Taking Hoover Out of Context

...The author therefore fails to distinguish the actual man and his bearing on history from the mythological lore about him woven by American popular culture...

...Hoover's career was tightly woven into the fabric of the nation's politics...

...No serious student of McCarthyism has ever made a remotely similar charge...

...What is startling is seldom true, and what is true is usually not startling...

...From 1919 until the end of his days, Hoover was a marked man to the revolutionary Left...

...The author began his research in the mid-1970s, when he could interview now-deceased agents from Hoover's early days...

...The men Hoover allied himself with during his long (1924-1972) tenure as head of the FBI held beliefs similar to his own...

...Biographies like Gentry's subtract both from our knowledge of Hoover and from our understanding of American history...

...Consequently, for the Left, discrediting him and the FBI was a way to deliver a blow to anti-Communism...

...There is, perhaps, a grain of truth there, but as the whole truth it is a bizarre distortion of what investigation and plain sense tell us about the way our government functions...

...He hated them and vice versa...

...to rip him out of context, to treat him as a free agent responding only to his private demons, is to promulgate a fantastic view that, unfortunately, has wide appeal these days...

...Since it has already been established, for example, that the Bureau maintained files on all of its celebrity critics, nothing is gained by reading file number 101 along with the hundred previously disclosed, even if each is greeted by an obligatory round of tsk-tsking...

...At age 22," Gentry tells us, "John Edgar Hoover had found his niche in life...

...I frankly do not believe that Hoover bought pornographic pictures from W. C. Fields to show to his cronies (supposedly these sketches of Eleanor Roosevelt looked like female genitals when held upside down), and I don't care if Fields said so, or if his friends say he said so...

...He even sees fit to include a great deal of gossip by Hoover's celebrity allies, acquaintances and victims, much of it taken from their biographies and memoirs...

...He had become a hunter of men...

...But biography is more than the accumulation of details...

...He is also a giant figure in our mythic history...

...But he does not examine how Hoover's FBI paralleled other agencies during the New Deal, or how Hoover's crime-busting of the '30s complemented the policies of a President as much concerned with political psychology as economic surgery ("nothing to fear but fear itself," remember...

...In the unlikely event that there is in the offing a comprehensive study of the historic role anti-Communists played in the demise of Communism, we may see a favorable reevaluation of Hoover's contribution to the fight...

...The writer must have a sense of the trajectory of the life he is re-creating, and how it related to the surrounding society...

...That demands rigid self-control on the part of the author, for he will discover that the most colorful stories about Hoover are just that: stories, circulated because they fit neatly into one of the alternative ideological perspectives...

...Hoover was an ideologue of the most extreme definition: patriotic, anti-Communist, moralistic, and racist, in approximately that order...

...those who hated him adhered to another set of political tenets...

...for the Right, boosting the agency's prestige was a way to maintain anti-Communism as an American orthodoxy...

...For the progressive Left, Hoover is not simply the man who led the drive against the Communist Party, he is one of the vital supports of its characteristic alienation from American politics...

...On the evidence of Russell Martin's brilliant Story that Stands Like a Dam, we could add to the list Floyd Dominy, head of the Bureau of Reclamation...

...I discount stories of that sort not because Hoover was a plaster saint, but because he was consumed by a sense of self-protectiveness that bordered on paranoia...

...It would be interesting to know what in the political culture from 1933 to 1960 let such men build powerful coalitions and accomplish bureaucratic prodigies unimaginable today...

...This suggests he was a hunter for the sake of the hunt...

...To confuse matters further, the Left and the Right each have produced their own mythic pasts, and Hoover looms large in both...

...In these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that we now have the third biography of the former FBI director to appear since his death—the other two being my own Secrecy and Power (1987), and Athan G. Theoharis and John S. Cox' The Boss (1989...

...McCarthyism,'" he writes, "was, from start to finish, the creation of one man, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover...

...To argue that the main theme of Hoover's life is not the record of his transgressions of civil liberties and public decency is to be labeled by some an apologist for him...

...Indeed, his reputation has more to do with popular dreams and fears than with the factual record of his life...

...Clearly, no biography of Hoover can be complete if it does not consider why these influential stereotypes (admittedly reduced here to their extreme essentials) came into existence, who subscribed to them, and the part they played in the country's political life...

...he played dirty with them and they returned the favor...

...Instead of Gentry's muddled study, we need an extension of the insight of Eugene Lewis, who noted in Public Entrepreneurship the similarities among political empire builders like Hoover and his coevals Hyman Rickover and Robert Moses...

...As for the collapse of Hoover's reputation, surely the discovery of his misdeeds was less of a factor than the disappearance of the brutal Cold War politics that made his actions possible—and to some extent necessary...

...The latest volume is by Curt Gentry, who with Vincent Bugliosi co-authored the sensational Helter-Skelter (1975), an account of Charles Manson's activities said to be the "best selling true crime book ever published...

...Curt Gentry never seems to have decided whether the real Hoover story is the sum total of every titillating event the FBI chief may or may not have been involved in, or whether it is his encounters with the great forces of his times...

...While Gentry dutifully recounts the well-known indiscretions, he does not alter the overall picture of Hoover's career...

...Most of the other salacious revelations of Hoover's personal life fail the same test of common sense...

...Nor do I find it plausible that Hoover held private screenings of pornographic films for FBI executives in the basement of the Bureau's headquarters...

...But the author appears to be uninterested in whether his statements are true or false...

...Nothing could be further from the truth...

...He never put himself in a position where someone might gain an advantage over him, and inviting professional associates to watch pornography with him would have made him especially vulnerable...

...If the unelected Hoover truly exercised control over legitimate national leaders through his secret blackmail files, then radicals are justified in denying the validity of the government and its policies...

...and its way of life...

...But don't hold your breath...

...Gentry does supply many interesting tidbits not widely known about Hoover's personal relationships with other public figures in Washington...

...Even during the relatively innocuous decade from 1924 to 1934, when the FBI's counter-radical operations were on a back burner, Hoover was seen as a symbol of the government's stand against the extreme Left...

...Gentry, alas, does not seem to worry about such pitfalls...

...Motiveless malignity was not the reason for Hoover's policies...

...One, now defunct except in American Legion bars and at Knights of Columbus reunions, presents him as being solely responsible for keeping the pink-tinged Washington establishment—teeming with such rascals as Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Henry Wallace, and Eleanor Roosevelt —from surrendering the country to the Russians...

...He and the FBI were charged with helping to shape a world order hospitable to the U.S...

...Obviously, too, no biography of Hoover can be worth much if it does not rigorously try to delineate myth and fact...

...Gentry provides examples of political favors Hoover extended to Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom the director enjoyed the closest and most productive relationship he had with any President...

...Such material lacks the impact of, say, a signed confession from the nation's legendary top G-man declaring that he framed Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs (an article of faith in some quarters), yet it is important to have all the details and they are not easy to get...

...To separate fact from fiction—particularly in the case of a hero/villain like J. Edgar Hoover—he has to experience the world through his subject's eyes for a while...

...Readers looking for new Hoover scandals will find little to satisfy them here...

...His excesses have to be regarded in the light of the nation's response to the international Communist movement—to the propaganda activities of the Comintern before World War II, for instance, and to the far Left's publicity drives in the years that followed the War...

...Yet the picture Gentry paints is of a Washington filled with ferocious games-playing backstabbers devoid of ideas or principles, obsessed with defaming one another in a Hobbesian struggle for survival...

...Over the years, two contrasting images of Hoover have developed...

...author, "Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover" By almost any standard, J. Edgar Hoover is one of the giant figures of 20th-century American history...

...The other my this that Hoover was an all-powerful and malevolent manipulator of Presidents and Congressmen who subverted constitutional democracy by turning American politics into a reflection of his anti-Communist, racist, homophobic obsessions...

...Still, civil libertarian outrage, though warranted, does not advance our understanding of what was going on...