February 14, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Beverly Gage, author of the definitive biography of J. Edgar Hoover, G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and The Making of the American Century, tells the story of the most important lawman of the 20th century—and how he created an entire government agency in his own image.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story of the most important lawman of the twentieth century,
the first director of the FBI, Jay Edgar Hoover. Although
he himself never arrested anybody, his influence over his bureaucracy
took what would become the FBI from a corrupt and
nearly powerless body to the investigative behemoth that it is today.
(00:35):
Here to tell his story is Beverly Gage, author of
g Man j ed Go Hoover and the Making of
the American Century.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Take it away, Beverly.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Well. I found him really interesting as a person, in
part because I thought that he had become such a
kind of caricature in our own time, this sort of
one dimensional villain, And when I saw him pop up
in history, he was a little more complicated than that.
He was actually really popular for most of his life,
(01:11):
And then I also thought he was just a great
vehicle for talking about some of the big themes of
the twentieth century. He became FBI director in nineteen twenty four,
and he'd never actually retired. He just died on the
job without ever being forced out of office, and that
meant that he was there under eight different presidents. Four
(01:33):
were Democrats and four were Republicans, which I think is
a lot harder to do now and almost impossible for
people to imagine in our own kind of partisan world.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
So what that.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Really meant is that he got the job under Calvin Coolidge.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Back did back from everyone at prod of reigning.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
He then stayed on through Herbert Hoover and the dawn
of the Great Depression.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
It is a.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Contact between two lad I'm gone. He stuck around for
Franklin Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt's three plus terms in office,
so the New Deal of the Second World War.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
He stayed around under Harry Truman. So as we started
getting into the.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Cold War, McCarthyism, the fight against communism, the world will.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Note that the first atomic bomb was dropped off Hiroshima.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
He was there for both Eisenhower terms. He was there
under John Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
We choose to go to the Moon and miss Decay
and do the other thing, not because they are easy,
but because they are on.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
He was there under Lyndon Johnson, and finally he was
there under Richard Nixon and died at the very end
of Nixon's first term in office, So he was there
for forty eight years, this huge swath of time. He
shaped every movement, from the labor movement to the civil
(02:59):
rights who went to the conservative movement. He had his
fingers in pretty much everything. I think the kind of
popular Hollywood depiction is that he had the goods on
everyone and he kind of coerced everyone into keeping him
in office by threatening to reveal their secrets. And there
is some truth to that, particularly toward the end of
(03:19):
his life. But I think he was also really, really
useful to most of these presidents. He did what they wanted.
For the most part. They thought that he was politically
advantageous to them, and he kind of served their agendas,
and so it's another reason they didn't fire him. He
(03:45):
was born in eighteen ninety five in Washington, and the
Goover always had very idyllic descriptions of his own childhood.
Right it was the time of innocence, when everyone was good,
it got along, and you know, made the moral code,
et cetera, et cetera, the way that many people later
mythologized their own childhoods. But when you really look at
(04:07):
the historical record, you can see a much much more
complicated story. He came from a Washington family, a family
that had worked in and around the government for a
long time, which was actually pretty unusual in the late
nineteenth century, but it was a family that nonetheless had
(04:27):
been pretty troubled. His grandfather committed suicide in a very
dramatic and public way. He basically tied himself to a
stake in the Anacostia River and drowned himself while leaving
behind a note denouncing many of the people in his life.
And that incident was precipitated by a banking crisis of
(04:50):
the era that brought down the German American bank that
his family had been very invested in. You know, all
of your friends and in this case, in the German
communities put their money in the bank. There was no
federal deposit insurance, so if there was a run on
your bank, you often just lost all of your money,
(05:10):
and in this case, it meant that the leadership of
the bank had lost much of the.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Money of their own community.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
And then there was the big shadow of his own father,
who really suffered from pretty severe depression. He died when
Hoover was just in his twenties, and the death certificate
says He died of melancholia, which was sort of the
term of the time for depression, and of inanition, which
basically means that he just he kind of just stopped functioning,
(05:42):
stopped eating, just sort of lost the desire to live.
But Hoover's mother was incredibly important to him, not least
because you know, his father was absent in so many ways.
Hoover was also kind of the pet of the family.
He had an older brother and an older sister, but
they were fifteen and sixteen.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Years older than he was.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
He had had a sister who was just a couple
of years older, but she had died as a toddler.
And he was kind of this amazing late in life child.
He was born on New Year's Day, you know, this
kind of new gift to the family. And he was
very close to his mother his whole life, and in fact,
(06:27):
he lived with her in his childhood home until the
day she died, long after he had become a national celebrity.
She was an interesting person in her own right. She
came from a kind of family of Swiss diplomats who
had come to Washington in the eighteen fifties, and you know,
I think she really saw her role as kind of
(06:50):
holding everything together, providing Hoover's moral education, providing some stability
and love in what were often pretty difficult circumstances. But
he was deeply loyal to her, So that material was
really interesting for Hoover's psychology.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And then I think Washington itself.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Is really important for thinking about his worldview.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
First of all, the fact.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
That he comes of age in the federal city. He's
born on Capitol Hill, he never lives anywhere else besides Washington.
He comes of age at a time when the government
was beginning to grow by leaps and bounds.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
And then he comes of age in a city.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
That is actively segregating on racial lines. You know, we
tend to think of segregation as being this kind of
static thing and you put up signs and people use
different water fountains, but in fact, it was a really,
very very aggressive process of separating people, building segregated institutions.
And that was a big piece of his childhood too,
(07:53):
And I think is a lot of where he got
his racial views. Is a really interesting combination of different
political strains that we don't see operating together all that often.
On the one hand, he is from his very early
life kind of imbued with this progressive, scientific career, federal
(08:19):
service tradition that we would tend to associate, I think
with liberals or progressives. And then on the other hand,
on lots of issues, particularly cultural issues, race, religion, law
and order, anti communism, he's a very devout conservative, and
he sort of puts those two traditions together to build
(08:40):
the FBI and build this bureaucracy. But sometimes those things
are just in conflict, and I think you can see
that in cases like his sort of complicated history around
race and civil rights enforcement. So there's no question that
Hoover has had pretty deeply racist.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Views in many ways.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
But he did also even as he was investigating the
civil rights who have met really going after figures like
Martin Luther King, he also was going after the Clan,
white supremacist groups, etc. And I think in those latter
cases it was often his belief in.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Law enforcement and the need to enforce.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Federal laws, whether you liked them or not, that really
led him to go after groups like the Clan, particularly
when they were groups who were employing violence.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And you're listening to author Beverly Gage tell the story
of j Edgar Hoover, a man replete the paradoxes and
contradictions like so many of us. When we come back
more of the story of j Edgar Hoover here on
our American Stories, and we continue with our American stories
(10:12):
and the story of the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover, the most influential man in law enforcement
during the twentieth century and in our nation's history. Here
telling the story is author Beverly Gage, and she's written
g Man, j Edgar Hoover and the Making of the
American Century. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and
(10:35):
pick up this book. Let's get back to the story.
Here again is Beverly Gage.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
His first job in the federal government was not at
the Justice Department, but was in fact at the Library
of Congress. Sorry, it's not entirely clear how he got
the job, but he certainly had plenty of kind of
mid level connections in Washington. You know, some of his
relatives belonged to the same club as the head of
(11:03):
the Library of Congress. But a lot of kids from
his high school did what he did, which was to
stay in Washington, go to school at a place like
gw which was at that point actually really mostly a
night school for future federal servants. So you worked for
the government by day in some sort of clerk's position,
(11:24):
and you went to GW at night. And that's basically
what Hoover did. I think what's really interesting about that
as his first job is that these are the years
when the Library of Congress classification system, which was sort
of the rival to the Dewey decimal system, was coming
into being, just as a way to organize information retrieve
(11:44):
library books. So he's learning all about that at the
Library of Congress and it was actually pretty cutting edge
stuff for its time, was hugely useful to him when
he went into the Justice Department and the bureau. You know,
we tend to think about Hoover and law enforcement, but
he was not a policeman. He actually didn't do investigations.
(12:07):
There's really no evidence that he himself ever investigated or
solved any sort of crime. He never really made arrests,
except for a few kind of showy stagy arrests when
people pointed this out in the nineteen thirties. He and
his skill set was the bureaucracy and the file system,
and he was really good at it. So from his
(12:28):
very early years, right out of college, he went straight
into the Justice Department and never left. But it was
clear that a lot of his talents very early on
were in keeping massive numbers of records. His first job
was in helping out with German internment and registration during
the First World War, and it turned out he was
(12:49):
so good at that that he got a promotion at
the age.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Of twenty four to lead a.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
New part of the Bureau that was called the Radical Division,
which was basically the federal goal government's first attempt.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
To keep tabs and to keep.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Files on left wing radicals in the United States. Almost
all law enforcement in this country then as well as now,
but especially then was really done at the local and
the state level. The federal authorities basically didn't have a
lot of jurisdiction to do very much, and so until
nineteen oh eight, the Justice Department had no investigative Division,
(13:28):
but they were starting to get some new duties, particularly
antitrust investigations, where they were tired of going to the
Treasury Department and basically begging for investigators from the Secret Service,
so they decided they needed or wanted their own investigators,
and that's really how the Bureau of Investigation was born.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
But even at that they didn't have all that much
to do during those early years, but it was.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
A real grab bag and they were not a super
professional organization.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
There were a lot of civi liberties abuses as well
as corruption.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
There were lots of accusations that they, particularly during the war,
used a lot of physical violence when they were trying to, say,
arrest someone who was due for deportation. As the early
years of Prohibition, there was a lot of bribery going on.
There was a lot of backroom dealing. There were poker games.
(14:25):
There were a lot of people who ended up deputized
by the Bureau of Investigation who didn't really have any qualifications.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
The Attorney General.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Was brought up on impeachment charges more than once for
everything from outrageous labor injunctions to spying on senators. Their
files were disorganized, tried sort of very basic things.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
So Hoover was.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Actually there for most of that, but he was seen
as the man who had kind of kept himself apart,
sort of the squeaky queen youngster who was close to
it all but kept himself enough apart from it that
he was able to make the leap into something else.
He became head of the FBI when he was just
(15:15):
twenty nine years old. Of course, it was a much
smaller organization, but even at that it was a pretty
extraordinary thing because, of course most of the people working
there were older than he was.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
At least many of them.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
So the man who really gave him the job was
the Attorney General in nineteen twenty four, who was a
pretty famous law professor named Harlan Stone who went on
then to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I
think when he first looked to Hoover was just looking
kind of for a placeholder. Stone ended up firing Hoover's boss,
(15:52):
who was a famous kind of swashbuckling private detective named
William Burns, and he kind of just needed someone to
hold the bureaucracy together while he went around looking for
who the real director ought to be. But Hoover was
pretty determined in that year to show Stone that he
was the right choice for that. So when he was
(16:13):
appointed acting director, he just engaged in this kind of
blurry of energy and of trying to appeal to Stone
and appease Stone and impress Stone. A lot of that
entailed firing some of the you know, kind of dead
weight at the bureau, beefing up professional standards, make the FBI,
(16:35):
which was still just called the Bureau of Investigation, sort
of into an elite model for the rest of law enforcement.
So they didn't have, you know, very broad law enforcement jurisdiction.
But what Hoover thought they could do was number one,
kind of set high standards and number two sort of
(16:57):
perform certain kinds of scientific and professional services to police
departments throughout the country that would be really useful. So
on the kind of personnel front, he hired only people
with college educations, or mostly people with college educations. He
liked lawyers, he liked accountants. He wanted his core to
(17:19):
be these sort of professional men, and in order to
do that, he waged battles again and again to keep
his agents out of civil service rules so that he
could be the one who personally picked them, hired them,
fired them, rather than having to go to some pool
of qualified applicants. It's the reason when you think of
(17:43):
an FBI agent, right, even today, I think we have
a very specific vision of who that person is, right,
Paul white guy in the suit and the shiny shoes.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
And the hat.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
People who were a lot like him and who shared
his values were really thought that appearances mattered. He had
very strict standards for everything, from you know, how high
the sheets at the Bureau of Investigation on the windows
ought to be so that people could look in and see,
(18:14):
you know, precision at work, to whether you could wear
goal washes and like eat in the office.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
I mean, everything had a rule. Under Hoover.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
He was very concerned about presentation as well as practice.
And then he found a bunch of different areas which
are still things that the FBI does. So that included
the Fingerprint Division, in which the FBI became a repository
for criminal fingerprints. They began collecting the first national crime statistics.
He set up the famous FBI Lab, which was full
(18:46):
of you know, chemists and other scientists using the latest technology.
And he set up a training academy not only for
his own agents, but to bring in policemen from around
the country to be trained in the latest of professional techniques.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
And that was his vision and it was very important
to the Bureau then.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I think it remained important throughout his life, and I
think in some ways is really still part of the
DNA of the FBI, and.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
You're listening to author Beverly Gage tell one heck of
a story, a complicated story, a powerful story of j
Edgar Hoover. When we come back, more of the story
of j Edgar Hoover here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
we continue with our American stories and the final portion
of our story on the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover. When we last left off, Beverly Gage
was telling us about how Hoover created the FBI in
his image. Now let's get into some of the greatest cases.
Here again is author Beverly age Well.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
John Dillinger was a kind of small time to big
time bank robber. Basically, he was, in the early nineteen thirties,
part of a kind of generation of criminal operators often
operating in the Midwest, often using various new technologies like
fast getaway cars and high powered guns that had just
(20:27):
come in to create and carry out pretty dramatic acts
of robbery, murder, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
John Dillinger in particular was.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Very famous because he would rob banks and then he
would manage to evade the police. Most famously, you know
when the police in Indiana finally managed to lock him
up in nineteen thirty four. He ended up whittling a
fake gun in his cell, tricking all of the guards
(20:57):
into thinking that he had a gun, and escaping from jail,
once again, having already been someone in the headlines saying
no jail.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Could hold me.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
So by the time he and Hoover began to sort
of become adversaries, Dillinger was already very famous, and he
was more famous than Hoover.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
But in the nineteen thirties, the.
Speaker 5 (21:25):
FBI did begin to get jurisdiction over bank robbery and
kidnapping in particular as federal crimes, and that sort of
led them on the Dillinger manhunt.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
It became one of these really legendary stories. But the
truth is the Bureau really didn't know what they were
doing when they first started out, And one of the
biggest embarrassments of that period for Hoover was a moment
when they thought that they had figured out where John
Dillinger was sort of hiding out with his gang out
(22:00):
in the woods in Wisconsin at a lodge called Little Bohemia.
These Bureau agents, who are pretty new to this kind
of criminal law enforcement, many of them have never shot
a gun before. They sneak up to this lodge, don't
really know what they're doing. There are dogs there. The
dogs bark warned the Dillinger Gang. The Dillinger Gang escapes,
(22:21):
Some civilians come pouring out of the lodge and have
Bureau agents shoot the civilians. Members of the gang ultimately
shoot a few Bureau agents and it's a real disaster
for Hoover and he's under a lot of pressure from
the Roosevelt administration. Coover is paying attention to this from Washington.
He is trying to work a straight at all. He's
(22:42):
putting a lot of pressure on his agents to do this.
So it didn't start out very well. But in the
final equation, after a lot of man hunting and a
lot of headlines and a lot of pressure, they do
manage to track down John Dillinger, largely through an informant
who turned to them and gave them information someone that
(23:04):
Dillinger was staying with in Chicago, and they managed to
kind of entrap him as he's going to see a
movie and they have a very bloody shootout and the
FBI finally guns down John Dillinger, you know, in cold
blood in the light of day there in the streets
of Chicago, and it becomes one of the great FBI legends.
(23:27):
He is incredibly adept at responding to crisis and kind
of rising to the moment when the war comes along,
and both Roosevelt and the British intelligence authorities come to
Hoover and they say, you know, the moment has come.
We need a domestic intelligence agency. You need to become
(23:47):
a counter espionage agency. And they really don't have much
skill in it. Franklin Roosevelt even tells Hoover to go
ahead and set up a special spy service to cover
latinumyera Erica sort of the whole Western hemisphere, and you know,
Hoover says, okay, we will go ahead and do that.
Really has no agents who speak Spanish, they have no
(24:10):
idea what they're doing, but he kind of is able
to turn on a dime, very diligently sets about learning
how to think about espionage, and they improve really dramatically.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Really quickly.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
There's usually a little bit of a learning curve to
really come through. And you see that again and again
that as the challenges and the politics of the moment shift,
he has enough control over his bureaucracy that he's able
to make the institution turn pretty quickly too.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Ladies and gentlemen, I have some very sad news for
all of you and people who love peace all over
the world. Martin Luther King was shot and was killed
tonight in Memphistops.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You know, the FBI had its successes and failures, as
any institution does, but the investigation into the assassination of
Martin Luther King was the largest investigation of Hoover's career.
It was, of course, one that the FBI was under
a lot of pressure and suspicion for because Hoover had
(25:17):
been so openly critical of King, so.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Disdainful of King.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
The FBI's campaign to undermine and discredit and disrupt the
life of Martin Luther King is one of the most
outrageous things that Hoover's FBI ever did, and it really
was an escalating series of efforts that went from what
started in the late fifties and early sixties as an
(25:45):
investigation of a couple of advisors and colleagues who had
been in the orbit of the Communist Party and were
now close to King. So starting in this national security
type investigation that then it extended into placing wiretaps on
King's home, beginning to put bugs in his hotel rooms
(26:08):
and recording his sex life, to then engaging in really
active intimidation and disruption operations, trying to spread that information
around in Washington in the press, and even going so
far as to write up a fake threatening letter, anonymous
letter to King, sending along some of the reels of
(26:31):
tape from those hotel room recordings, trying to get him
as King interpreted to kill himself as others have said,
to drop out of public life, but engaged in a
whole array of really outrageous, sometimes illegal, dirty tricks aimed
at King, who of course was doing nothing illegal and
(26:53):
in fact, was engaged in a campaign of racial justice
that the FBI was deeply opposed to. What that meant
in April of nineteen sixty eight, when King was assassinated
was that many people blamed the FBI for helping to
(27:14):
create an environment in which that assassination was more likely.
Some people suspected the FBI even then of being involved,
and for Hoover, it really meant that the FBI was
then under enormous pressure to show that it could solve this.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Assassination, even though it had shown such animosity to King himself,
and so.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
That became an incredibly large, very difficult investigation to figure
out what had happened. So Hoover really set out, you know,
I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think there
was something like two thousand agents working on the King
assassination at its peak.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
It really was a matter.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Of tracing the little bits of evidence that were available,
the gun that had been left behind, you know, engaging
in sort of large scale forensic investigations, and then ultimately
trying to get on the trail of this man who
had changed his name many many times and was pretty
(28:24):
adept at hiding from the authorities. There are two big
moments in that investigation which really proved to be big breaks.
One was the suspicion, based on what they were learning
of Ray's movements, that he might be a fugitive from justice.
He might be someone who had broken out of prison
at some point therefore had been changing names, and so
(28:47):
that sent them into being able to look to those
records of prison escapees, and that was a big breakthrough.
And then the other was deducing that he might have
been fleeing the country, maybe through Canada, and so they
actually literally sat down with the cooperation of the Canadian
authorities and began to go through every single sort of
(29:10):
passport material that they could find that seemed like it
might be related to Ray, just you know, a kind.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Of paperwork effort of a tremendous scale. That's how they.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Finally tracked down Ray in England. And then the big
challenge was getting him back to the United States without
him meeting the fate that Oswald had met because of
Oswald had, of course himself been assassinated while in police custody,
and be Hoover was very, very worried that that was
going to happen in this case as well. Now there
(29:41):
are lots of people who are still critical of that investigation,
sometimes for good reason. But it was a pretty extraordinary
feat of detective work in its day, and a.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our
own Monte Montgomery. And what a story Beverly Gauge told.
She's the author of g Man, j Edgar Hoover and
the Making of the American Century. Pick it up wherever
you buy your books. The Good and the Bad, The
Story of J. Edgar Hoover. Here on our American stories.
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story of the most important lawman of the twentieth century,
the first director of the FBI, Jay Edgar Hoover. Although
he himself never arrested anybody, his influence over his bureaucracy
took what would become the FBI from a corrupt and
nearly powerless body to the investigative behemoth that it is today.
(00:35):
Here to tell his story is Beverly Gage, author of
g Man j ed Go Hoover and the Making of
the American Century.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Take it away, Beverly.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Well. I found him really interesting as a person, in
part because I thought that he had become such a
kind of caricature in our own time, this sort of
one dimensional villain, And when I saw him pop up
in history, he was a little more complicated than that.
He was actually really popular for most of his life,
(01:11):
And then I also thought he was just a great
vehicle for talking about some of the big themes of
the twentieth century. He became FBI director in nineteen twenty four,
and he'd never actually retired. He just died on the
job without ever being forced out of office, and that
meant that he was there under eight different presidents. Four
(01:33):
were Democrats and four were Republicans, which I think is
a lot harder to do now and almost impossible for
people to imagine in our own kind of partisan world.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
So what that.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Really meant is that he got the job under Calvin Coolidge.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Back did back from everyone at prod of reigning.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
He then stayed on through Herbert Hoover and the dawn
of the Great Depression.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
It is a.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Contact between two lad I'm gone. He stuck around for
Franklin Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt's three plus terms in office,
so the New Deal of the Second World War.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
He stayed around under Harry Truman. So as we started
getting into the.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Cold War, McCarthyism, the fight against communism, the world will.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Note that the first atomic bomb was dropped off Hiroshima.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
He was there for both Eisenhower terms. He was there
under John Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
We choose to go to the Moon and miss Decay
and do the other thing, not because they are easy,
but because they are on.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
He was there under Lyndon Johnson, and finally he was
there under Richard Nixon and died at the very end
of Nixon's first term in office, So he was there
for forty eight years, this huge swath of time. He
shaped every movement, from the labor movement to the civil
(02:59):
rights who went to the conservative movement. He had his
fingers in pretty much everything. I think the kind of
popular Hollywood depiction is that he had the goods on
everyone and he kind of coerced everyone into keeping him
in office by threatening to reveal their secrets. And there
is some truth to that, particularly toward the end of
(03:19):
his life. But I think he was also really, really
useful to most of these presidents. He did what they wanted.
For the most part. They thought that he was politically
advantageous to them, and he kind of served their agendas,
and so it's another reason they didn't fire him. He
(03:45):
was born in eighteen ninety five in Washington, and the
Goover always had very idyllic descriptions of his own childhood.
Right it was the time of innocence, when everyone was good,
it got along, and you know, made the moral code,
et cetera, et cetera, the way that many people later
mythologized their own childhoods. But when you really look at
(04:07):
the historical record, you can see a much much more
complicated story. He came from a Washington family, a family
that had worked in and around the government for a
long time, which was actually pretty unusual in the late
nineteenth century, but it was a family that nonetheless had
(04:27):
been pretty troubled. His grandfather committed suicide in a very
dramatic and public way. He basically tied himself to a
stake in the Anacostia River and drowned himself while leaving
behind a note denouncing many of the people in his life.
And that incident was precipitated by a banking crisis of
(04:50):
the era that brought down the German American bank that
his family had been very invested in. You know, all
of your friends and in this case, in the German
communities put their money in the bank. There was no
federal deposit insurance, so if there was a run on
your bank, you often just lost all of your money,
(05:10):
and in this case, it meant that the leadership of
the bank had lost much of the.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Money of their own community.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
And then there was the big shadow of his own father,
who really suffered from pretty severe depression. He died when
Hoover was just in his twenties, and the death certificate
says He died of melancholia, which was sort of the
term of the time for depression, and of inanition, which
basically means that he just he kind of just stopped functioning,
(05:42):
stopped eating, just sort of lost the desire to live.
But Hoover's mother was incredibly important to him, not least
because you know, his father was absent in so many ways.
Hoover was also kind of the pet of the family.
He had an older brother and an older sister, but
they were fifteen and sixteen.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Years older than he was.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
He had had a sister who was just a couple
of years older, but she had died as a toddler.
And he was kind of this amazing late in life child.
He was born on New Year's Day, you know, this
kind of new gift to the family. And he was
very close to his mother his whole life, and in fact,
(06:27):
he lived with her in his childhood home until the
day she died, long after he had become a national celebrity.
She was an interesting person in her own right. She
came from a kind of family of Swiss diplomats who
had come to Washington in the eighteen fifties, and you know,
I think she really saw her role as kind of
(06:50):
holding everything together, providing Hoover's moral education, providing some stability
and love in what were often pretty difficult circumstances. But
he was deeply loyal to her, So that material was
really interesting for Hoover's psychology.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And then I think Washington itself.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Is really important for thinking about his worldview.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
First of all, the fact.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
That he comes of age in the federal city. He's
born on Capitol Hill, he never lives anywhere else besides Washington.
He comes of age at a time when the government
was beginning to grow by leaps and bounds.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
And then he comes of age in a city.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
That is actively segregating on racial lines. You know, we
tend to think of segregation as being this kind of
static thing and you put up signs and people use
different water fountains, but in fact, it was a really,
very very aggressive process of separating people, building segregated institutions.
And that was a big piece of his childhood too,
(07:53):
And I think is a lot of where he got
his racial views. Is a really interesting combination of different
political strains that we don't see operating together all that often.
On the one hand, he is from his very early
life kind of imbued with this progressive, scientific career, federal
(08:19):
service tradition that we would tend to associate, I think
with liberals or progressives. And then on the other hand,
on lots of issues, particularly cultural issues, race, religion, law
and order, anti communism, he's a very devout conservative, and
he sort of puts those two traditions together to build
(08:40):
the FBI and build this bureaucracy. But sometimes those things
are just in conflict, and I think you can see
that in cases like his sort of complicated history around
race and civil rights enforcement. So there's no question that
Hoover has had pretty deeply racist.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Views in many ways.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
But he did also even as he was investigating the
civil rights who have met really going after figures like
Martin Luther King, he also was going after the Clan,
white supremacist groups, etc. And I think in those latter
cases it was often his belief in.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Law enforcement and the need to enforce.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Federal laws, whether you liked them or not, that really
led him to go after groups like the Clan, particularly
when they were groups who were employing violence.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And you're listening to author Beverly Gage tell the story
of j Edgar Hoover, a man replete the paradoxes and
contradictions like so many of us. When we come back
more of the story of j Edgar Hoover here on
our American Stories, and we continue with our American stories
(10:12):
and the story of the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover, the most influential man in law enforcement
during the twentieth century and in our nation's history. Here
telling the story is author Beverly Gage, and she's written
g Man, j Edgar Hoover and the Making of the
American Century. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and
(10:35):
pick up this book. Let's get back to the story.
Here again is Beverly Gage.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
His first job in the federal government was not at
the Justice Department, but was in fact at the Library
of Congress. Sorry, it's not entirely clear how he got
the job, but he certainly had plenty of kind of
mid level connections in Washington. You know, some of his
relatives belonged to the same club as the head of
(11:03):
the Library of Congress. But a lot of kids from
his high school did what he did, which was to
stay in Washington, go to school at a place like
gw which was at that point actually really mostly a
night school for future federal servants. So you worked for
the government by day in some sort of clerk's position,
(11:24):
and you went to GW at night. And that's basically
what Hoover did. I think what's really interesting about that
as his first job is that these are the years
when the Library of Congress classification system, which was sort
of the rival to the Dewey decimal system, was coming
into being, just as a way to organize information retrieve
(11:44):
library books. So he's learning all about that at the
Library of Congress and it was actually pretty cutting edge
stuff for its time, was hugely useful to him when
he went into the Justice Department and the bureau. You know,
we tend to think about Hoover and law enforcement, but
he was not a policeman. He actually didn't do investigations.
(12:07):
There's really no evidence that he himself ever investigated or
solved any sort of crime. He never really made arrests,
except for a few kind of showy stagy arrests when
people pointed this out in the nineteen thirties. He and
his skill set was the bureaucracy and the file system,
and he was really good at it. So from his
(12:28):
very early years, right out of college, he went straight
into the Justice Department and never left. But it was
clear that a lot of his talents very early on
were in keeping massive numbers of records. His first job
was in helping out with German internment and registration during
the First World War, and it turned out he was
(12:49):
so good at that that he got a promotion at
the age.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Of twenty four to lead a.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
New part of the Bureau that was called the Radical Division,
which was basically the federal goal government's first attempt.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
To keep tabs and to keep.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Files on left wing radicals in the United States. Almost
all law enforcement in this country then as well as now,
but especially then was really done at the local and
the state level. The federal authorities basically didn't have a
lot of jurisdiction to do very much, and so until
nineteen oh eight, the Justice Department had no investigative Division,
(13:28):
but they were starting to get some new duties, particularly
antitrust investigations, where they were tired of going to the
Treasury Department and basically begging for investigators from the Secret Service,
so they decided they needed or wanted their own investigators,
and that's really how the Bureau of Investigation was born.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
But even at that they didn't have all that much
to do during those early years, but it was.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
A real grab bag and they were not a super
professional organization.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
There were a lot of civi liberties abuses as well
as corruption.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
There were lots of accusations that they, particularly during the war,
used a lot of physical violence when they were trying to, say,
arrest someone who was due for deportation. As the early
years of Prohibition, there was a lot of bribery going on.
There was a lot of backroom dealing. There were poker games.
(14:25):
There were a lot of people who ended up deputized
by the Bureau of Investigation who didn't really have any qualifications.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
The Attorney General.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Was brought up on impeachment charges more than once for
everything from outrageous labor injunctions to spying on senators. Their
files were disorganized, tried sort of very basic things.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
So Hoover was.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Actually there for most of that, but he was seen
as the man who had kind of kept himself apart,
sort of the squeaky queen youngster who was close to
it all but kept himself enough apart from it that
he was able to make the leap into something else.
He became head of the FBI when he was just
(15:15):
twenty nine years old. Of course, it was a much
smaller organization, but even at that it was a pretty
extraordinary thing because, of course most of the people working
there were older than he was.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
At least many of them.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
So the man who really gave him the job was
the Attorney General in nineteen twenty four, who was a
pretty famous law professor named Harlan Stone who went on
then to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I
think when he first looked to Hoover was just looking
kind of for a placeholder. Stone ended up firing Hoover's boss,
(15:52):
who was a famous kind of swashbuckling private detective named
William Burns, and he kind of just needed someone to
hold the bureaucracy together while he went around looking for
who the real director ought to be. But Hoover was
pretty determined in that year to show Stone that he
was the right choice for that. So when he was
(16:13):
appointed acting director, he just engaged in this kind of
blurry of energy and of trying to appeal to Stone
and appease Stone and impress Stone. A lot of that
entailed firing some of the you know, kind of dead
weight at the bureau, beefing up professional standards, make the FBI,
(16:35):
which was still just called the Bureau of Investigation, sort
of into an elite model for the rest of law enforcement.
So they didn't have, you know, very broad law enforcement jurisdiction.
But what Hoover thought they could do was number one,
kind of set high standards and number two sort of
(16:57):
perform certain kinds of scientific and professional services to police
departments throughout the country that would be really useful. So
on the kind of personnel front, he hired only people
with college educations, or mostly people with college educations. He
liked lawyers, he liked accountants. He wanted his core to
(17:19):
be these sort of professional men, and in order to
do that, he waged battles again and again to keep
his agents out of civil service rules so that he
could be the one who personally picked them, hired them,
fired them, rather than having to go to some pool
of qualified applicants. It's the reason when you think of
(17:43):
an FBI agent, right, even today, I think we have
a very specific vision of who that person is, right,
Paul white guy in the suit and the shiny shoes.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
And the hat.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
People who were a lot like him and who shared
his values were really thought that appearances mattered. He had
very strict standards for everything, from you know, how high
the sheets at the Bureau of Investigation on the windows
ought to be so that people could look in and see,
(18:14):
you know, precision at work, to whether you could wear
goal washes and like eat in the office.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
I mean, everything had a rule. Under Hoover.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
He was very concerned about presentation as well as practice.
And then he found a bunch of different areas which
are still things that the FBI does. So that included
the Fingerprint Division, in which the FBI became a repository
for criminal fingerprints. They began collecting the first national crime statistics.
He set up the famous FBI Lab, which was full
(18:46):
of you know, chemists and other scientists using the latest technology.
And he set up a training academy not only for
his own agents, but to bring in policemen from around
the country to be trained in the latest of professional techniques.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
And that was his vision and it was very important
to the Bureau then.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I think it remained important throughout his life, and I
think in some ways is really still part of the
DNA of the FBI, and.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
You're listening to author Beverly Gage tell one heck of
a story, a complicated story, a powerful story of j
Edgar Hoover. When we come back, more of the story
of j Edgar Hoover here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
we continue with our American stories and the final portion
of our story on the first director of the FBI,
j Edgar Hoover. When we last left off, Beverly Gage
was telling us about how Hoover created the FBI in
his image. Now let's get into some of the greatest cases.
Here again is author Beverly age Well.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
John Dillinger was a kind of small time to big
time bank robber. Basically, he was, in the early nineteen thirties,
part of a kind of generation of criminal operators often
operating in the Midwest, often using various new technologies like
fast getaway cars and high powered guns that had just
(20:27):
come in to create and carry out pretty dramatic acts
of robbery, murder, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
John Dillinger in particular was.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Very famous because he would rob banks and then he
would manage to evade the police. Most famously, you know
when the police in Indiana finally managed to lock him
up in nineteen thirty four. He ended up whittling a
fake gun in his cell, tricking all of the guards
(20:57):
into thinking that he had a gun, and escaping from jail,
once again, having already been someone in the headlines saying
no jail.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Could hold me.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
So by the time he and Hoover began to sort
of become adversaries, Dillinger was already very famous, and he
was more famous than Hoover.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
But in the nineteen thirties, the.
Speaker 5 (21:25):
FBI did begin to get jurisdiction over bank robbery and
kidnapping in particular as federal crimes, and that sort of
led them on the Dillinger manhunt.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
It became one of these really legendary stories. But the
truth is the Bureau really didn't know what they were
doing when they first started out, And one of the
biggest embarrassments of that period for Hoover was a moment
when they thought that they had figured out where John
Dillinger was sort of hiding out with his gang out
(22:00):
in the woods in Wisconsin at a lodge called Little Bohemia.
These Bureau agents, who are pretty new to this kind
of criminal law enforcement, many of them have never shot
a gun before. They sneak up to this lodge, don't
really know what they're doing. There are dogs there. The
dogs bark warned the Dillinger Gang. The Dillinger Gang escapes,
(22:21):
Some civilians come pouring out of the lodge and have
Bureau agents shoot the civilians. Members of the gang ultimately
shoot a few Bureau agents and it's a real disaster
for Hoover and he's under a lot of pressure from
the Roosevelt administration. Coover is paying attention to this from Washington.
He is trying to work a straight at all. He's
(22:42):
putting a lot of pressure on his agents to do this.
So it didn't start out very well. But in the
final equation, after a lot of man hunting and a
lot of headlines and a lot of pressure, they do
manage to track down John Dillinger, largely through an informant
who turned to them and gave them information someone that
(23:04):
Dillinger was staying with in Chicago, and they managed to
kind of entrap him as he's going to see a
movie and they have a very bloody shootout and the
FBI finally guns down John Dillinger, you know, in cold
blood in the light of day there in the streets
of Chicago, and it becomes one of the great FBI legends.
(23:27):
He is incredibly adept at responding to crisis and kind
of rising to the moment when the war comes along,
and both Roosevelt and the British intelligence authorities come to
Hoover and they say, you know, the moment has come.
We need a domestic intelligence agency. You need to become
(23:47):
a counter espionage agency. And they really don't have much
skill in it. Franklin Roosevelt even tells Hoover to go
ahead and set up a special spy service to cover
latinumyera Erica sort of the whole Western hemisphere, and you know,
Hoover says, okay, we will go ahead and do that.
Really has no agents who speak Spanish, they have no
(24:10):
idea what they're doing, but he kind of is able
to turn on a dime, very diligently sets about learning
how to think about espionage, and they improve really dramatically.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Really quickly.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
There's usually a little bit of a learning curve to
really come through. And you see that again and again
that as the challenges and the politics of the moment shift,
he has enough control over his bureaucracy that he's able
to make the institution turn pretty quickly too.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Ladies and gentlemen, I have some very sad news for
all of you and people who love peace all over
the world. Martin Luther King was shot and was killed
tonight in Memphistops.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You know, the FBI had its successes and failures, as
any institution does, but the investigation into the assassination of
Martin Luther King was the largest investigation of Hoover's career.
It was, of course, one that the FBI was under
a lot of pressure and suspicion for because Hoover had
(25:17):
been so openly critical of King, so.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Disdainful of King.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
The FBI's campaign to undermine and discredit and disrupt the
life of Martin Luther King is one of the most
outrageous things that Hoover's FBI ever did, and it really
was an escalating series of efforts that went from what
started in the late fifties and early sixties as an
(25:45):
investigation of a couple of advisors and colleagues who had
been in the orbit of the Communist Party and were
now close to King. So starting in this national security
type investigation that then it extended into placing wiretaps on
King's home, beginning to put bugs in his hotel rooms
(26:08):
and recording his sex life, to then engaging in really
active intimidation and disruption operations, trying to spread that information
around in Washington in the press, and even going so
far as to write up a fake threatening letter, anonymous
letter to King, sending along some of the reels of
(26:31):
tape from those hotel room recordings, trying to get him
as King interpreted to kill himself as others have said,
to drop out of public life, but engaged in a
whole array of really outrageous, sometimes illegal, dirty tricks aimed
at King, who of course was doing nothing illegal and
(26:53):
in fact, was engaged in a campaign of racial justice
that the FBI was deeply opposed to. What that meant
in April of nineteen sixty eight, when King was assassinated
was that many people blamed the FBI for helping to
(27:14):
create an environment in which that assassination was more likely.
Some people suspected the FBI even then of being involved,
and for Hoover, it really meant that the FBI was
then under enormous pressure to show that it could solve this.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Assassination, even though it had shown such animosity to King himself,
and so.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
That became an incredibly large, very difficult investigation to figure
out what had happened. So Hoover really set out, you know,
I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think there
was something like two thousand agents working on the King
assassination at its peak.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
It really was a matter.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Of tracing the little bits of evidence that were available,
the gun that had been left behind, you know, engaging
in sort of large scale forensic investigations, and then ultimately
trying to get on the trail of this man who
had changed his name many many times and was pretty
(28:24):
adept at hiding from the authorities. There are two big
moments in that investigation which really proved to be big breaks.
One was the suspicion, based on what they were learning
of Ray's movements, that he might be a fugitive from justice.
He might be someone who had broken out of prison
at some point therefore had been changing names, and so
(28:47):
that sent them into being able to look to those
records of prison escapees, and that was a big breakthrough.
And then the other was deducing that he might have
been fleeing the country, maybe through Canada, and so they
actually literally sat down with the cooperation of the Canadian
authorities and began to go through every single sort of
(29:10):
passport material that they could find that seemed like it
might be related to Ray, just you know, a kind.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Of paperwork effort of a tremendous scale. That's how they.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Finally tracked down Ray in England. And then the big
challenge was getting him back to the United States without
him meeting the fate that Oswald had met because of
Oswald had, of course himself been assassinated while in police custody,
and be Hoover was very, very worried that that was
going to happen in this case as well. Now there
(29:41):
are lots of people who are still critical of that investigation,
sometimes for good reason. But it was a pretty extraordinary
feat of detective work in its day, and a.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our
own Monte Montgomery. And what a story Beverly Gauge told.
She's the author of g Man, j Edgar Hoover and
the Making of the American Century. Pick it up wherever
you buy your books. The Good and the Bad, The
Story of J. Edgar Hoover. Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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