OUR SECRET POLICE

Cox, Athan G. Theoharis And John Stuart

Our Secret Police THE BOSS: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition by Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox Temple University Press. 489 pp. $27.95. Like every other President who...

...Still, Kennedy didn't mind putting Hoover to work tapping the telephones of journalists, members of Congress, and his own appointees...
...Twenty years later, when Kennedy was in the White House, Hoover was still keeping track of Kennedy's "immoral conduct," and making sure that the President knew what Hoover knew...
...Hoover's long career, always characterized by opportunism, self-promotion, and utter contempt for democratic rights and civil liberties, is carefully documented in The Boss...
...Athan G. Theoharis, a professor of history at Marquette University who has become an outstanding authority on the Hoover era, and co-author John Stuart Cox, a free-lance writer, have compiled a breathtakingly detailed record of the FBI's assaults on the Constitution, based largely on never-before-released material from Hoover's secret files...
...FBI files on Kennedy reached back to the early 1940s, when the young Navy officer had an affair with a woman suspected (wrongfully) of being a German spy...
...In fact, no President—neither the liberals' sainted Franklin Roosevelt nor the archvillain Richard Nixon—was able to resist the temptation of having a formidable spy network at his personal and political disposal...
...Like every other President who held office during J. Edgar Hoover's forty-eight-year reign over the Federal Bureau of Investigation, John F. Kennedy had ample reason to be wary of the chief of America's secret police...
...But the larger lesson of this book is not to be found in Hoover's villainy but in the entire system's vulnerability to the most ominous abuse...

Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1


 
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