J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
Shocking, grim, frightening, Curt Gentry's masterful portrait of America's top policeman is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how a paranoid director created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone who opposed him. The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; as well as insight into the Watergate scandal and what part he played in the investigations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
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Community Reviews
Some biographies laud their subjects as otherworldly folks bestowed upon humanity, unswerving in pursuit of their ideals. Biographies of Lincoln and Fred Rogers come to mind.
Most raise complex aspects of their subject. The books try to figure out whether the positives make up for the negatives, whether the means used to accrue and dispense power justify the ends. Here you get a wide range of people from great folks with human failings (e.g., Einstein) to questionable characters who did amazing things (e.g., Jobs, Lyndon Johnson) to questionable characters who did amazing and questionable things (e.g., Kissinger, Robert Moses).
Few biographies yield wholly negative verdicts on their subjects. But this one does. Gentry concludes the trifecta: Hoover should be condemned for how he accumulated power (surprisingly common); how he maintained it (less so); and the ends to which he put it (generally reserved for only biographies of those history already considers 'evil people'). Gentry clearly considers Hoover to be an 'evil person', that is one who did harm without any offsetting benefit in support only of his personal power and preferences. It is magnitude, not direction, that separates Hoover from history's worst characters, in this telling.
Is Gentry right? He certainty marshals an impressive array of evidence. On my reading, he convincingly shows Hoover sought to do anything necessary to establish and maintain his power. From the beginning, he courted powerful people, lied to them, established his power, and then used his power to blackmail those people for almost half a century.
One way to judge this behavior, as Robert Caro suggests, is that you must separate what folks do getting power from what they do once they have it. All of the things folks do to get power are done for a purpose. It is only once they obtain the power they have been after that we know what that purpose was. Though I disagree with this as the proper measure of a life, it is a convenient framework to separate powerful folks on a meaningful dimension.
Does Hoover use his power to do something meaningful - something even good? Here is where Gentry's analysis may fall short. Gentry portrays Hoover acting to punish his enemies, cow his friends, and maintain his position of power through an ever growing internal espionage network. On Gentry's telling, Hoover has no meaningful accomplishments after he captures Dillinger. Hoover thwarts the Communists, who were never a threat in the first place. Hoover denies the existence of organized crime, which very much was a threat. Hoover wire taps and terrorizes our national heroes (King Jr., Kennedy).
But why does he do these things? Is it possible that Hoover truly believes he has guided the FBI toward the nation's greatest threats?
By the end of the 700+ page book, we just don't know. Gentry has not fully helped us see the world through Hoover's eyes, the way for instance Caro does with Lyndon Johnson.
In a book that bills itself as being about "a man and the secrets" perhaps underlying motivation was the one secret Hoover truly never revealed - or perhaps Hoover had no underlying motivation beyond the mixture of self interest prejudice that Gentry portrays.
But I am at least left wondering.
Most raise complex aspects of their subject. The books try to figure out whether the positives make up for the negatives, whether the means used to accrue and dispense power justify the ends. Here you get a wide range of people from great folks with human failings (e.g., Einstein) to questionable characters who did amazing things (e.g., Jobs, Lyndon Johnson) to questionable characters who did amazing and questionable things (e.g., Kissinger, Robert Moses).
Few biographies yield wholly negative verdicts on their subjects. But this one does. Gentry concludes the trifecta: Hoover should be condemned for how he accumulated power (surprisingly common); how he maintained it (less so); and the ends to which he put it (generally reserved for only biographies of those history already considers 'evil people'). Gentry clearly considers Hoover to be an 'evil person', that is one who did harm without any offsetting benefit in support only of his personal power and preferences. It is magnitude, not direction, that separates Hoover from history's worst characters, in this telling.
Is Gentry right? He certainty marshals an impressive array of evidence. On my reading, he convincingly shows Hoover sought to do anything necessary to establish and maintain his power. From the beginning, he courted powerful people, lied to them, established his power, and then used his power to blackmail those people for almost half a century.
One way to judge this behavior, as Robert Caro suggests, is that you must separate what folks do getting power from what they do once they have it. All of the things folks do to get power are done for a purpose. It is only once they obtain the power they have been after that we know what that purpose was. Though I disagree with this as the proper measure of a life, it is a convenient framework to separate powerful folks on a meaningful dimension.
Does Hoover use his power to do something meaningful - something even good? Here is where Gentry's analysis may fall short. Gentry portrays Hoover acting to punish his enemies, cow his friends, and maintain his position of power through an ever growing internal espionage network. On Gentry's telling, Hoover has no meaningful accomplishments after he captures Dillinger. Hoover thwarts the Communists, who were never a threat in the first place. Hoover denies the existence of organized crime, which very much was a threat. Hoover wire taps and terrorizes our national heroes (King Jr., Kennedy).
But why does he do these things? Is it possible that Hoover truly believes he has guided the FBI toward the nation's greatest threats?
By the end of the 700+ page book, we just don't know. Gentry has not fully helped us see the world through Hoover's eyes, the way for instance Caro does with Lyndon Johnson.
In a book that bills itself as being about "a man and the secrets" perhaps underlying motivation was the one secret Hoover truly never revealed - or perhaps Hoover had no underlying motivation beyond the mixture of self interest prejudice that Gentry portrays.
But I am at least left wondering.
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