G-man: a book review

I just finished reading “G-man,” Beverly Gage’s Pulizer-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover. During his lifetime, Hoover became synonymous with the FBI, the agency he founded, developed and controlled until his death. In the beginning, Hoover conceived of the FBI as a purely investigative agency, apolitical and devoted to the most up-to-date technologies of crime-solving and record-keeping. Early on, he created a huge database of fingerprint, a database that proved key in, among other cases, the identification of James Earl Ray as Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin. Hoover accepted the FBI role in law enforcement only grudgingly.

Much of his career he was consumed with his war on communism. It began with the first red scare at the end of WWI, then flared again in the 1950s with the McCarthy era. Hoover was deeply conservative, sexist and racist. He hired blacks and women only for menial jobs, never as agents. He maintained a life-long association with the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which valorized the Confederacy and antebellum South. He feared the civil rights movement and despised MLK.

Hoover’s longevity in power owed itself to his ability to embrace overlords of both parties and make himself indispensable. In the case of JFK, he also kept files on Kennedy’s many extramarital relationships. This finally began to break down in Hoover’s 70s during the Nixon Administration. Although Nixon considered Hoover a close friend, he found Hoover to be a political liability and near the end of Hoover’s life was maneuvering to get Hoover to resign. Hoover died before those plans could be consummated. Ironically, had he lived and stayed as FBI director, Hoover might well have prevented the release of evidence that Nixon conspired in the Watergate coverup, evidence that led Nixon to resign.

One of the threads that runs through the book is Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson; they lived as husband and wife for many years and Hoover’s friends and supervisors always knew to include Tolson in any social gathering involving Hoover. While neither Hoover nor Tolson admitted to being gay, everyone who knew them professionally or personally knew and kept their secret.

As you might expect from a Pulitzer-winning book, the writing is excellent. It reminds me of Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. Both Hoover and Moses amassed enormous political power without ever having held elective office. Both shaped the worlds they occupied in huge and enduring ways. While the book is quite long and chock-full of detail, my interest never flagged. The only quibble I have is that I found the extent of coverage of Hoover’s homosexuality to be excessive. It never became an issue, and Gage doesn’t show how it affected his service in the FBI. But overall, I found this a thoroughly engrossing read, a story about an historical figure that shaped law enforcement and American politics throughout the 20^th century.