he had kind of

58:06

complex relationships that are really well

58:08

rendered in your book. But it can't

58:10

be denied that the vision that you just described

58:12

with his with the way he thought about communism

58:14

becomes KYE sort of dominant one for

58:16

these rising forces of anti communism

58:18

even if some of them

58:20

were, you know, pursuing those goals in ways that he found

58:22

sort of sorted or not unlawful and careful enough.

58:24

What are the political puzzles of the

58:26

book? And really, in some ways, the

58:29

frame of of Hoover's my

58:32

mind is that he stands for

58:34

these two political traditions.

58:36

As you suggest, one is this kind

58:38

of progressive professional

58:40

career, a political expert

58:43

government service. And that's

58:45

serious. It's a serious part of

58:48

what he does. It's a serious part of his

58:50

public reputation. And then,

58:52

ideologically, he's this incredibly powerful

58:55

servative voice on communism,

58:58

on crime, race, religion,

59:00

right a whole host of factors,

59:04

and the nineteen forties and fifties, I think, is the

59:06

period when these two things

59:08

for him come together

59:10

most effectively when

59:12

he has established

59:15

control over a

59:17

very powerful bureaucracy that

59:19

is his, the FBI, He's

59:22

using that bureaucracy in many ways

59:24

to enforce important elements

59:26

of his own worldview, particularly

59:29

on the question. Of communism. And I think the

59:31

key, which is in contrast to to what

59:34

comes later, is that it makes him

59:36

incredibly popular.

59:38

Right. Yeah. And

59:40

this is maybe the most surprising thing about

59:43

Hoover's career, particularly during these

59:45

years, is just how

59:48

popular he because we tend to think of him as the kind of the man that

59:50

nobody liked. But in fact,

59:52

his popularity ratings are

59:54

really off charts during

59:56

these years in the seventies, eighties, ninety

59:58

percentiles, and it's not because people

1:00:00

didn't know his priorities or

1:00:02

even know some of

1:00:04

his methods because they did know them and they supported them

1:00:06

and the country was

1:00:08

behind this. And the other funny thing

1:00:10

is as you suggested he's got this kind

1:00:12

of messy relationship

1:00:14

with Joseph McCarthy who

1:00:16

is a friend and they obviously share a

1:00:18

lot of ideas. But for

1:00:20

many people, including

1:00:22

many Liberals' during this period. Hoover, who is an

1:00:24

institution builder, who is someone who at

1:00:26

least professes to be

1:00:28

observing limits

1:00:30

and facts, he's seen as

1:00:32

the kind of responsible

1:00:34

alternative to just McCarthy. Right? And

1:00:36

so he's got all the support at the

1:00:38

very moment that McCarthy is kind of

1:00:40

being driven out of public life. And

1:00:42

I I did wanna mention or ask

1:00:44

about, there was the the situation

1:00:46

that Hoover kind of quashed, right,

1:00:48

where McCarthy there was going to

1:00:50

possibly be an investigation into

1:00:52

him getting someone in the

1:00:54

army drunk right and made a pass

1:00:56

a pass something like that. So Hoover

1:00:58

He also did McCarthy a solid. definitely did. So this

1:01:01

is, you know, the red scare is also

1:01:03

the period of the lavender scare,

1:01:05

which is incredibly complicated

1:01:08

for over. Right? So it becomes federal policy

1:01:10

during these years that if you are

1:01:12

gay, you can be fired from your

1:01:16

federal job And one of the

1:01:18

things that that produces is just,

1:01:20

you know, a swirl of

1:01:22

investigation and

1:01:24

accusation against all sorts of

1:01:26

people. I mean, there's this moment when that

1:01:28

swirl is around McCarthy.

1:01:30

There are some letters

1:01:32

coming in saying that McCarthy they had,

1:01:34

you know, seduced this. I think it was an army lieutenant if

1:01:37

I recall correctly. And then

1:01:39

there are a few journalists actually

1:01:41

who are willing to write about these

1:01:44

rumors about McCarthy saying that he's been, you

1:01:46

know, taking young Republican

1:01:48

GMan. Members of the young Republicans

1:01:51

kinda back to hotels in

1:01:53

Wisconsin. McCarthy was a groomer. Right.

1:01:55

Yeah. This is the story of this

1:01:57

GMan, and and Hoover helps to

1:01:59

quash that for

1:02:00

McCarthy, and it's worth noting that McCarthy very

1:02:02

quickly gets married. And I

1:02:04

think it's

1:02:05

interestingly, you know, related to wanting at least in part to

1:02:07

to quash some of those rumors. I found the

1:02:09

way that you described Hoover navigating the

1:02:12

lavender scare

1:02:14

really interesting. Obviously, we

1:02:16

can assume, well, we know that he felt

1:02:18

endangered at this time because he

1:02:20

would, you know, send FBI agents to

1:02:22

people's homes who set some rumor about

1:02:25

him and his sexuality. So at the same

1:02:27

time that he was doing the

1:02:29

bidding of this homophobic political moment KYE

1:02:31

was protecting himself and people who for

1:02:33

one reason or another he

1:02:35

felt loyal to.

1:02:38

I can't really imagine a more clear depiction of this

1:02:41

contrary conflicted self and sort

1:02:43

of work in the world than lavender

1:02:45

scare for

1:02:47

Hoover. Yeah. One of my favorite moments of

1:02:50

research was in trying

1:02:52

to just think about

1:02:54

what that must have been like

1:02:56

for him, right, where he's charged with this enforcement of

1:02:59

these federal policies. He's,

1:03:01

you know, embracing them

1:03:04

public he is sending FBI agents to squash

1:03:06

and intimidate people who

1:03:08

are suggesting anything

1:03:10

untoward about his own homosexuality.

1:03:14

But then there's this moment

1:03:16

in nineteen fifty when he and

1:03:18

Tulsa are together at a

1:03:20

farmer's market in

1:03:21

LA. Oh,

1:03:21

this is amazing. And a reporter notices

1:03:23

them, starts following them, and

1:03:26

they go into a bookstore,

1:03:28

they don't see the reporter

1:03:30

and the reporter just sort of stands there to look at what buying at the bookstore

1:03:33

and Tolleson is buying a few

1:03:35

westerns. But Hoover is

1:03:38

buying like, very deep

1:03:40

and complicated works of

1:03:43

psychoanalysis by a woman named

1:03:45

Karen Horny who was a sort

1:03:47

of famous psychoanalyst in that

1:03:50

moment and one of them is called our inner

1:03:52

conflicts and the other is

1:03:54

called self analysis. And

1:03:56

so I got those books out of the library and

1:03:58

started reading them. And, you know, they

1:04:00

were a kind of sad and interesting

1:04:04

portrait. I mean, one of the themes of our

1:04:06

inner conflict is, you know,

1:04:08

what does it do to someone

1:04:10

when their public image

1:04:12

and the self that they are presenting

1:04:14

to the world is so at odds

1:04:17

with their personal self. What

1:04:19

does that do? And her claim is

1:04:21

that it makes people rigid. It

1:04:23

might make you paranoid, it might mean that you

1:04:25

-- No. -- want to maintain

1:04:28

control over everyone around

1:04:32

you. And I don't know what Hoover made of those books. I don't

1:04:34

even know that he read them, but he

1:04:36

did buy them and they seemed

1:04:38

full of a of a

1:04:40

kind of. Complicated

1:04:42

and sad set of insights about what he

1:04:44

might actually have been

1:04:45

experiencing. And the interesting thing about the other book

1:04:47

self analysis that you point to is that this is sort

1:04:50

of Horne's effort to give people the tools solve on

1:04:52

their own, you know, without

1:04:54

going to an analyst or

1:04:58

having to be more open with others about what you're going through, which is

1:05:00

sort of makes so much sense because it's like, yeah,

1:05:02

I might have this problem, but I definitely need

1:05:04

to deal with it, you know, just by myself.

1:05:08

Well, Beverly, there's still a lot to get to. Of course,

1:05:10

go until pro the FBI's

1:05:12

surveillance of doctor King, so

1:05:14

on and so forth, But I

1:05:17

did wanna ask here since we're kind of in the in the fifties, you

1:05:19

know, kind of in the popular imagination,

1:05:21

a conservative period, the

1:05:24

Eisenhower years KYE have, of

1:05:26

course, the nineteen fifty five, the founding

1:05:28

of National Review. And since we talk a

1:05:30

lot about the right on this

1:05:32

podcast, I was

1:05:34

just wondering what did they make of Hoover? What did Hoover make of

1:05:36

them? Because I also know there was a

1:05:38

FBI file a national review you

1:05:40

looked

1:05:41

at. Right? Yeah. So a lot of

1:05:43

the Freedom of Information Act requests

1:05:46

that I,

1:05:48

myself, filed were about

1:05:50

right wing movements, conservative

1:05:52

figures, in part because we

1:05:54

know so much about the

1:05:57

FBI and its relationship. To

1:05:59

the left, hospital relationship to the left. But we actually

1:06:01

didn't know that much about

1:06:03

Hoover's relationship with

1:06:06

the right And I came

1:06:08

of age in graduate school

1:06:10

at the moment when the study of

1:06:12

conservatism and the

1:06:14

American Wright was really just

1:06:16

beginning to explode.

1:06:18

And I teach a lot about that at

1:06:20

Yale. And so I thought, well, how does a

1:06:22

figure like Hoover fit into that

1:06:24

story. Number one, he's interesting because

1:06:27

he's in the state. Right?

1:06:29

He's this incredibly powerful

1:06:32

state actor in a

1:06:34

moment that we tend to think of

1:06:36

as, you know, the age of kind of liberal

1:06:38

state building or the liberal

1:06:40

consensus or something

1:06:42

like that, but he's this powerful ideological conservative

1:06:44

exercising all of this state

1:06:46

power and that I felt

1:06:48

hadn't really

1:06:50

been represented very well in the historical literature,

1:06:52

which had mostly looked at, figures

1:06:54

like Buckley, grassroots movements, occasionally

1:06:58

political figures like gold water,

1:07:00

but not at the state

1:07:02

itself. And then his

1:07:04

position in the state gives him a kind of

1:07:06

funny relationship with the

1:07:08

conservative movement as it starts to

1:07:10

develop because on the

1:07:12

one hand he is

1:07:14

a great hero of the conservative movement, and

1:07:16

there are declarations here in the early

1:07:18

sixties whovers, the patron

1:07:20

saint of the conservative movement of the

1:07:22

far right

1:07:24

as it's emerging. But of course, that's very weird

1:07:26

because they hate government bureaucrats. Right?

1:07:28

And so Hoover is always like,

1:07:31

KYE one exception except for Jay

1:07:33

Edgar Hoover. And then Hoover

1:07:36

himself, because he's a

1:07:38

state actor, is making a

1:07:40

set of judgments about

1:07:42

who's legitimate and dependable in

1:07:44

the new conservative movement and who's

1:07:46

not. So I think it's probably

1:07:48

most useful to see him as kind of like

1:07:50

an ally of the quote

1:07:54

unquote affectable conservators. Right? This was more eyebrow

1:07:56

conservators like Buckley. He

1:07:58

liked National Review. National Review liked

1:08:00

Tim for the most part.

1:08:03

But he was a lot more suspicious of

1:08:06

groups like the John Birch Society,

1:08:08

which he thought was, you know, kind

1:08:10

of spiritorial and vigilante oriented

1:08:13

and a little bit out of control. And

1:08:15

then he ran into what actually

1:08:17

was something I would have liked

1:08:19

to write a lot more about, but it's a biography, so it

1:08:21

had to be about Uber. But this group

1:08:23

of ex FBI agents

1:08:26

who become these really

1:08:28

important figures on the far

1:08:30

right as broadcasters and lecturers and such, and he, on

1:08:33

the one hand,

1:08:36

kind of likes their politics and what they're

1:08:38

publicizing, but he doesn't want them going around saying, you know, I speak

1:08:41

for Jay

1:08:43

a grover because they're saying some pretty

1:08:45

problematic things. It's just an interesting moment where what he has

1:08:48

brought is build

1:08:50

this organization, which has

1:08:52

this amazingly untarnished imprimada for the

1:08:54

people who come out of it. So if you're

1:08:56

an FBI agent, you've been on

1:08:58

the front lines of fighting anti

1:09:02

timingism. And these guys are

1:09:04

using that reputation to sort of forward

1:09:06

their own, first of all, sort of

1:09:08

like personal famed goals, but also to really

1:09:10

get in the dirt of far right politics. And

1:09:13

that is a moment

1:09:15

where Hoover sort of has

1:09:17

to reckon with the fact that, well, I made these men and, you know, do

1:09:19

I want them to be the face

1:09:21

of of the FBI

1:09:24

and

1:09:24

politics? That's supposed

1:09:26

to be him. He's supposed to be

1:09:28

fat. Right. Exactly. And then especially during the

1:09:30

the Kennedy years, you know, Hoover, because

1:09:33

he's inside the state has to be maintaining relationships with

1:09:35

a much more liberal White House,

1:09:38

one that is obviously not

1:09:42

to fond of the John Burch Society. And in

1:09:44

that case, a White House where he's already got

1:09:46

a lot of problems and he doesn't need

1:09:48

that one

1:09:49

too. He's

1:09:49

got a lot of problems with RFK shirt sleeves.

1:09:52

Yeah. Those are amazing moments. The

1:09:54

rivalry with Robert Kennedy, which is

1:09:58

partly about power and institutional goals and

1:10:00

all of that, but a lot of which

1:10:02

is just like he just thinks both

1:10:05

Robert and John on, but Robert

1:10:07

especially, you know, is this

1:10:10

like thirty something disrespectful

1:10:12

man who keeps taking off

1:10:14

his tie and putting his feed on the

1:10:16

desk and all of these things that are just

1:10:18

sort of shocking and and abhorrent to Uber. Well, and it makes

1:10:22

sense that he you know, became so fond of Nixon and

1:10:24

Nixon of him because they both sort of

1:10:26

saw each other as sort of anti

1:10:29

Kennedy figures. And also

1:10:31

sort of like you have a line where

1:10:33

you say Nixon was famously awkward, Hoover famously aloof, the social

1:10:35

unease may have helped

1:10:38

draw them together. Two middle class nobody's making good on the

1:10:40

world stage. Our listeners will have heard

1:10:43

our long episode on Nixon

1:10:45

and Nixon Eases

1:10:48

recently, so that will resonate with Will's depiction of Nixon. But then

1:10:50

to have, you know, this sort of infatuation with Nixon and then end up

1:10:52

with the Kennedy's in the in

1:10:54

the White House instead who are sort

1:10:56

the opposite of that in every way

1:10:58

is a tough moment for

1:10:59

Hoover. Yeah. It might seem strange to say, but a

1:11:01

Hoover Nixon relationship was

1:11:03

one of my favorite

1:11:06

relationships in the book, in part

1:11:09

because they're so close for so

1:11:11

long, really beginning in the

1:11:13

late forties. Kind of around the

1:11:15

elder his case and then really becoming

1:11:17

very good friends when Nixon is vice

1:11:19

president that lasting through

1:11:22

Nixon's kind of years in the wilderness after he loses the nineteen sixty eight election then

1:11:24

obviously on into

1:11:27

the Nixon president's either

1:11:30

there, they run into some conflicts. But what

1:11:32

was fascinating is that these are, you

1:11:35

know, two of the, I

1:11:37

think, reputationally least likable most

1:11:40

awkward men in all of American politics,

1:11:42

and they liked each other much. Yeah.

1:11:44

And they both don't really comfortable

1:11:46

with each other, and there are these sort of

1:11:48

notes back and forth like when we're

1:11:51

together, we can really let

1:11:53

down our hair

1:11:55

and talk

1:11:56

freely. Just kind of finding things up. To

1:11:58

misfit toys finding each other. Well, one thing

1:12:00

to get us into the

1:12:02

sort of civil rights stuff Something that

1:12:05

I found really interesting was how

1:12:07

you contrasted Hoover's approach to the sort of enforcement of anti

1:12:11

lynching, you know, which he did try to

1:12:13

stop and investigate lynchings in the

1:12:15

Truman era. And

1:12:18

then when the civil rights movement kicks off, he doesn't

1:12:20

see it as the same

1:12:23

obligation to protect, say,

1:12:25

the freedom riders as they engage in sort of

1:12:27

civil disobedience. Could you talk about

1:12:30

kind of how Hoover sees

1:12:32

the beginnings of the civil rights movement

1:12:34

and how it sort of challenges his

1:12:36

deeply

1:12:37

ingrained, as we mentioned at the beginning of the episode,

1:12:39

sort of ideas about racial hierarchy. Yeah. So

1:12:42

there's a kind of baseline

1:12:44

racist outlook that he has come of

1:12:47

age with, like many white

1:12:49

Americans of the period

1:12:51

in Washington and elsewhere.

1:12:54

And that of course continues to

1:12:56

inform a lot of what he does.

1:12:59

But there are these interesting

1:13:01

moments. So in the nineteen forties,

1:13:03

when he both is pressured to,

1:13:05

but in many ways

1:13:07

voluntarily tries to kind of

1:13:09

bring federal investigative power, Gage federal

1:13:12

legal power to bear,

1:13:14

to stop southern lynchings. The FBI does these massive investigations.

1:13:17

I think

1:13:20

for Hoover, there

1:13:22

are two things that really are problematic to him and make him quite committed

1:13:25

to those

1:13:28

particular KYE. So

1:13:30

one is the use of violence. And

1:13:32

the second is that they

1:13:34

are often to him seen as

1:13:37

people who are thumbing their nose

1:13:39

at the federal government, federal

1:13:41

law, at federal law enforcement.

1:13:43

So in many ways, he feels

1:13:45

that the FBI's legitimate see and the broader

1:13:47

legitimacy of the federal government is at

1:13:49

stake in these southern off

1:13:51

in white supremacist

1:13:53

groups or incidents who are saying we're gonna do this and,

1:13:55

you know, the law can't be enforced.

1:13:58

So he's pretty committed in those

1:14:00

very particular

1:14:02

instances, but you know, when the kind of non violent civil

1:14:05

disobedience fades, the civil

1:14:07

rights movement really takes

1:14:09

off in the

1:14:12

early sixties, he sees that as the same

1:14:14

kind of defiance of the law and civil disobedience is

1:14:16

in many ways a claim

1:14:18

that there's there's a higher law.

1:14:21

And that therefore these particular laws don't need to be

1:14:23

obeyed and he really really didn't like that,

1:14:27

particularly what it coming from black radicals

1:14:29

or even figures like Martin Luther King. One of

1:14:32

Hoover's quotes he's probably best

1:14:34

known for is his remark that

1:14:38

doctor King was the most notorious

1:14:40

liar in the country. And that was

1:14:42

after I think King had criticized

1:14:44

the FBI's failure to protect civil

1:14:46

rights workers. And some of our listeners will know the FBI's

1:14:49

role in trying to get

1:14:51

doctor King to

1:14:54

kill himself bugging, phones, hotel room

1:14:56

recordings, so on and so forth.

1:14:58

But what was the kind of

1:15:01

hoover king relationship. How much was Hoover directly responsible,

1:15:03

I guess, for how doctor King was treated? Well,

1:15:06

I think he was

1:15:09

quite responsible. And that moment that you mentioned, which was a public

1:15:11

statement by Hoover in late nineteen

1:15:13

sixty four. So right after

1:15:16

the nineteen before

1:15:19

presidential election in a press conference.

1:15:21

He calls King the most notorious

1:15:24

liar in

1:15:27

America and that becomes their moment of greatest public confrontation.

1:15:30

But that happened after

1:15:33

several years in which the FBI

1:15:35

had been investigating King, and that investigation had

1:15:38

gone through a series of

1:15:40

phases each of

1:15:42

which was kind of escalating by that

1:15:44

point, so it started out

1:15:46

investigating a couple of communist party

1:15:49

affiliated advisers of kings. It seems very clear that in fact, you know,

1:15:52

these couple

1:15:56

of figures that they were interested

1:15:58

in were in fact part of the Communist Party's secret and open

1:16:01

apparatus during the

1:16:04

late fifties in particular, but even

1:16:06

after they they were working with King. So that's sort of interesting. But that's a way in.

1:16:09

That then escalates

1:16:12

to become a

1:16:14

series of wire taps on other aids of kings then on

1:16:19

king himself partly the

1:16:22

FBI is getting worried about civil disobedience. Partly,

1:16:24

Hoover's really mad that King

1:16:27

has started criticizing the

1:16:29

FBI. And then that itself

1:16:31

escalates by nineteen sixty four into

1:16:34

these bugs in King's

1:16:36

hotel rooms as well as

1:16:38

wire taps on his office and

1:16:40

home in which

1:16:42

the FBI is finding out all

1:16:44

sorts of information about his extramarital

1:16:46

sex life, which then it begins.

1:16:48

Pedaling around and that Hoover is very interested in.

1:16:50

So all of that has happened, and then you get this moment of public confrontation, secret

1:16:56

side to it, which is that this

1:16:58

is the moment the FBI sends some

1:17:00

of these tape recordings as well

1:17:03

as a kind of anonymous threatening

1:17:06

note to King that becomes known this this kind of urging to commit don't

1:17:11

say that explicitly. So

1:17:14

that's kind of the KYE height of

1:17:16

the confrontation. But the really interesting thing to

1:17:18

me about the aftermath of that confrontation is

1:17:21

today, we think king is the

1:17:23

hero, hoover is the villain. Obviously, I think that's true. But

1:17:27

when you look public opinion polls

1:17:29

in nineteen sixty four or sixty five, many more people are are

1:17:32

siding with Hoover in that

1:17:34

confrontation than are siding with

1:17:36

King. Something

1:17:38

that struck me is that when

1:17:41

king is killed, there's a moment

1:17:43

where Hoover fears that he'll be sort

1:17:45

of held responsible for it. If I can

1:17:47

put it that way. And then what is it a year

1:17:49

later? Fred Hampton is killed, not by

1:17:51

FBI agents, but by police, but

1:17:53

they were involved in investigating the

1:17:56

Gage and involved in that

1:17:58

plot. So could you talk a little bit about those two moments? Yeah, they happen,

1:18:01

as you

1:18:04

say, very close together. And it's true that

1:18:06

Hoover's very concerned because of all of this history of public

1:18:08

animosity with king, that

1:18:11

when king is killed, KYE, that

1:18:14

there are going to be suggestions that maybe the FBI was involved, and there

1:18:17

have been

1:18:20

since King's up a whole raft

1:18:22

of kind of conspiracy the But two, that

1:18:27

people were gonna say the FBI wasn't be able to conduct

1:18:29

an effective investigation because of

1:18:32

its racism, because

1:18:34

of its bias against king because

1:18:37

of his whole history. And so in a funny

1:18:39

way, I think that actually makes him and

1:18:42

the bureau more broadly even

1:18:44

more committed to just pulling out all the

1:18:46

stops. And it is a massive and really

1:18:51

quite difficult investigation and I

1:18:53

think that they are very very concerned about their own legitimacy in

1:18:55

that moment. But they are, of course, at

1:18:59

the same time, still engaged

1:19:01

in not only surveillance and public animosity

1:19:04

toward civil rights activists, and

1:19:06

in particular, Black Power and Black

1:19:09

KYE activists

1:19:11

by this period. So it doesn't

1:19:13

actually make Hoover pullback from any

1:19:15

of that, and a lot of

1:19:17

those are not just surveillance or criticism.

1:19:19

Right? They are active disruption and

1:19:21

manipulation. And then in the case

1:19:23

of Fred

1:19:24

Hampton, ACTIVE INFORMATION

1:19:26

SHARING WITH THE POLICE WHO THEN GO IN AND MURDER HAMPTON IN THIS RADE. JUST

1:19:32

ANOTHER MOMENT where there's a contradiction

1:19:34

with Hoover that is not resolved and perhaps is not resolvable. He keeps doing

1:19:36

that.

1:19:37

Yeah. Well, of course,

1:19:39

he's talking about hoover's contradictory nature

1:19:42

or or the tensions in his life and in person. I think one of the most interesting

1:19:44

narrative features of

1:19:47

the biography is after

1:19:50

calling doctor King the most notorious liar

1:19:52

in the country. After everything we've just

1:19:54

said, at the same time, is the

1:19:57

infiltration of the KKK and white supremacist groups in the

1:19:59

south. Yeah, co and telpro, of course, we all think about as being aimed

1:20:01

at the left and a lot of

1:20:03

it was. I mean, almost

1:20:07

almost all of it, but there was this program called

1:20:09

CoIntelpro white hate that

1:20:11

was aimed at white

1:20:13

supremacist organizations, the clan,

1:20:16

neo Nazi seize a whole

1:20:18

host of of organizations. And it starts in nineteen sixty four. I

1:20:21

think exactly

1:20:24

the moment that Hoover is doing

1:20:26

almost the same things to Martin Luther King and they really they're infiltrating

1:20:31

the plan. They're planting false press stories about the plan. They're trying to

1:20:33

sue, you know, division and paranoia and the plan.

1:20:35

I GMan, all

1:20:38

of these things. That they're famously doing to the civil

1:20:40

rights movement, the anti war movement. They,

1:20:42

in fact, are also doing to pretty

1:20:45

good effect with the clan and because some

1:20:47

of the the memos are kind of funny about that because they're

1:20:49

like, well, some of the techniques that we

1:20:51

use say against the communist party

1:20:53

really aren't gonna apply here because

1:20:56

you can't write anything very

1:20:58

long because the klansman won't KYE communist, you write

1:21:01

some GMan at

1:21:04

fake manifesto. They're gonna read it. They're gonna debate

1:21:06

it. They're gonna get way too into it. But the Klansman aren't gonna

1:21:08

read anything. And so you

1:21:10

gotta have some different techniques Yeah.

1:21:13

I enjoyed the detail of, you know, if writing a letter kind

1:21:15

of under the name of a supposed klansman to

1:21:18

include some spelling mistakes.

1:21:21

Short sentences, not very long letters, that kind of

1:21:23

thing. Exactly. Well, Beverly, we should probably start turning toward the

1:21:25

end of this conversation. We

1:21:27

could obviously keep going. But

1:21:30

one of the questions I wanted to ask toward

1:21:32

the end here was, you know,

1:21:34

he died in office in nineteen

1:21:37

seventy two. He hung on

1:21:39

till he literally ended. If you'd retired earlier,

1:21:41

would we think of Hoover differently or or kind of, would all this

1:21:43

stuff have eventually come out anyway?

1:21:48

Well, that's Part of where the book

1:21:50

starts is with that question, right, and with this moment in nineteen fifty nine

1:21:52

when he's a hero

1:21:55

of the Eisenhower Administration He

1:21:58

is kind of the hero of

1:22:00

the anti communist cause. He's

1:22:02

incredibly popular, and this movie,

1:22:04

the FBI story comes out

1:22:07

starring all sorts of big Hollywood figures. And

1:22:09

I think if he had retired

1:22:11

in that moment, we would

1:22:14

remember him really, really differently.

1:22:16

You know, there would be all sorts of

1:22:18

grounds to criticize what he had done during the Red scare, but the fact is

1:22:22

there wasn't a lot of public opposition to him

1:22:24

until the period that followed in

1:22:26

which a couple of things happened.

1:22:28

One, he just starts getting

1:22:30

old and a little less capable,

1:22:33

I think, certainly over the course of the sixties. And as a result of being

1:22:35

old, he's seen as being

1:22:38

kind of out of

1:22:40

touch his

1:22:42

pronouncements about, you know, the rabble rousing

1:22:44

college students and how he doesn't like them very popular

1:22:46

with conservatives, not so popular with the new generation.

1:22:51

And then it's also the period which the FBI commits many of

1:22:54

the most kind of famous abuses

1:22:59

and excesses some known Hoover's lifetime. A lot come

1:23:01

out right after his death, and it's

1:23:03

really the period that kills his

1:23:05

reputation. I think it's what we

1:23:08

remember best. It's

1:23:10

what the church committee really he is though

1:23:12

there's lots to

1:23:15

criticize earlier that

1:23:18

gave him his kind of reputation

1:23:20

as as a great villain. Well, given

1:23:22

sort of what we were discussing about

1:23:24

the way that you sort of treat

1:23:27

Hoover as a lens to think about the sort of revolution in this

1:23:29

country, the sort

1:23:31

of rise of a

1:23:34

federal power of bureaucracies of sort of technological management as well as

1:23:37

the exertion

1:23:40

of power from above

1:23:42

and into people's lives during the new deal. How do you see the of that

1:23:47

American governance takes

1:23:50

toward the end of his life as representing

1:23:52

that, you know, because it

1:23:53

seems like Hoover is sort of riding

1:23:55

the wave of the rise of federal

1:23:57

legitimacy for the first half of his

1:23:59

life. of life as the federal

1:24:01

government is seen as less

1:24:04

legitimate by so many different

1:24:06

factions for so many different reasons.

1:24:09

He sort of is subject to

1:24:11

the same dwindling sense of legitimacy

1:24:13

that that the rest of the

1:24:15

government is experiencing. Yeah, I

1:24:17

think that's a great way to characterize it. I think, you know,

1:24:19

as kind of challenges to

1:24:23

federal power, skepticism of institutions, skepticism

1:24:26

of the cold war security state.

1:24:28

Right? As all

1:24:31

of those things, begin to flourish in the

1:24:33

1960s. A lot of them for very good reason get aimed at the

1:24:36

FBI and

1:24:39

at Hoover himself I mean, there's a

1:24:42

funny moment after he dies when Nixon who was such

1:24:44

a good friend of

1:24:46

his is going through Watergate

1:24:49

and is talking on the Nixon tapes and sort of

1:24:51

suggests that if Hoover hadn't died, when he died,

1:24:53

he might have been able

1:24:56

to help continue.

1:24:58

Oh, that's right. To the to

1:25:00

the degree that, like, Watergate and then the church

1:25:03

committee. Right? Those are the moments that the

1:25:05

wheels really come off of of of faith

1:25:07

in government, faith in institutions, faith in political

1:25:09

actors. And so Nixon and

1:25:11

his advisers sort of wonder if Hoover

1:25:13

had been around, if he would have been

1:25:15

able to act maybe not

1:25:17

hold it altogether, but do a little better than than everybody else was doing. That's interesting

1:25:19

to think about. But

1:25:23

in many ways, you know,

1:25:25

what gets exposed then in the seventies after his death means that this

1:25:28

institution that

1:25:32

he did located his life to, to

1:25:34

its legitimacy, etcetera, it's actually what he did during

1:25:36

that period that

1:25:39

once it's exposed, really calls that legitimacy into

1:25:41

question for decades to come. I think, you know, in the end,

1:25:43

Hoover kind of damaged the

1:25:45

institution that he cared so

1:25:48

much about. Wow.

1:25:50

Well, that might be a good place Beverly biography,

1:25:52

G GMan, Jed Gage, the

1:25:54

making of the American Century. Published

1:25:59

last month by Viking. Beverly, what an incredible book. Thank you for

1:26:02

sharing the fruits of your labor with us.

1:26:04

Well,

1:26:05

thank you for reading all fifty eight chapters.

1:26:08

It was really a pleasure to read for

1:26:10

listeners whatever thing you felt we didn't

1:26:14

cover in enough detail. Promise you. It's covered in a great amount of detail

1:26:16

in Beverly's book. Thanks so much, Beverly.

1:26:18

Yeah. Thanks. This was really fun.

1:26:21

Alright. See you next time listeners.