 No federal bureaucrat played a bigger role in 20th century law enforcement than J. Edgar Hoover, who served as the head of the FBI and its predecessor agency for half a century. Hoover oversaw crackdowns on everything from real and imagined communists in the first red scare of the 1920s and its sequel in the 1950s. Staged high-profile shootouts with public enemies like John Dillinger and babyface Nelson in the 1930s. Surveiled Nazi and Axis sympathizers during World War II infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and pursued extra-legal operations against civil rights leaders and anti-war protesters in the 1960s. His personal vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. led to one of the most shameful incidents in FBI history when the bureau sent an anonymous letter to King shortly before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, encouraging him to commit suicide or be exposed as a serial philanderer. Hoover is the subject of Yale historian Beverly Gage's new biography, GMAT, J. Edgar Hoover and the making of the American Century. Gage seeks to complicate and flesh out the life and legacy of Hoover, who is rightly notorious for often brushing aside constitutional limits on state power like so much police tape at a crime site. Gage points out that he opposed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, undermined Senator Joe McCarthy's overwrought anti-communist witch hunts, and refused to do political surveillance for Richard Nixon, inadvertently leading to the bungled Watergate break-ins and the 37th president's fall from grace. I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. To understand Hoover in all his complexity, including his much whispered about personal relationship with his FBI colleague, Clyde Tolson, is to understand the moral ambiguities of the country he served, Gage tells reason, as well as to understand the promise and limits of constitutional government in an open society. Beverly Gage, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having me. Let's start with the elevator pitch for G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the making of the American Century. How do you summarize this book? How do you pitch it to people who should be interested in reading it? Well, it's been 30 years almost since the last real crop of Hoover biographies, so part of the goal is just to have a chance to look at all of the records, all of the new history, all of the new ways of thinking that have come out over these decades. But I guess I had two goals in mind. One is to get away from what I think is a little bit of our caricature of Hoover as this kind of one-dimensional villain, this figure who stood outside of American politics, manipulating everyone and actually bring him back into kind of a central part of the story of the 20th century. And then also to situate him in a couple of political traditions that we don't often think of as going together in our own moment. One is a kind of progressive, good government expert bureaucrat tradition, and the other is a kind of deep social conservatism. And then think about the ways that those two fit together in his life and then shaped a lot of the 20th century. Can you dilate on that a little bit? Because this is something, at reason, we tend to take a fairly dark view of the progressive period partly because it was so socially conservative and reactionary. When you think about things like alcohol prohibition, on the one hand, the progressives were pushing for women's rights in certain areas and in other ways they were trying to kind of control female sexuality in new and emboldened ways. And certainly with immigration there was a progressive fixation on purity and cleanliness that led to a lot of anti-immigrant sentiments and whatnot. So talk a little bit about Hoover as he emerges, because he was born what year was he born again? So he was born 1895 and he really came of age then in the progressive era and entered government in 1917 and sort of the peak year of progressivism in many ways. Which is amazing. It is amazing when you look at the, I mean it would be as if Babe Ruth was still playing baseball in the early 70s or something, just that span. And I want to talk with you a little bit about that term in your subtitle, the American Century. But so Hoover is growing up, he's a Washington DC hometown guy. What does it mean to be growing up in the early 1900s? Yeah, one of the things that attracted me to writing about him is as you suggest this huge span of time. He enters the Justice Department in 1917, becomes head of the Bureau in 1924 and then is there through 1972. So it's just this incredible career, this incredible period of time which we'll get to. But the progressive era is I think really critical for understanding him for some of the reasons and in some ways kind of contradictory reasons or tensions that are established during that period. He's born 1895, he's born in Washington and he's born into these two traditions that become so important to him. One is this kind of career government service. Even in the late 19th century, he's born to a family that has worked in the career government service, the administrative wing of the state already. And that's not very big in the late 19th century. And then he's born into Washington as a conservative southern city. So particularly on the question of race, he is born into a city that is actively undergoing racial segregation where there's a lot of talk about cleanliness and order and the good society being linked to these ideas about racial separation and segregation. And he holds on to many of these ideas for the rest of his life. Yeah, one of the things that comes through is in profound ways, not maybe total ways, but in profound ways, he is a southerner. And he was born the year before Plessy versus Ferguson, so kind of the legal articulation of Jim Crow. And at the same time, D.C. was a city that was mixing, right? Because one of the odd things is that it takes Woodrow Wilson 15, 20 years later to desegregate the federal workforce, implying that blacks and whites were actually kind of working and living together in a way that seems kind of difficult to understand right now. Right. The city that he was born into, the Washington of the late 19th century, was really a multi-racial city. And I was able to kind of look at the census and build out a little bit of his childhood neighborhood. And it was a multi-racial neighborhood. But by the time we get into the teens, you're seeing this very, very firm process of segregation taking place. And as you say, it's during the Wilson years that federal employment becomes much more explicitly segregated than it had been before. And those are the years that Hoover enters government service. And you talk, he went to George Washington University. Does George Washington, and I guess he went to their law school in particular, although it's back then what, I mean, he seemed to go directly from high school to law school, right? So it's a little bit different than today's academic kind of progression. Is George Washington University proud of having him as an alum, or are they kind of like, on the one hand, world's greatest bureaucrat? On the other hand, he's Jagger Hoover. Right. Well, they still list him among their famous alums. So he's still out there. But yeah, GW was a different institution at the time. It really was mostly a night school. It was a professional school. You went particularly into a professional track as your undergraduate training. And most of what it did was train for service in the government. So it was a lot of local students who were like Hoover working for the government during the day. He worked with the Library of Congress, then attending GW at night. One of the things in his college years that you stress a lot is that he was a member of a fraternity that was chartered in the deep south and embraced a kind of lost cause Southern romanticism. Can you talk a little bit about what that fraternity was and how it kind of structured or gave voice either? I don't know if it created these ideas in him or gave voice to them or something. But could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. In college, he joined this fraternity called Kappa Alpha, became the chapter president at GW and remained pretty involved in and committed to the fraternity throughout his life. In fact, took some of the first generation of FBI agents and officials out of the circle of Kappa Alpha as well as GW. And so I wanted to know what this institution really was. And it was fascinating as I started to do the research because it turns out Kappa Alpha is a fraternity that was founded, as you say, kind of in the aftermath of the civil war to carry on the lost cause of Robert E. Lee of the White South. And by the time Hoover joined it in the teens, you know, at the height of kind of segregation, Jim Crow being ensconced, a lot of its most famous members were these ardent segregationists, the one that really fascinated me was a guy named Thomas Dixon, who was a famous novelist, wrote the novels that the film Birth of a Nation was based on this kind of famously racist romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan. And so what was particularly interesting there is that I could see the world that was kind of creating Hoover's racial ideology, which of course becomes so important to the way that he polices social movements, politics. And it's amazing because Dixon's novel, the main one that Birth of a Nation is based on is called The Klansmen. There's the rise of the second clan and then Hoover becomes kind of famous, and we'll get to this down the road for actually really undercutting the Klan, you know, by the mid-60s or so. What can you, you know, to go back to this question of progressivism and kind of order and cleanliness or purity versus kind of chaos or mixing and mongrelization, what is going on there? And is it, is it, is maintaining strict racial borders? Is that the basis of, you know, the worldview or is that an epiphenomenon? Is that something, you know, that what progressives wanted more than anything else? And I realize, you know, I'm painting with a broad brush here and generally a negative one, but you know, they wanted order first and foremost. And so when it comes to things like drunkenness, you know, that takes one form. When it comes to, you know, the way government administers itself, that takes one form. And then when it comes to things like race relations or racial and ethnic heterogeneity versus homogeneity, it really argues for kind of fixed boundaries. Yeah, I think historians spend a lot of time trying to sort out what progressivism actually was. And of course, it's this big tent. It's got all sorts of movements in it. It's got all sorts of ideas. I think for Hoover growing up during the progressive era, there are a couple of really important ideas that come out of it. So one is this faith in kind of experts in people who are going to stand apart from politics and in many ways apart from democratic forms, who are going to be able to kind of control situations, administer the government, but a whole world of kind of expertise and professionalism that emerges. I think as a young boy, he's also growing up with ideas about a kind of progressive, orderly, self-disciplined masculinity that is just all over the literature of this period at his church, in his high school, elsewhere. And the essential idea that I think a lot of progressives held that individual virtue, the ability to discipline yourself, to act in certain ways was going to be really critical to the social order. And then in fact, the state had a role in encouraging and enforcing certain kinds of behavior on that front. Could you talk a little bit about the masculinity crisis that was widely discussed in the early 20th century? Because as I was reading that, I was like, obviously history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. But I'm hearing a lot of the same thing that as the country was moving from rural to urban, as new types of people were coming in, as men were leaving farms or physical labor and doing desk jobs because of industrialization, there was a sense that they didn't know how to be manly. And that's a big problem. Yeah, and that is really one of the dominant themes in every institution that I was able to kind of research about Hoover's early years, the DC public schools, and then George Washington University, Kappa Alpha, but also the Presbyterian church where he comes of age. This is a moment when there are worries. First of all, the boys aren't going to school and schools aren't suiting boys very well. In fact, it appears that at Hoover's own public high school, white public high school in Washington, girls outnumbered boys two to one. So there's a lot of attention on the boys about how are we going to turn these boys into men, a certain suspicion actually of the things that Hoover was really good at because he was like, he was a paperwork kid. He was a brainy kid. He wasn't very sporty in certain ways. He didn't really get into this ideal of kind of muscular masculinity or muscular Christianity. Certainly, I mean, he's short too, right? Relatively speaking. And, you know, the pictures of him as a round person, I mean, it's, you know, these, I don't think we're quite making those body types anymore, which is a good thing for men and women, I suspect. Right. Well, that was later in his life. He was a very, you know, trim kind of go-getter. He was not an athlete, per se, because he was small, but he did, he was in like a drum, not a drum major, but a regimen, right? He was in his cadet corps. Yeah. In high school, it was pretty common at the time, a little bit like ROTC, but less formal than that. So, yeah, he was very into kind of military drill. And those were the kinds of institutions he always liked. You know, they were full of hierarchy and rules and order. He really enjoyed institutions where he was kind of both close with other men and engaged in some common purpose. And a lot of those institutions of his youth, his fraternity, the cadet corps, you can see the ways in which they become models for what he builds at the bureau. And, you know, this is not a strict, in any way, shape, or form a kind of psychoanalytic biography, but you do dwell on his home life with extremely chaotic. And it was filled with, you know, both kind of overbearing female figures, certainly in the case of his mother, but then also like non, you know, kind of non-entity men or men who were constantly breaking down, right, physically and mentally. Yeah. Well, I think that's a little uncharitable to his mother, maybe, who had a lot going on. Yeah. No, she certainly was, yes, yeah, truly. But it was really interesting to me to see, you know, Hoover often narrated his childhood as this kind of idyllic time. And I was able to kind of go back and interrogate that a little bit and find some really pretty deep family traumas from the suicide of one of his grandfathers, a pretty public suicide. He drowned himself in the Anacostia River to the murder of his mother's brother's wife. Again, you know, headlines, and that was when he was 10 years old, so he certainly knew about that. And then what I concluded, and you know, some of this is a little speculation, but had to be one of the most important factors in his childhood, which is that his father suffered from depression. And so, you know, he's in a world where he's under all of this pressure, getting all of these messages about what a man is supposed to be and his own father, you know, is really struggling, he's struggling with mental illness in other ways as well. And I mean, it does create, you know, a sympathetic view of Hoover, or at least as you move through his life, you realize, you know, this guy was dealing with a ton of stuff, not usually not explicitly, or at least not maybe not consciously, but not publicly. Let's talk about his early years in the service, his his kind of and to skip ahead a little bit, but his, can you talk about his role in, you know, what came to be known as the Palmer raids and the first red scare? What was going on there? And why is that so important to the person that and the bureaucrat and the the power person that Hoover became? Yeah, Hoover happened to graduate from law school in 1917, which is one of these kind of accidents of history that made me think, well, you know, had it been a year earlier, a few years later, would we have had a different J Edgar Hoover, a different American state, a different sense of history. But he graduated just as the United States was entering World War One. He did not enter the military, but instead went straight into the Justice Department and spent a couple of years there basically helping to administer German internment and German registration, which are things we don't think about much now, but we're a pretty big deal at the time. And it turned out that he was good enough at that sort of paperwork, and at that sort of kind of early surveillance experiment that in 1919, when the federal government decides that they're going to kind of keep some of this going in peacetime, particularly to police political radicals like anarchists and communists and other revolutionaries, right? Moment of big turmoil. Hoover gets the job as the head of the new radical division in the Justice Department. And the radical division basically has two jobs. One is to start building up a file system that's going to keep track of basically left wingers throughout the country, a few exceptions to that, but mostly anarchists and communists, and then to help plan for deportation raids that ultimately happen at the end of 1919 and early 1920 that become known as the Palmer raids. And I think there are a couple of things that are really critical about the Palmer raids and about that moment that he carries on through his life. So one is that he becomes one of the first government experts on communism. He actually writes the first federal briefs on the two Communist parties, the form in 1919. And so he sort of sells himself as an expert there, as the only man who kind of understands this revolutionary ferment, the Bolshevik revolution had just happened in Russia. And then the second is that he gets in a lot of trouble ultimately for the Palmer raids or at least comes under a lot of criticism. They're very popular at first. And then after the second round of raids, mainly civil libertarians come forth and say, we don't think this is something the state should be doing against people who are basically just expressing unpopular political ideas. And it's hard to, I mean, kind of fully capture how kind of insane the wartime restrictions on free speech were. Right. I mean, Wilson. And again, this shows the kind of multifacetedness of the progressive movement because on the one hand you have Woodrow Wilson, the paragon of progressivism, basically saying anybody who disagreed about entering the war should be put in jail for treason or whatever, sedition. And then you have these early groups like the ACLU and the a little bit later, the NAACP who are also progressive saying, no, we should not be surveilling people in peacetime who are just going about kind of general political organizing. Exactly. And this is the moment. It's Hoover's first moment in government, but it's also for many of the same reasons. It's the birth of a kind of civil liberties consciousness, the ACLU itself as an organization comes out of this period. And of course, Hoover is kind of negotiating with being criticized by accommodating critics like the ACLU for the rest of his career. Now, Hoover though politically seemed to be more in line with the Republican Party. And I realize also during the progressive era in particular, somebody like Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson ultimately probably have more in common than any two Democrats or any two Republicans. But what happens in the 20s because Wilson is out, you have Harding and then Coolidge come in. Does that give, but these guys are also particularly Coolidge is anti, I mean, he's anti-immigrant, but he's also anti giving the federal government any power. How does Hoover kind of maneuver the 20s? Where on the one hand, he's given a lot of room to go after Reds because communism is the big threat. And especially as the Soviet Union really kind of gets up and running during the 20s, there's that. But then there's this suspicion of the federal government and particularly a federal law enforcement. I mean, this is another thing. Looking back before say the, you know, FDR or something, the federal government was a relatively small player in almost everything, but certainly in things like law enforcement. Yeah, that's definitely true. You know, Hoover politically is an interesting character. And one of the reasons I wanted to write about him was that I think he kind of gives us a different lens onto the story of politics and government because he's a DC resident. So it means he never votes in his life. He never formally joins a political party. And in some ways, the big story of his career is his ability to move back and forth between these Democratic and Republican administrations, you know, just during his time at the bureau, he's there under eight different presidents, four of them are Republicans, four of them are Democrats. And then you see that even earlier, he starts out in the Wilson administration and he successfully transitions into the Harding administration and then into Coolidge. And what makes his ability to last through those years kind of even more remarkable early on is that, you know, he really does come under criticism for the Palmer raids and Palmer is ousted. But when the new administration comes in, he actually gets a promotion. So he becomes the assistant director of the bureau. And again, because I think he was really talented at administration at making the bureaucracy run, getting the files in order, professionalizing hiring and firing and scientific methods of fingerprinting and all of these things that he embraced. But then there are a bunch of scandals in the 20s under the Harding administration. So that attorney general gets kicked out, that bureau chief gets kicked out. And yet Hoover survives again. And in 1924, though he had been sort of adjacent to some of those scandals, he is in fact made director of the bureau. And this is, you know, later in his life, you know, the common line, which seems to have some truth to it is that he had so much dirt on any president that it would be hard to, you know, for a president to fire him because they'd be afraid of reprisals. At this point, he's not really doing that. So is he just, as you said, I mean, he's a good bureaucrat in the sense that he's taking these offices and kind of professionalizing them. He's coming up with kinds of conduct and best operating procedures and things like that. Is that what accounts for, you know, his ability to kind of get to a point where the modern FBI or the FBI is fully created with him at the head of it? Yeah, I think so. I mean, our image of him, you know, kind of manipulating and strong arming and using gossip to bend people to his will, all of that, which does cabin in later years, doesn't actually tell us very much about this early period when he doesn't have that kind of power and he can't do it. And I think the reason that he is in fact successful in 1924, and then during this kind of period of institution building in the 20s, so he's really good at pleasing men a level or two above him. So he's always throughout his career very good at reading what more powerful men want from him and trying to deliver that. He's very good at running his bureaucracy and he's kind of, you know, this young energetic figure who holds a lot of appeal. And he spends a lot of that first period as director trying to get away from the scandals of the earlier period. So he promises he's not going to do political surveillance anymore, but more or less sticks to that. I mean, there are some exceptions, but certainly in comparison to the Red Scare, he really follows through and that he is going to make his men, you know, incorruptible, getting away from like all the poker games and whiskey dealing of the Harding administration. And those ideas really kind of drive him for that first decade when the bureau is pretty small, he's just kind of refining the bureaucracy and his own ideas. In the 30s, there's two things that start to crop up. I mean, there's a continuing worry about communists, but then the rise of fascists, both overseas but at home. And then there's the rise, not quite of organized crime in terms of, you know, the mafia or whatever, and we can get to that in a little bit, but of, you know, the high-profile tabloid gangsters, people like Babyface Nelson and Ma Barker and John Dillinger. How does Hoover negotiate and navigate the 30s, particularly first with this organized crime thing? And in the book, you stress or you point out that a lot of the things that we take for granted that the FBI would be involved in, they kind of had to make a case for that. And also he was in many ways slow to kind of expand the purview. I believe in public choice economics. So I think every government agency is always trying to increase its market share, kind of like a private business. But there are moments where it seems like he's really being, he's trying to be restrained, but then he gets pushed into doing more and more as the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yeah, I think kind of contrary to our image of Hoover as constantly trying to, you know, find new duties, accumulate more power, he was actually pretty selective about the sorts of things that he would take on. And during his first decade as director, when the Bureau doesn't have very much jurisdiction, his main goal is to create this kind of world of scientific gentleman expert investigators who are going to wear suits and they're going to, you know, deal with things like statistics and fingerprints, but they're not going to be like cops, right? They're not going to be out there doing that sort of thing. Then the 30s comes along and the 30s, as you say, is really the critical period where the FBI gets the two big duties that come to define it for the rest of Hoover's career. And I think even today, one is that they become a real federal law enforcement agency under all of this pressure from the Roosevelt administration, but also just from the situation, this rise in violent crime that takes place and these big celebrity criminals, he sort of gets pushed into that. And it's interesting to watch how quickly his bureaucracy then is able to turn his agents mostly didn't even carry guns or not as a regular feature before this moment. Suddenly they're carrying guns, they're engaging in these high profile public shootouts with people like John Dillinger. Sometimes they're really screwing it up at first, and then they ultimately come through. And then the other thing that happens, as you say, in the 30s is that they move back into political surveillance in a much more aggressive way. Yeah, let's let's get to that in a second. I just want to add that Dillinger stuff. You know, this is partly why parents were born in the 20s. And so they, I mean, they grew up in the 30s, and they would talk about, you know, these kinds of gun battles and things like that. There's a figure who I think used to be better known as he's receding from history that you talk about Melvin Purvis. Who was he? And why is he important to, you know, kind of understanding the way Hoover operates as head of the, as head of the Bureau? Melvin Purvis to your parents would have been most famous as the agent who took down John Dillinger. And so, you know, in 1935, 36, he is really Hoover's only rival. Hoover is just becoming a celebrity. Melvin Purvis is becoming a celebrity. But to me, the most interesting thing is the period before that Hoover hired Purvis as an almost perfect example of the kind of man that he liked to hire at the Bureau. He was young. He was good looking. He was Southern. He was a Kappa Alpha coming out of that fraternity. And then from a historian's perspective, what's really fascinating about Purvis is that he saved all of his correspondence with Hoover. And so it's remarkable correspondence because you can see this young agent who's not only rising through the ranks of the Bureau, but is negotiating a pretty intimate personal relationship with his boss. Sometimes it's kind of flirtatious. Sometimes it just has a quality of a kind of boss pressuring and underling to be more casual and Purvis being like, but I really think I should call you director. And he says, no, call me J.E. And so it's just a fascinating set of personal correspondence. And we don't have a lot of that for Hoover because he had a lot of his personal papers destroyed. But then Purvis basically, he becomes too big a star, right? He doesn't know his place within the Bureau's hierarchy. Right. It's a pretty conflict filled and in some ways kind of tragic ending for Purvis. So Hoover fires him in 1936, kind of the wake of all the Dillinger stuff. It seems clear. Some of it is jealousy. Some of it is that Purvis is also, you know, not following Hoover's rules all the time. And it's a pretty profound personal break. And Hoover really refuses to talk to him for decades. And in the early 60s, Purvis ends up committing suicide. And Hoover refuses even to acknowledge it then. The other big thing, you know, particularly for the way we talk about the FBI now is that, you know, FDR comes a calling or I mean, you know, it's obviously much more complicated than that. And it's like, you know, we need you to start doing surveillance of political groups or ideological groups. Can you describe how that happens? And, you know, how does Hoover respond to that? FDR was probably the most important president in Hoover's career, although it wasn't, he wasn't the president that Hoover was personally closest to. But he's really important because he gives Hoover all of the tools that are the building blocks of the FBI. One of those is that in the mid 30s, as you say, as communist groups, but particularly concerns about domestic fascism are picking up as worries about kind of labor strife throughout the country are getting more and more attention. FDR basically goes to Hoover and says, Hey, could you maybe keep an eye on all of these groups for me? And very quietly, really without the knowledge of Congress allows the bureau to move back into that kind of political investigation, political surveillance that then becomes formalized during the war and absolutely explodes during the war. The war, the FBI quadruples in size, starts doing all sorts of new kinds of work that don't go away when the war ends. Are they are they actually good at infiltrating the groups that are serious? Because this comes up later, certainly in the 60s and with Coentel Pro. But in the 30s and 40s, were they finding those secret Nazi saboteurs or those sinister communist groups that were undermining America from within? Well, one of the things that they have to do is actually figure out how to do that kind of work. So political surveillance is one thing, but espionage and counter espionage, real wartime intelligence work, they actually have no idea how to do it. And there is nobody in the United States that has any idea really how to do this. And so during the early years, they turn to the British. And the British are the ones that really kind of teach both the FBI and then later the OSS precursor of the CIA to do a lot of the things that are necessary during wartime. And as they're getting started, sorry. Oh, no, I was going to say you describe an incident where they did, I guess, get, you know, they penetrated a group of Nazi affiliated, you know, agents, I guess spies or saboteurs, whatever subversives. But then they treated them as if they were criminals, right? And they like released them after they were indicted or something like that. I mean, they were like, okay, show up for your trial. And most of them obviously left the country. Right. In the late 30s, as they're just learning to do this, they're kind of acting like the law enforcement officials they are and not, you know, like counter terrorism or counter espionage operatives. And so yeah, in their early cases, some of which were really quite embarrassing. They do things like go ahead and arrest everyone and then tell them to promise to show back up for the grand jury. Of course, they just all go back to Germany. But they do learn as the war goes along, they have a big high profile case in 1942 that I dedicated chapter two that involves kind of an amazing story of German saboteurs who were brought over on you boats, you know, dropped off on the beach in Florida and Long Island. And it's a, it's kind of a big detective saga of sorts that ends with their capture and execution. And also in the 30s, and this is partly due to the organized crime sufferer, you know, the Dillinger Alvin Karpus type people who, for fans of bizarre American history, Alvin Karpus shows up later teaching Charles Manson how to play guitar and federal. Is that right? I didn't know that. Yeah. There's so many bizarre connections through all of this kind of stuff. But Hoover also starts using confidential informants. Can you talk a little bit about how that was a change and how that became super important to the FBI's kind of MO going forward? Yeah, when Hoover became director, he had all of these things that he promised he was never going to do. He was never going to wiretap. He was never going to use kind of strong arm or third degree tactics, you know, physical force. And he was not going to use informers because they were, you know, kind of just untrustworthy, etc. Well, a lot of these, as he gets into much more serious both intelligence and law enforcement work, a lot of those promises fall by the wayside. But he has a really interesting policy that he does hold for almost all of his career, which is that he does not want his own agents going undercover in the way that we might think about, you know, an actual employee of the bureau pretending to be someone else going undercover. What they got very good at doing, although, you know, there are ups and downs along the way, was either paying regular citizens to go ahead and join fascist groups, communist groups, whatever group they might deem suspect or recruiting people who were inside those groups, of course, to inform on their comrades and colleagues. After, you know, FDR says you've got to help rid us of domestic fascism and, you know, and the return of kind of surveillance of political groups. Is there any turning back then? Does that become, you know, an inextricable part of the FBI's day to day operations? It really does. Most of the programs and strategies and methods that are put in place during the war simply continue on and in certain cases escalate after the war. So the targets change a little bit because, you know, once the war is over, there's a lot less concern with fascists, with, you know, Japanese loyalists, those interests sort of die away. But what really persists is the FBI surveillance of the left in general. And that's one of the weird ironies, or I don't know if it's an irony or if it's weird, but that in the 30s, a number of organizations or a number of things to strategies to surveil, usually German allied groups like the Bund movement and whatnot, oftentimes with the support of either communists in America or communist sympathizers in Congress and whatnot, end up being turned, that surveillance state or apparatus ends up being turned against Soviet people or suspected Soviets, spies, sympathizers and later in the 40s and 50s. Right. I mean, there's this fascinating period from 1939 to 1941, which is the period of the Nazi Soviet pact. And that's when the FBI is really ramping up and they're looking, again, both at fascists and at communists, it's kind of Soviet connections. But of course, in 1941, then the Soviet Union becomes an American ally, but the FBI actually doesn't stop doing what it was already doing. And it's that that continues on and then becomes, of course, the Red Scare after the war. There's a moment around this time that you mentioned in the book, too, that kind of communism or political subversion could be fascist, but it's mostly communist. And homosexuality or sexual deviancy or alternativeness, they get yoked together. Was that true in Hoover's mind, the idea that homosexuals and communists or subversives are almost always the same thing? Yeah, there are these two quote unquote scares that happen in the 40s and 50s. One is the Red Scare, which is aimed at communists, leftists in general. And then the other is the Lavender Scare, which was aimed at gay people primarily employed in the federal government. And it became federal policy in the 40s, 50s and into the 60s that you, if you were found to be gay, you could be and would be fired from your job in the federal government. And so there are all sorts of ways in which these things are kind of connected in the language and the images of the time, right? These are both whether you're a communist or you're gay, you're keeping secrets, and those secrets are making you vulnerable and your loyalties might lie elsewhere, right? In the case of quote unquote homosexuals, the idea was that you could be blackmailed because you have this dangerous secret, right? So there's a lot of cultural imagery that sort of links these two groups. Hoover, interestingly, I would say treats them the same and different. So he enforces federal policy. And so the FBI is conducting pretty extensive investigations of people's sex lives as well as their political backgrounds during these years and often getting people fired from their jobs. But Hoover is much, much more outspoken publicly about anti-communism. He talks very rarely about homosexuality. And that is in part because it wasn't his core interest, but it was in part because he himself was primarily living in a world with other men, having a relationship with another man, and was vulnerable to all sorts of rumors about his own sexuality. We will talk about that and the cocktail dress myths and whatnot in a moment. But one of the things both in the 40s and the 50s during the McCarthy period, but even during World War II, and you said you're one of your goals and you certainly do this in writing the book is to complicate Hoover's legacy, he is on the right side of the Korematsu decision. He was against interning Japanese Americans. And the people on the other side included people like Earl Warren, a governor of California who was progressive, as well as Franklin Roosevelt. What was his rationale? And on a certain level, why was he so good on that and then so bad in so many other ways? Yeah, it's a great, you know, it's one of J Edgar Hoover's better moments, which is that in 1942, he opposes mass internment of Japanese Americans. So why does he do that? Because it seems kind of counter to our vision of Hoover. And I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is that he genuinely thought it was unconstitutional, particularly when you were talking about American citizens. And that's about half of the people who were interned were in fact American citizens. And he would just thought you couldn't do that. He thought it was unconstitutional. And he thought it wouldn't really stand the test of history very well. I think he was looking back to moments like World War I and the Palmer raids where he had been involved in programs that came under a lot of criticism. And he could sort of see that coming with Japanese internment. Probably the most important reason, slightly less principled reason, was that the FBI and the Justice Department were already running their own internment program. And so they had a very specific vision of how that ought to run. So they were looking not only at Japanese people, but at people of German descent, at people of Italian descent. And they were making individual cases against them. And that's how he thought it ought to go, that there were people who were dangerous, disloyal during wartime, but that the FBI could tell you who they were, that these cases ought to be made individually and that everybody else didn't need to worry about it because Jay and Hoover was on the case. So that's where his professionalism and his his belief in his own expertise in his own systems really trumps larger scale kind of anxieties or hysteria. Do you know offhand how many Italian, either probably not Italian American citizens, but Italian resident aliens or German resident aliens, what numbers were being put into relocation camps or internment camps during World War II? Yeah, I don't know the final numbers, but it's in the thousands. And you're right. So they are all non-citizens who are being interned in various ways. I think my impression just from looking at the FBI's own early numbers, and this would have been early on, is that the number of Japanese were higher, was higher than either Germans or Italians. But there are substantial numbers of Germans and Italians who are sent to camps, sometimes families, but often just individuals. In the 50s, you know, he was also kind of on or, you know, he was not an ally of Joe McCarthy or of the most kind of insane, overwrought hysterical witch hunts for communists. Where did that come from? And how did he, you know, your book does a good job of this of how did he undermine Joe McCarthy while not becoming a target of McCarthy's wrath? Yeah, when we think about the McCarthy era, right, obviously McCarthy is the figure we tend to think of. But I think Hoover was much more important in a couple of ways. So he really takes anti-communism as the cause of his life. And it makes him incredibly popular in the 40s and 50s. He's doing that work before McCarthy comes along. He's doing it while McCarthy's there, and he's doing it after McCarthy has been kind of censured and driven out of political life. And he is, if I'm sorry to interrupt, I mean, at certain points, it seems that he interprets any disagreement with him about what it means to be American or whatever, as it means you're a communist. I mean, that's one of the odd things about Hoover. It seems like at a certain point, it becomes impossible to disagree with him and him not to cast that in archly ideological terms. Yeah, and I think there are two things going on there. One is that he just hated criticism. He had a powerful sense of his own righteousness and his own rightness. And he really went after people who criticized him for any reason. And that is true throughout his career. And then second, he just had an incredibly expansive vision of what the struggle against communism meant. So I think we could imagine an FBI director in the 40s and 50s, it's the early Cold War. The Communist Party is in fact getting money and support from the Soviet Union. There is in fact some level of Soviet espionage. So anyone in this position is going to be doing some of that. But you could think of someone who would just kind of take it as a national security matter, conduct these espionage investigations, et cetera, and be done with it. But Hoover did something very, very different, which was to kind of frame it in these grand existential terms. We are battling atheistic communism. And therefore, all Americans should be going to church and participating in religious rituals, et cetera, et cetera. And so he had a highly expansive, very moralistic vision of what all of this meant. Yeah. And if you didn't agree with him, he then found you suspect. So how did he kind of stick the knife in Joe McCarthy, though? Because McCarthy was also as ardent a anti-communist. Right. So they certainly shared a lot of ideas, and they were actually pretty friendly with each other in a social sense. They hung out with the same people often. But Hoover did not like McCarthy because he thought he was sort of a loose cannon. He thought that he lied. He thought that he was a headline monger and a demagogue. And he thought therefore that McCarthy was actually doing a lot of danger to the anti-communist cause. The thing that he least liked about McCarthy was that McCarthy kept trying to kind of take the credibility of the FBI to back up his own claims. So he would say things like, you know, there are these communists in the State Department, and if we can open up the FBI files, I guarantee they will show what I'm saying. Of course, that is the last thing that Hoover, the institution builder wants. So he works at various moments from 1950 to 54, particularly with the Eisenhower administration to sort of say, nope, actually, the FBI files won't necessarily support what Joe McCarthy is claiming. And that really helps to discredit him and bring him down. Towards the, you know, in the 50s, the other thing that kind of gets up and running in a big way is the civil rights movement. And this goes back to earlier concerns that Hoover had evinced, you know, about race mixing and things like that. But there and there are, I mean, to be fair to the historical record, there are, there were communists who were involved in the mainstream civil rights movement, including people who were associates of Martin Luther King and things like that. But you get to this point then where Hoover is identifying the civil rights movement or any kind of desegregation efforts as a communist plot to overturn and destroy America. Can you talk a little bit about how he built that case both in his own head? And it wasn't just him. I mean, this is, you know, common of a lot of people who are, you know, Democrats and Republicans at the time, but Southern Democrats, you know, somehow the, the institution of segregation and Americanism were conflated. And so if you were for integration, you were anti-American, which also meant then you were a communist. What, what was going on there? And how did that affect the way that Hoover focused the attentions of the FBI? Well, I think, you know, on race and on many other issues, it's probably easiest to just think of Hoover as essentially a defender of the status quo. And so social movements, organizations, forms of protest that were seeking to upend power relations, existing social hierarchies he tended to be very suspicious of. And the civil rights movement, I would say above all, you know, in fact, if you look at his career, nobody absorbed the weight and the cruelty and the power of the FBI as much as black radicals of one sort or another from the mainstream civil rights movement into the Communist Party, you know, later the Black Power Movement, the Nation of Islam, a lot of the FBI's energy and capacity was always aimed at those groups and figures who Hoover saw as this deep threat to, you know, everything from, from the racial order to the workings of American politics to simply his friends who were Southern Democrats. There are some interesting moments where he makes exceptions to that pattern in the 40s. He does begin to investigate lynchings in the South in part because he thinks that that kind of violence is a challenge to federal authority, to federal legitimacy. And he does some of that in the 60s as well. But the overall pattern is pretty distinct. And yeah, at one point you mentioned that when he finally kind of gets motivated to go against the Ku Klux Klan, and I guess in the 60s really, part of it is because he was thinking of them, he was linking them to black radicals and that they were both operating outside the law, you know, and it's a bizarre kind of equation, certainly a moral equivalency that doesn't pass the laugh test, but the way he could find it within him to push against the Ku Klux Klan is that these guys are acting, you know, they're mavericks. They're outside the law just like the Black Panther Party or the SNCC, the SNC-SIT. Right. Hoover focused almost all of his energies on, you know, the left writ large, particularly on the civil rights movement as it began to emerge in the 50s. But there were these moments where if you met one of two criteria or really both criteria, he might go after white supremacist groups, neo-Nazi groups, other kind of far-right groups as well. One was the use of violence. The other was kind of thumbing their nose at federal authority and, you know, a lot of massive resistance in the South. A lot of what the Klan was doing was saying, you know, the federal government can't come into the South and enforce civil rights law. And in those moments, Hoover said, oh, yeah, really well, you know, watch us do it. So there were those exceptions. But with the civil rights movement, it was a much broader right. He associated it with communism. He associated it with kind of embarrassing the United States on the world stage and providing Soviet propaganda. He didn't like civil disobedience, which he saw as a form of lawbreaking. There was just a basic level of racism behind all of this. And so it's all in this big stew. And then of course, with King, this escalates and escalates in really dramatic ways. Yeah. And it is kind of amazing to think, you know, with somebody like Martin Luther King or civil disobedience, and the way that King practiced it was that you took your punishment. I mean, that was the moral part of it. And he's drawing from Henry David Thoreau as much as anybody. So it's a form of political protest that is so American for Hoover to be like, this is anti American, you know, he's doing a lot of mental gymnastics there. I first, I think I first became aware of your work. About a decade ago, you found an unredacted version of the letter that the FBI, somebody within the FBI or associated with the FBI, sent to Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide, you know, when he was a month away from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in what was 64, I guess. Yeah, late 64. Yeah. Could you describe what that letter, you know, where did it come from? What did it say? And how does that kind of exemplify Hoover's, you know, weird obsession and fixation on Martin Luther King in particular? Yeah, that is probably the best thing I'm ever going to find in an archive. I thought, well, this is sort of, you know, the holy grail of the kind of research that I do. But, yeah, it's true about a decade ago, as I was doing the research for this book, I came across an unredacted version of what was even then already a very famous letter, the existence of which had been established in the 70s with the Church Committee, which was this anonymous, threatening letter that the FBI had sent to King during this critical period of his life. So that in many ways was the kind of lowest moment of an incredibly extensive campaign, first of surveillance, then of disruption and harassment that the FBI engaged in against King sort of started out looking at a couple of his advisors who were involved with the Communist Party, and that was one way in that turned into wiretaps on many of his associates, which then turned into wiretaps on King himself, which then turned into bugging his hotel rooms, which then led them to evidence of his extramarital sexual activity that they were recording. And so in this moment in late 1964, Hoover both publicly denounced King in a confrontation as quote the most notorious liar in America. It's an interesting public confrontation. And then secretly the FBI put together these tapes and this anonymous kind of dirty tricks letter purporting to come from a disillusioned admirer that has all sorts of details about King's sex life is clearly meant to threaten him, either drive him out of public life or as many people interpret it, get him to actually kill himself. Why didn't it work? Yeah, it's really interesting. So the FBI did a lot of peddling of this information about King and particularly about King's sex life to members of Congress, to members of the press during this period, and then of course, engaging in this mailing to King himself. And a lot of people, you know, just thought it was kind of political dynamite. They didn't want to touch it. The press didn't want to print it. There are some kind of offhand references at various moments in Congress and in the press. There are a lot of urgent meetings with other members of the Civil Rights Movement, other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, who really come to the FBI, beg them to stop doing this. The FBI was a lot closer with, you know, the NAACP and more kind of conventional DC civil rights leaders. And a lot of them came and kind of pleaded with the Bureau to stop doing it, which they both did and didn't. But it didn't really become public in a significant way. What does that, I mean, does it suggest, you know, I guess on the one hand, it plainly shows that Jagger Hoover was willing to go to extreme lengths to discredit, you know, his, what he perceived as his political adversaries. On another level, there's some restraint there, there, right? In that he did not call a press conference and make this public. He did, he, he desisted after a certain point, right? Although, as your book points out, I mean, the relationship between Jagger Hoover and Robert Kennedy in particular is vexed because Bobby Kennedy signed off on many of these wiretaps or knew all of this information, and then later kind of threw Hoover under the bus or pretended that he was not implicated in it. But I mean, it does this show like, did Hoover learn something from the failure to kind of unmask Martin Luther King as a serial philanderer? And of course, you know, David Garrow and other Martin Luther King biographers have said there is, you know, it's, it's not simply that King was sleeping around. I mean, there's accounts of sexual violence and whatnot that are deeply troubling, which have little or nothing to do with King's civil rights work. But, you know, what, what did Hoover take away from the failure of, you know, of his attacks on King, you know, and then the assassination of King as well as Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X and things like that? Yeah, well, I think Hoover was frustrated by his inability to, in fact, you know, bring down Martin Luther King or damage his reputation. But you also see him kind of calculating in the documents about how far this can be pushed without discrediting the FBI. I mean, I think one of the things that's really interesting to me is that as you look at these kind of behind the scenes records, you see how many people in positions of power did actually have some sense of what the FBI was doing, right? It wasn't publicly known. But King certainly knew about it. Other people in the movement knew that they were being surveilled and that there was lots of wiretapping and bugging going on that the FBI was really gunning for King. Lyndon Johnson knew, major newspaper editors knew, members of Congress knew, if only because they were getting this information, there's really only one way to get that information. You know, and none of them publicly denounced King, but also none of them went after Hoover either. And so I think he had a sense that he could do quite a lot of this without himself suffering political consequences either. And of course, he all throughout his career, but especially I guess starting maybe not especially, but in the sixties, he also started doing the outward facing public relations stuff. You spend a fair amount of time talking about a TV show called the FBI with Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. This haunts the reruns of my childhood, you know, of sick days and things like that. How did Hoover promote the vision of himself, but also the agency throughout the popular culture? Because he seemed to be incredibly savvy at doing that. Yeah, it's true that people who came of age in the in the sixties can, and I say that I'm writing about Hoover, they often say the FBI do the opening segment of that series, which was very popular beginning in 1965. But public relations were an absolutely key part of his career of the FBI's apparatus beginning in the 1930s. You know, he was not only good at getting his message out into the press and into Hollywood and ultimately on TV, but in cultivating popular constituencies that were going to support him. You know, one of the savviest things I think that he did was have a policy that, you know, the FBI would kind of create some little piece of propaganda about how great they were. And if a small town newspaper editor went ahead and published that, Hoover would have a letter sent to that editor with his byline saying, thank you so much for this. And then, you know, you got a letter from the great J. Edgar Hoover, and it was sort of this brilliant thing that kept this big, big popular constituency of his quite loyal to him. Another point that you make that, you know, kind of goes in Hoover's favor. Again, you know, it's wrong. It's not like you're making the case for J. Edgar Hoover as, you know, the greatest American or anything. No, I'm definitely not doing this. No, no. But I mean, what fleshes things out is his engagement with the mafia and this is, you know, or actual organized crime. One of the knocks on Hoover was always that and, you know, again, I come from parents who, you know, grew up, you know, Hoover was a great man, you know, he's like Robert Moses or FDR or Truman or whatever. And, you know, one of the knocks on Hoover was that he failed to take the mafia seriously. Partly, my mother was Italian, so her family who hated the mafia but reveled in this was that he thought Italians were too stupid to kind of pull off a national organized crime syndicate. That's wrong, right? And it's not that he was, you know, particularly prescient or laser focused on stopping organized crime. But what's the revisionist's take on Hoover's understanding and treatment of the mafia? Yeah, I think there's some truth to this, you know, longstanding idea that he was pretty slow to recognize the mafia as a kind of formal crime syndicate. He certainly had all sorts of weird ideas about various racial groups, probably including Italians, though I didn't come across very much of that. And so, you know, there's some truth to that. But it's also clear that beginning in the 1950s when, you know, things like Appalachian, which was a raid on this kind of mafia confab, when things like that start to happen, Hoover says, okay. That was like the burning man for mafia. Exactly. In the middle of nowhere, and upside New York. We're all having dinner together and then fleeing into the woods when they're like tiny Italian thin loafers. Exactly. So, you know, in a moment like that, he changes course pretty quickly. And one of the things that starts happening in the late 50s and to early 60s is that the FBI has some success in conducting pretty secret operations, particularly against the Chicago mob. They actually get microphones into mob headquarters, I mean, big things that they're pretty proud of. But they're not the kinds of things that you can talk about publicly. So, Hoover is not talking about them publicly. And there actually is not a whole lot of federal jurisdiction on this as much as there's kind of public pressure and public desire for it. Hoover is a little bit like, you know, what are the laws that we're actually going to use to prosecute? He gets very mad when Robert Kennedy comes in as Attorney General in the early 60s and says, by golly, we're going to go after organized crime. And it really does ramp up at that point. But Hoover always thought it was a little unfair to be criticizing the FBI, which had been doing some stuff at least. You know, Hoover kind of like Elvis had a bad 60s, really, right? You know, he tried to, you know, talk, I guess, a bit about how the Cointel Pro, and is that the correct pronunciation or is it Cointel Pro? I pronounce it Cointel Pro, but I've pronounced it the way it is. You are the historian. And it comparts with my pronunciation, so let's go with that. Talk about how, you know, there was a version of that that went after right-wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but the main focus were on, you know, black power groups like the Black Panthers, and also the anti-war movement, or the New Left, particularly the anti-war movement. How did that work to kind of, you know, and at this point Hoover is in his 70s. He has managed to get LBJ and other people to kind of waive mandatory retirement ages for him. How did that kind of show that, I mean, he's like Frank Sinatra in a way, you know, where he is trying to sing, you know, Beatles songs, but he just looks really bad doing it. How did Cointel Pro kind of show that he had lost whatever understanding he might have had on America, you know, in the late 60s? Right. Well, Hoover certainly is trying to talk to the new generation, though he is also conducting surveillance of the Beatles among everyone else. Yeah, sure, sure. Well, they were subversive of something, maybe not of American virtue, but... But Cointel Pro is, I think, you know, probably the most notorious program of Hoover's career now was not publicly known for most of his career, but it stands for Counterintelligence Program, and it was, as you say, largely aimed at groups on the left, the student activist movement, the anti-war movement, civil rights, black power in particular, a whole range of 60s activist organizations, and it was not just a surveillance operation. It was deliberately an operation that was aimed at causing kind of disruption and paranoia, getting movements of organizations and leaders to fight with themselves to become disorganized and kind of to collapse from within. I think there are a couple of things that are particularly interesting about it that are a little bit less known. One is that it actually started in the 50s as an operation aimed at the Communist Party and really, you know, a sense that people didn't like prosecutions and such so much anymore. The Supreme Court was kind of turning on the Red Scare so that the FBI was going to have to do stuff secretly, though it is also clear that they did inform Dwight Eisenhower and Congress, at least in some general way, that they were engaged in these kind of disruptive activities and nobody objected or said much of anything about it. As you say, there was a part of COINTELPRO that was aimed at kind of far-right and white supremacist groups and it was exactly the same kinds of methods that were being deployed against other groups. So, you know, disruption and formers going in and kind of misguiding meetings, fake press reports, sewing rumors, all of these kind of disruptive tactics. And so, it's a really interesting lesson both in what happens kind of when there's a whole secret operation, but the ways in which these methods move from one group to another pretty easily. You know, I think of the FBI in the 60s also undertook at some expense, at taxpayer expense, an investigation to figure out what the lyrics to Louis Louis were and failed to do it. I mean, I guess this is, before we talk briefly about his life and his, you know, his kind of personal life and what came after him, you know, is there, I mean, do you consider Hoover a success or how do you, you know, how do you deal with that? Because in many ways, like his, you know, when I read your biography, and it's funny, you mentioned the Beatles, like when I read a Beatles biography, you know, like a lot of people, I'm obsessive about that. And I find every detail interesting. And then I'm kind of like, okay, well, is that all they did after, you know, a 900 page book? And they changed the world. They were, you know, all of this kind of stuff. Hoover probably, you know, this goes to the question of the American Century to the extent that the American Century happened. He is one of the main players in this. He created as much of kind of 20th century, you know, America as anyone. Was he successful? Or how do you measure whether the FBI was good, bad, or indifferent when you take the measure of his life? Yeah, well, I think there are a lot of ways to measure that. I mean, the book opens with a moment in 1959, when this big Hollywood movie called the FBI story is coming out. And it's sort of a grand vision of Hoover's bureau over 30, 35 years. And it suggests, you know, if Hoover had retired in 1959, he would be remembered very differently than he is now. And I think that we would answer this question, was he a success differently? You know, I'm pretty critical of some of the things that he did during the Red Scare and to the Communist Party. But he was incredibly popular for doing that. And it's only in the 60s that he begins to really lose some of his popularity that things polarize and fracture and his reputation takes a big hit. So he was certainly successful at staying in office because he was there till the day he died. I think in many ways, by his own terms, he was successful at kind of policing and enforcing certain boundaries to American democracy. And I think that was kind of his political goal in deciding who was legitimate, who was illegitimate. I think a lot of the movements of the 50s and 60s would have gone differently without the FBI's involvement. And you know, he didn't crush those movements, but he certainly changed them and contained them in various ways. No, I don't think that's a particularly good thing. Other people might think you want to call that a success of sorts. And I think that he was quite successful at building an institution with a lot of staying power in the government that even today, 50 years after his death, you know, bears the stamp of his priorities and his ideas to some degree. Again, do we want to talk about that as like arousing success that that's a sort of subjective judgment? But he did in many ways what he set out to do. Briefly, let's talk a little bit about his personal life. And this is something where I guess it's really, I mean, these rumors were floating around during his life. And even in what I think was the first biography of him written by a conservative writer, Ralph de Toledano, who wrote for National Review and was actually a member of Jim Garrison's office that tried Clay, I'm sorry, Clay, the businessman in New Orleans, yeah, and whatnot. But, you know, was Hoover gay in any meaningful way that we can talk about and does that matter? Yeah, I would say yes and no, which might be an unsatisfying answer. So it's clear during his lifetime, you know, he'd never had a significant relationship with a woman. All of his significant relationships were with men. And the most important by far was with Clyde Tolson, who was his number two at the FBI, but was also really his social partner and spouse that traveled together, had all their meals together, etc. So that's all very clear. And that's pretty much out in the open. I mean, that's, it's very well documented. There's not much question. Yeah, you document how, you know, you know, Richard and Pat Nixon would go out with them and then send notes saying, like, thanks to you and Clyde for a wonderful, I mean, they were treated as a married couple. Exactly. Exactly. In Washington, in LA, in New York, that's how that's how they moved through their lives. So what can we then say about that? They themselves, of course, did not describe themselves as being gay. And they were part of the, you know, enforcement apparatus for purges of gay people from the federal government. They, we don't know if they were having sex, right? We just don't know that we can't know that we will probably never know that. And that gives me a small measure of relief, I have to say. You don't want to know too much about. Yeah, you know, okay, with that one being gray. And, you know, it's also clear that Hoover kind of policed in a very aggressive way any rumors about his own sexuality. And so there are moments where, you know, someone's at a party, they mentioned they've heard this rumor about the director and there was a lot of that at the time. And that, you know, they would get an FBI agent showing up at their door saying, you should never say such scurrilous things about our fine upstanding FBI director. So that's kind of the obverse of if you're a small town newspaper editor, you get the letter from Jagger Hoover. Exactly. You either get that or you get the FBI guy saying what he wants or not doing what he wants. And he had both, you know, the fist is Santa Claus. He knows if you're, you know, he's watching you, right? That's that's what he wanted. Yeah. So, you know, I think in the end, I do think it's useful to think of of Hoover as a gay man in the sense that clearly his deepest affinities and affections were for other men. And I think that he and Tulsa, you know, loved each other and and functioned as life partners for each other. But beyond that, it's hard to say it's not language of their own relationship. And I mean, I guess this would be a different conversation. But if Hoover lived in a time when homosexuality was more accepted, it might have changed not only his conception of himself, but of masculinity and the way that he kind of projected that onto law enforcement or the institution that he created. There is no evidence that he is a cross-dresser. Is that correct? There is no evidence that I think we would recognize as real historical evidence. There were rumors. There are people who purport to have seen things, but they're not super reliable witnesses. And those stories mostly start cropping up after he died, right? I mean, I'm always from from the point of view of kind of how myths become real. It's always fascinating that the the cross-dressing stuff usually gets sourced to a kind of downmarket British writer writing sometime after Hoover died. That's kind of the first print version of this. Right. It's mostly from a biography by a British journalist named Anthony Summers that came out in the early 90s. So it's 20 years after Hoover's death. And of course, he's not around to say whether these things were true or not. And then it was popularized in the Oliver Stone movie JFK, right? It seemed to be floating around. It caught on immediately. I mean, it is still one of the first things that people asked me about Hoover. That must be great where you have a mass, the 800-page or 700-page biography in the people. What they really want to know is what size did he wear, right? And where did he buy shoes? Why are you interested in this? You've written about political violence and kind of the anxiety around that. Why are you interested in Hoover or in this broader part of American society and history? Yeah. Well, I got interested in Hoover writing my last book, which was about a bomb attack on Wall Street in 1920 and the kind of history of radical terrorism during that period. And what was interesting to me was that he was there as a very young man already doing this kind of work. And I could see these ideas kind of spreading throughout the rest of the century. So I guess a couple of things interest me. One is that I think he shows the real centrality of anti-communism or the struggle over communism to nearly every aspect of American politics over the course of the 20th century. I think he turns our eye a little bit away from presidents and elections and political parties and all of these important things about politics to this other really important story of what happened in the 20th century, which is the growth of the federal government, trying to make sense of the relationship between the social welfare state and the security state and the administrative state and all of these big things that are always as sexy as elections, but are really, really important to think about. And then I also wanted to say something different about Hoover himself, because I think there has been a tendency to kind of cast him as a rogue villain. And one of these figures, if only we had known, these things never would have happened. But the truth is that he was very popular. He was widely supported on both sides of the aisle. And so I think if there are things that we didn't like about Hoover and what he did and how he built the FBI and the state, we have to actually look at this broader history as much as we make him into this singular. Isn't it a brutal irony? And I mean, I certainly think that conservatives in particular, but also maybe liberals and progressives and libertarians, that one of the reasons why the American state grew as vastly as it did in the 20th century is because it was trying to undermine communism. And so it becomes this mirror image of it. This is actually kind of the thesis of Arthur E. Kirch in a book in the mid 50s called The Decline of American Liberalism that in fighting communism with a garrison state, we end up becoming more and more like the Soviet Union without kind of acknowledging that. And I find, you know, your book certainly kind of suggests something along those lines. I wouldn't say that's the main argument by any stretch. Yeah. And on that point, to jump in, I also wanted to think a little bit about the history of conservatism because we tend to, you know, describe the conservative movement as being anti-federal or anti-statist in some way. And yet here was J. Edgar Hoover, this ardent conservative, in fact, a hero of the conservative movement who is really deep within the state during this whole period that we talk about as kind of the heyday of liberalism. And that set of issues is really fascinating to me. Yeah. And what do you make of the contemporary moment? You know, and I just, a couple of, like an hour before we started talking, I was reading about how, you know, the FBI was working so closely with Twitter in terms of trying to manage or massage certain types of, the reach of certain types of people or banning them altogether. Books like Timothy Wiener's Enemies, which is a history of the FBI that came out about a decade ago, posits not only is the FBI a effectively a criminal organization within the government, but that it has gotten worse since J. Edgar Hoover. That, you know, I mean, which was kind of like the mind-blowing revolution is that Hoover was terrible and he might not even be in the top three worst FBI heads. What do you think about the FBI since Hoover? You know, and you mentioned the church commission or church committee, you know, we didn't understand a lot of what was going on in Hoover's FBI until the 70s. And those commissions, Rockefeller also ran one, you know, which revealed so many extra legal, illegal just, you know, criminal acts by the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all in the interest of reining them in. That doesn't seem to have worked very well. It just seems to have kind of given them new ways of figuring out how to get around whatever limits are placed on them by the Constitution or by Congress. Well, this is, you know, it's a critical history of Hoover. I'm not sure I'm as critical of the FBI as that description would suggest, but you know, I do think that the FBI is in a position now where they're encountering a lot of issues that would be really familiar to Hoover. So one is that you're supposed to be this apolitical organization and you're being drawn into these incredibly politicized investigations, right, from Trump to January 6th. And that is to, I mean, the Hillary in 2016, I mean, James Comey, you know, she still says that he cost her the election. Exactly. And so, you know, Hoover would have recognized that. I think there are all sorts of questions about surveillance and infiltration, right? Whether you're talking about the FBI Black Lives Matter, or you're talking about, you know, calls for them to be more aggressive toward groups on the right. You know, that I think is all deeply resonant with this other period. And I think that the FBI still kind of does the things that Hoover set it up to do, you know, it's law enforcement and domestic intelligence. It is, has this kind of... It's being provocative. I mean, in the trial of the people, you know, accused of planning to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor, you know, they were like, oh, you know, there were a bunch of federal informants in here who were actually the ones like, no, no, do it this way. Do it this way. Right. Those issues came up a lot during Hoover's period, particularly in kind of plan investigations, that sort of thing. And, you know, I think the FBI still has this kind of tension between, on the one hand, kind of professional, scientific, expert identity, and then on the other hand, you know, certain kinds of pretty powerful, institutional culture and these things kind of spin around together as they did, as they did then. I mean, the funny thing at the moment is that Democrats now like the FBI so much more than Republicans do, which has not happened in half a century, but we're seeing something interesting there. Yeah, that and the, you know, shifting kind of valences of Russia in, you know, in American political discourse. It's like, you know, so we now have a Republican Party that is objectively pro-Putin and anti-FBI. It's kind of like, I must have missed the season, you know, where that plot line got introduced and turned around. Do you, I guess as a final question, and this might be on beyond your purview, one of the things that is phenomenal about the book beyond its absolute readability and its, you know, attention to detail and your unwillingness to go beyond what the historical record shows, I guess my question is, is it conceivable or can we conceive of a federal agency that does what the FBI is supposed to do that does not get politicized or does not overreach in kind of predictable ways and recurrent ways? Because all, again, and I think, you know, your book does a fantastic job of laying out all of the tensions within Hoover and within the institution that he created. You know, sometimes he went by the letter of the law, other times he didn't. He pulled back, he refused to do political work for Richard Nixon, which in an interesting way gives us Watergate, which in an interesting way gives us the Church Commission, which tells us that J. Edgar Hoover was not a good guy for most of his career, you know, was very an ambivalent figure. Is there a way to conceive of a federal intelligence agency or a bureau that does not become what the FBI seems to have become, which is this endlessly politicized, professionalized kind of vague institution that is, you know, is never quite what it's supposed to be? Well, I think that the FBI structurally, you know, is going to be drawn in some of those directions always. And so it's a question of what kind of limits and accountability and transparency are going to look like. And that was what the church committee was trying to do, what the reforms of the 70s were trying to do, did it successfully to some degree? Some of that was undone in the wake of 9-11, right? So we've had a number of different ways of kind of thinking about accountability and transparency. You know, I would say from Hoover's era that the impulses that led to the greatest abuses were tended to happen in two areas. One was when Hoover, and therefore the institution that he was a part of, and was directing, when they had such a powerful sense of their own righteousness, of their own correctness that they understood themselves to be kind of acting for a cause. And therefore anyone who was critical or disagreed with them was suspect, right? So that sense of really powerful, uncritical self-righteousness tended to drive a lot of the biggest abuses and excesses. And then part of what enabled that to happen was an apparatus of secrecy where the FBI could say, well, I don't know how popular this will be, or I don't know if we really have jurisdiction for this, but we're right. And therefore we'll just do it in secret. We'll figure out a way to carry this out. And I think both of those certainly in the Hoover era were the places where the bureau made its greatest missteps, its greatest moments of kind of overreach and abuse. So those are probably features just to watch for in the present as well. The book has been extremely well received. It's shown up on various bestseller lists and best of the year lists and things like that. I'm curious among your historian brethren, your professional historian brethren, are people like, I wish I hadn't written that? Or are they like, this really is making me think harder and deeper about the way that we do history? Yeah, I've been amazed that people mostly seem to be willing to think hard and long. And it is a long book about J. M. Hoover. And I wasn't entirely sure that that was going to be the case. We've had pretty fixed ideas about him for a pretty long period of time. But I'm happy to say that I think most people have been ready to kind of open up. And I think for historians, you know, we're generally pretty glad when projects that take 13 years of research and all these documents actually that anyone reads them, it's kind of a win for everyone whenever that happens. Well, it certainly is a win for the American reading public. And I hope people in government read this as well, or at least have it read to them in summary form. Beverly Gage, thank you so much for writing. G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and the making of The American Century. And for talking to Reza. Great. Thanks for having me.