# G-Man by Beverly Gage - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Learn about the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.

Edgar Hoover served as director of the FBI for nearly half a century.

In a career spanning the years following World War I to the Nixon administration, he had a hand in many of the policies and events that have shaped the United States into what it is today.

There have been stories, legends, and theories about both his professional and personal secrets.

But 50 years after his death, what do we really know about Hoover as an individual?

Thanks to Beverly Gage’s biography, G-Man, we actually know a great deal.

Drawing from already documented history, Hoover’s hundreds of personal journals, and hundreds of thousands of newly unearthed pages of information, Gage has compiled the most recent and comprehensive history of Hoover and the FBI to date.

In this Blink, we’ll cover some of the highlights and lesser-known facts of both his personal and professional life, as well as get a distilled timeline of the history of Hoover’s FBI.

In another time and under other conditions, J.

The Making of the Man

Edgar Hoover may have grown into a heroic figure.

He was born into the Washington legacy, one of the first families of that town from its days as a roughshod village all the way through its emergence as a booming metropolis.

Both sides of his family were well-established and on the rise.

He had access to education and opportunity.

He was, by nature, an intelligent, enterprising youth who sought to become the ideal man – although that may not have been an advantage.

Unfortunately, Hoover’s character also contained some fatal flaws, likely acquired through family and social circumstances.

At the time of Hoover’s upbringing, the newspapers were full of laments about the lack of strong, capable men.

The masculine ideal seemed to have vanished, and so it was being put back into the public curriculum.

From the masculine Christ to Teddy Roosevelt, the ideals of strength, courage, robust health, and integrity were elevated.

Young Hoover worked hard to live up to these ideals and felt a great deal of shame over the weaknesses he saw in the men in his own family.

From his grandfather’s suicide to his father’s declining mental health, Hoover felt embarrassed by their failure to live up to the masculine ideal.

When he went to college, Hoover joined a fraternity called Kappa Alpha where he was indoctrinated in the southern white supremacist views of racial order.

While studying, he took his first government position as a messenger at the Library of Congress where he developed his incredible skills at gathering, organizing, and cataloging data.

When World War I erupted, he sought a government position in the Justice Department and avoided deployment.

The Justice Department was where he began to shape himself into the man who’d build the FBI.

Very quickly he proved his value to the department, becoming head of the Radical Division of the Bureau of Investigation in 1919.

That year, he also got a new boss, Attorney General A.

Mitchell Palmer.

Under Palmer, he conducted his first of the well-known “Palmer Raids” against radical anarchists.

Not only was this a first in terms of his achievement of spearheading a large-scale operation, it also marked the first time of any significance that he received negative attention for his actions.

His entire youth he spent successfully ingratiating himself to authority figures.

Now, he was shocked and upset by some heated criticism of the raid.

This didn’t deter him from organizing and conducting a second round of raids against two communist groups on January 2, 1920.

The exact number of arrests is unknown, but it was in the thousands.

Again, he received backlash and the Labor Department withdrew its support.

Rather than deport the communist dissidents en masse, they chose to investigate each detainee on a case-by-case basis resulting in far fewer deportations than Hoover had planned.

The criticism he received revealed the kind of person and leader Hoover would continue to be.

Rather than learn from it, he responded with vindictiveness, having his agents investigate – or rather, dig up dirt – on anyone who spoke out against him and the raids.

Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity

In 1924, after yet another regime change, a new attorney general was appointed.

Having a career already somewhat tainted by scandal from the Palmer Raids, the 29-year-old Hoover fully expected to be fired by Harlan Fiske Stone.

Instead, in May of that year, Stone called him into his office and made him acting director of the bureau of investigation.

But there were conditions.

Hoover wanted to shape the bureau into something more respectable, more gentlemanly, and more independent.

Hoover insisted that if he took the position the bureau would begin separating itself from politics, only hire based on merit, and only promote based on proven success.

Stone agreed.

A few months later, in December, Stone made Hoover the official director of the bureau of investigation.

Hoover set to work shaping the bureau into an institution that fitted with his ideals.

He hired only men who possessed legal or accounting degrees.

He also hired only men who were white, and he preferred men who were fit and masculine.

Prior to this time, there’d been Black agents but Hoover was blatant in his belief in racial hierarchy.

In addition to populating the bureau with his own idea of the perfect man, Hoover also went to work centralizing the fingerprint database and creating detailed methods of organizing and cataloging data.

He kept a map on the wall of all his field offices and pins that represented every agent.

Hoover liked to know everything all the time, and he liked to be in control.

Unfortunately, changes were coming that were beyond his control.

It wasn’t Al Capone that put guns into the hands of Hoover’s gentleman detectives.

In fact, the FBI – as it was later named during the alphabet agency phase of Roosevelt’s New Deal – played very little role in capturing Capone.

Instead, it was the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby that helped federalize law enforcement.

At the time, President Herbert Hoover activated the bureau to put its full efforts behind finding the kidnapper and murderer of the baby.

While this investigation was underway, Prohibition was breeding even more interstate criminals.

Names like Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, and Machine Gun Kelly might ring a bell.

It was these men and their brutal murdering of federal agents that turned Hoover’s accountants and lawyers into tommy-gun-toting G-Men.

This was far from how Hoover pictured his bureau.

He wasn’t comfortable with the level of in-field action being required of his agents.

He’d pictured a bureau full of intellectual men gathering data and forensics to close high-profile cases.

But Hoover would eventually adjust, as we’ll discover in the next section.

Hoover’s Hollywood

Edgar Hoover, up until the Great Depression, had been a data-collecting machine full of ambition and ideals.

He’d worked relentlessly and had no social life to speak of.

But in this dark time, Hoover finally started to come into his own.

And he had Hollywood to thank for it.

For the previous few years, Hollywood gangster movies had ruled the silver screen.

But somehow, a law had been passed that forbade directors from representing law enforcement as anything but a success.

The narrative of the gritty outlaw loner didn’t particularly change, and neither did the violence, they just turned James Cagney into an agent rather than a criminal.

Hoover wasn’t a fan of the movies, but he was a fan of the attention that they brought him.

Suddenly, he found himself gaining celebrity.

Even becoming a household name.

He opened up the FBI office for tours and did his best to make an appearance, especially if high-profile visitors came in.

He also began to cultivate a social life.

His right-hand man, Clyde Tolson, was at his side almost 100 percent of the time.

They posed for pictures in matching suits, vacationed together, and attended nightclubs and private parties together.

Many people at the time, and most people today, assume that the two of them were secret lovers.

Hoover had never shown interest in women.

But he had shown, through private letters to a bureau agent named Purvis, the ability to engage in flirtation.

He was human.

He made dirty jokes, loved his puppy, enjoyed flirtatious banter, and clearly felt an above-average devotion to Tolson.

His personal life was at odds with much of what he professed publicly.

He practically preached to anyone who’d listen on the virtues of Christianity and masculinity, morality and social hierarchy.

Yet, he partied and lived like someone with more relaxed morals.

Whether this cognitive dissonance caused him any difficulty, we’ll probably never know.

Before the Big War

Hoover and the FBI amassed most of their identity and power over the course of the Roosevelt administration.

In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, America seemed to revert back to its pre–Word War I fear and paranoia, primarily targeted against fascism and communism.

Roosevelt responded by empowering the FBI and Hoover to lead the way in intelligence gathering.

Throughout the pre-war years, Hoover teamed up with the British to lay the groundwork for central intelligence.

As a result, he gained access to eyes and ears all over the world.

This was a little more than what Hoover considered to be the scope of the FBI and he was as uncomfortable about it as he’d been about entering into the world of law enforcement.

In the end, though, he also embraced it.

For a short while, at any rate.

A major result of all of this intelligence gathering was that Hoover was ready the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

While he had no idea what the Japanese had planned, he did know that they were a threat; for years, he’d been indexing names of Japanese citizens and non-citizens who’d shown anti-American behaviors.

He categorized them according to threat level.

So, when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, Hoover was ready to send his agents out to start rounding up the individuals on his lists and putting them in internment camps.

It wasn’t only Japanese Americans, but Germans as well.

By the end of the second day of the round-ups, the government had apprehended over 1,200 Japanese non-citizens.

In the following months, the numbers of Japanese, German, and Italian arrests reached into the thousands.

Communists and Homosexuals

During World War II, Hoover and his FBI became more involved in central intelligence.

Even though he didn’t want to expand beyond domestic law enforcement, Hoover still felt frustrated when he was pulled back and international investigations were handed over to the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency.

He was further frustrated by the Truman administration which wasn’t nearly as friendly to the FBI as Roosevelt had been.

With some of his power reduced, Hoover took to the podium again, going around the nation and speaking out against communism as one of the greatest threats to the nation.

He also doubled down on his rhetoric about the importance of conservative Christian values.

For a brief time, Joseph McCarthy became a competitor in the war against communism, but eventually, McCarthy fell into line.

They led the nationwide hunt for communists including the move to blacklist Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and directors who were members of the Communist Party.

Many were dragged to hearings in front of Congress, and ten were convicted of contempt and sentenced to prison time.

During this time, Hoover also found himself dragged into the civil rights movement, another area which he entered reluctantly.

The FBI had investigated over a thousand civil rights cases since the 1920s and Hoover, in spite of his political leanings, was shocked and appalled by the brutality of the many lynchings he’d witnessed.

Hoover gave powerful testimony that made it into a 1947 report that Truman used to encourage lawmakers to pass anti-lynching legislation.

This was the only time Hoover actively and powerfully stood up in favor of civil rights.

Beyond entering the civil rights movement and continuing his crusade against Communism, Hoover more quietly worked with McCarthy to oust deviants and homosexuals from public office.

Hoover was most likely gay and there was speculation too about McCarthy’s sexual preferences – he was a confirmed bachelor.

This was likely the reason why they so vigorously sought to attack homosexuality in the public eye.

Despite how these years are viewed from the lens of a modern eye, the 1940s and 50s were considered golden years for Hoover.

He was widely viewed as a hero and a positive public figure.

In 1959, a movie called The FBI Story starring Jimmy Stewart was released.

Hoover watched with tears in his eyes.

The spectacle was the crown jewel of an already full and fulfilling career.

Perhaps Hoover should have bowed out, then, and ended on a high note.

But he didn’t.

Civil Rights and the End of an Era

Entering the 1960s, Hoover and his FBI quickly found themselves out of touch with the mindset of the new generation.

Everything from their belief system to their style of dress came off as antiquated and out of touch.

When John F.

Kennedy appointed his brother Robert as attorney general, he quickly clashed with Hoover over their ideals and ways of thinking.

The contention of the era was civil rights, but Hoover’s agenda continued to be ousting communism from the nation.

He clung to his mission to such a degree that he used FBI techniques and technology to keep tabs on the big names in the movement.

He was wiretapping individuals closely associated with Dr.

Martin Luther King, Jr, and eventually, he ended up wiretapping King himself.

Despite all the FBI’s technology, it couldn’t prevent two great tragedies from unfolding.

The assassination of Kennedy and the assassination of King both happened on Hoover’s watch.

The FBI led the way in investigations and arrests, but history would later judge it deficient at best and complicit at worst.

Hoover’s animosity toward King and his apathy toward the civil rights movement would always cast doubt and a shadow over his investigation efforts.

Nixon’s rise to the presidency should have been a good time for Hoover.

They’d been friendly and shared similar beliefs.

Had Hoover lived long enough, Nixon may have been able to use their friendship to protect himself in what later became known as the Watergate scandal.

On the other hand, Hoover was aging – and not gracefully – as well as becoming irrelevant.

Nixon was already trying to push him out of his role before he died, making Nixon’s praise after his passing ring a little hollow.

By the time Hoover died in 1972, his reputation was already muddied.

No one would deny his influence and power over his 48 years with the FBI, or his ability to shape the very fabric of the American political system.

But history would reckon with the quality of his influence, in the end painting him as more of a villain than a hero.

The key point to remember – in spite of what we may or may not think of Hoover as a person – is that his power was amassed little by little, policy by policy.

Hoover may have shaped the US system, but it’s because he was allowed – over the course of eight presidential administrations – to become such a powerful influence.

In the end, it’s a combination of Hoover and the system that enabled him to thrive that has made America what it is today.

Final Summary

Edgar Hoover was undeniably one of the most influential leaders in shaping America as we know it today.

In hindsight, we can see that much of what he hated in others was a result of what he hated in himself.

From physical weakness to his own homosexuality and cruelty, Hoover condemned them all even while embodying them himself.

As a child, he was small.

His father suffered from depression.

Yet he held up and promoted the masculine ideals of athleticism and strength.

As he grew, he sought power even as he tried to ingratiate himself with those in power.

He fought injustice even as he committed injustices.

These contradictions between his personality and his public persona shaped how he addressed crime, politics, and government.

He lived through and was involved in events like the Palmer Raids, Japanese internment, McCarthyism, and the Kennedy and King assassinations.

For better or worse,  Hoover’s status as a legend is set in stone.