J Edgar Hoover
Edgar Hoover, was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972.
Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. During his life, Hoover was highly regarded by much of the U.S.
public, but throughout his career and after his death he became an increasingly controversial figure. His many critics assert that he abused his power and exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI. He is known to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to have amassed secret files on political leaders and to have used illegal methods to collect evidence. It is because of Hoover's long and controversial reign that FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.
Early life and education
Hoover was born on New Year's Day in 1895 in Washington, D.C., to Anna Marie Scheitlin and Dickerson Naylor Hoover, Sr., and grew up in the Eastern Market section of the city.
Few details are known of his early years; his birth certificate was not filed until 1938. Hoover was educated at George Washington University, graduating in 1917 with a law degree.
During his time there, he worked at the Library of Congress and also became a member of Kappa Alpha Order (Alpha Nu 1914). While a law student, Hoover became interested in the career of Anthony Comstock, the New York City U.S.
The fact that the robbers frequently took stolen cars across state lines (a federal offense) gave Hoover and his men the authority to pursue them. Hoover was particularly fixated on eliminating Dillinger, whose misdeeds he considered to be insults aimed directly at him and "his" bureau.
In late July 1934, Melvin Purvis, the Director of Operations in the Chicago office, received a tip on the whereabouts of John Dillinger. Hoover made changes, such as expanding and combining fingerprint files in the Identification Division to compile the largest collection of fingerprints ever.
Hoover also helped to greatly expand the FBI's recruitment and create the FBI Laboratory, a division established in 1932 to examine evidence found by the FBI.
Investigation of subversion and radicals
Hoover was concerned about subversion, and under his leadership, the FBI spied upon tens of thousands of suspected subversives and radicals.
For example, in the Quirin affair during World War II, German U-boats set two small groups of Nazi agents ashore in Florida and Long Island to cause acts of sabotage within the country. They had kept us almost totally free of sabotage and espionage during the World War II".
Another example of Hoover's concern over subversion is his handling of the Venona Project.
The FBI inherited a pre-World War II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States. At this time he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO. This program remained in place until it was revealed to the public in 1971, and was the cause of some of the harshest criticism of Hoover and the FBI.
Its methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations. Some authors have charged that COINTELPRO methods also included inciting violence and arranging murders. In 1975, the activities of COINTELPRO were investigated by the "United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities" called the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-ID) and these activities were declared illegal and contrary to the Constitution.
Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed Deputy Attorney General in early 1974, Director Clarence M.
After The Washington Post broke a story in January 1975, Kelley searched and found them in his outer office. Hoover not only wrote an open letter to the press singling out these statements as "irresponsible" but secretly enlisted the help of NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall in a campaign to discredit Howard.
Response to Mafia and civil rights groups
In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover's unwillingness to focus FBI resources on the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors, after famed muckraker Jack Anderson exposed the immense scope of the Mafia's organized crime network, a threat Hoover had long downplayed.
Hoover personally made sure that Warner Brothers would portray the FBI more favorably than other crime dramas of the times.
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) under Senator Richard Schweiker, which had re-opened the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, reported that Hoover's FBI "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President." The HSCA further reported that Hoover's FBI "was deficient in its sharing of information with other agencies and departments." As a result, various conspiracy theories abound regarding the negligence of Hoover's leadership in performing due diligence with regard to the JFK assassination.
The FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 2001, Senator Harry Reid sponsored an amendment to strip Hoover's name from the building.
Edgar Hoover's name on the FBI building is a stain on the building," Reid said. The amendment was not adopted by the Senate.
Personal life
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson.
Hoover was a lifelong bachelor, and since at least the 1940s, rumors have circulated that he was homosexual despite no concrete evidence of these claims. It has also been suggested that his long association with Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the FBI who was also Hoover's heir, was that of a gay couple. Some authors have dismissed the rumors about Hoover's sexuality and his relationship with Tolson in particular as unlikely, while others have described them as probable or even "confirmed", and still others have reported them without stating an opinion. Attorney Roy Cohn, an associate of Hoover during the '50s investigations of Communists and himself a closeted homosexual, opined that Hoover was too frightened of his own sexuality to have anything approaching a normal sexual or romantic relationship.
Hoover described Tolson as his alter ego: the men not only worked closely together during the day, but also took meals, went to night clubs and vacationed together. The exceedingly close relationship between the two is often cited as evidence that the two were lovers, though some FBI employees who knew them, such as Felt, say that the relationship was merely "brotherly".
Tolson inherited Hoover's estate worth approximately USD$551,000 and moved into his home, having also accepted the American flag that draped Hoover's casket.
Although never corroborated, the allegation of cross-dressing has been widely repeated, and "J. In the words of author Thomas Doherty, "For American popular culture, the image of the zaftig FBI director as a Christine Jorgensen wanna-be was too delicious not to savor." Most biographers consider the story of Mafia blackmail to be unlikely in light of the FBI's actual investigations of the Mafia.
Grave of J.
It took a week before an HQ staffer realized the message related to the borders of the memo paper. Schott has also stated that the mistakenly increased border activity during this period resulted in the arrest of American Communist Party leader Gus Hall.
African American author Millie McGhee claims in her 2000 book Secrets Uncovered to be related to J. Genealogist George Ott investigated these claims and found some supporting circumstantial evidence, as well as unusual alterations of records pertaining to Hoover's officially recorded family in Washington, D.C., but found no conclusive proof.
Edgar Hoover's birth certificate was not filed until 1938, when he was 43 years old.
Honors
In 1950, King George VI of the United Kingdom awarded Hoover an honorary knighthood in the Order of the British Empire. Although it is widely believed that all of these were ghostwritten by FBI employees, Hoover received the credit and royalties.
Hoover, J.
A G-man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat,' And the Struggle for Honor in Washington. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-1945.