Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [9]
Behind his mask of public rectitude, it is now evident that this American hero was corrupt. He lived ‘like an oriental potentate,’ as a former Deputy Attorney General put it, milking FBI funds and facilities for his private profit and pleasure. Wealthy friends favored him with lavish hospitality and investment tips, and he apparently protected them from criminal investigation.
In the FBI’s oppression of civil rights activists and liberals, Hoover’s personal venom comes into focus. His rage over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Martin Luther King, Jr., was the greater because – for years previously – he had indulged the conceit that he himself deserved the Prize. His fury over criticism by comedian Dick Gregory led him to issue orders designed to trigger a mob attack on the entertainer.
Perhaps an alert public should have realized at the time that Hoover’s image was too good to be true. Yet in large measure because the nation’s press was so timid, it did not.
‘If we didn’t have Mr Hoover and the FBI,’ a television viewer wrote NBC shortly before the Director’s death, ‘I would like to know how you and I would exist.’ Many ordinary citizens expressed such sentiments.
Others differed. The poet Theodore Roethke called Hoover ‘the head of our thought police – a martinet, a preposterous figure, but not funny.’ Hoover’s FBI, wrote novelist Norman Mailer, was ‘a high church for the mediocre.’ ‘It was a relief,’ said pediatrician Benjamin Spock on hearing of Hoover’s death, ‘to have this man silenced who had no understanding of the underlying philosophy of our government or of our Bill of Rights, a man who had such enormous power, and used it to harass individuals with whom he disagreed politically and who had done as much as anyone to intimidate millions of Americans out of their right to hear and judge for themselves all political opinions.’
A former Assistant Attorney General under President Johnson, Mitchell Rogovin, thought Hoover’s life had been ‘a passion play of good and evil. And when there was good, it was hollow.’
What manner of man stirred such different responses? He came to be regarded, the New York Post once said, ‘with the same awe and reverence accorded the other monuments of Washington. Only he’s closed to the public.’ That a man with a crippled psyche, capable of great evil, became the trusted symbol of all that was safe and good is a paradox of our time. So too is the fact that, in a tribute after Hoover’s death, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said he had ‘epitomized the American dream,’ while renowned psychiatrists consider he would have been well suited for high office in Nazi Germany.
In spite of all the damaging information that has emerged about Hoover in recent years, and in spite of congressional motions to remove the words ‘J. Edgar Hoover’ from the wall of the FBI headquarters, the building still bears that name, in gold lettering, as though nothing had changed.
To explore such contradictions is to make a vital journey through the twentieth century, a time of deception and selfdeception about our values, our freedoms and our heroes. Perhaps, because this man’s life spanned a period in which the American dream went so badly wrong, understanding him may help us to understand ourselves.
To bring him into mortal perspective, J. Edgar Hoover – the child and the man – will remain ‘Edgar’ throughout this book. His story began on a freezing New Year’s morning, more than a hundred years ago.
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‘The Child is father of the Man.’
William Wordsworth
‘On Sunday January 1, 1895, at 7.30 A.M. J.Edgar Hoover was born to my father and mother, the day was cold and snowy but clear. The Doctor was Malian. I was born at 413 Seward Square, S.E. Wash. D.C …’1
The boy who was to become the world’s most famous