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J. Edgar Hoover: J. Edgar Hoover Building
built 231 days ago
Shocking grim, frightening, Curt Gentry's masterful portrait of J. Edgar Hoover -- director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972 -- is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how this unscrupulous man created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years. Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from FDR to Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden mikes to destroy anyone who opposed him.
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Hack: “For J. Edgar Hoover to be as powerful as he was, to maintain that image, he gave up his personal life. It became his personal life. There was no other life.”
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J. Edgar Hoover turned the deportation of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman into a personal crusade. In this letter he brands them as "beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country." As special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover amassed evidence against Goldman and Berkman and presented the case against them at their deportation hearing. Hoover was ... present at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of December 21, 1919, when the Buford set sail for Russia carrying Goldman, Berkman, and the other deportees. Hoover and the FBI monitored Goldman's activities closely for the remainder of her life in exile from the United States. Emma Goldman Papers @ sunsite.berkeley.edu
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Without hard evidence, the recent attacks against J. Edgar Hoover deserve no more credence than similar despicable incidents that transpired during Hoover's last few years as director. In 1969, for instance, it became public knowledge that in the early 1960s an FBI wiretap had been placed on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s telephone. When Hoover explained that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had not only authorized, but had proposed, the tap, another former attorney general, Ramsey Clark, angrily told reporters that Hoover was being "false" and "deceptive," and called for his retirement. When the smoke cleared... Hoover had proved with documents from his files that Kennedy had indeed both instigated and authorized the King wiretap. A chagrined Clark refused to apologize.
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John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington, D.C. on New Year's Day, 1895. He received an LL.B. from George Washington University in 1916 and a master's degree in law in 1917. While he was attending night school at George Washington University, J. Edgar Hoover worked at the Library of Congress for a period of five years. He began as a messenger and rose to cataloguer and finally, clerk. Biographer Curt Gentry notes that a coworker of Hoover estimated that Hoover was destined to become chief librarian had he stayed there. Hoover was destined to become chief librarian had he stayed there.
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When he was not cleansing America of filth, J. Edgar Hoover spent long hours in a laboratory in New Jersey, inventing thousands of other things. His notebooks, which only recently were discovered behind a bricked-in wall in a tunnel under the streets of Chicago by Geraldo Rivera, contained diagrams of hundreds of inventions that were never built. Perhaps the most interesting was the hoovercraft — a toy wagon with four large house fans fixed off to the sides. The house fans were ingeniously powered by 12 hamster running-wheels that were, in turn, connected to generators.
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J. Edgar Hoover Building