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Hoover and His FBI: A Study in Mediocrity?
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12917 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1987 |
4,239 Words |
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Alan J. Levine
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SECRECY AND POWER
The Life of J. Edgar Hoover
Richard Gid Powers
New York: The Free Press, 1987
605 pp., $27.95
For nearly fifty years, John Edgar Hoover was the head of the federal government's principal agency for law enforcement, and the man most responsible for protecting the United States from espionage and sabotage. Richard Gid Powers' book is a thoroughly researched and absorbing biography not only of Hoover the man, but of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he shaped in his own image. Made into an extension of Hoover's own personality, the FBI possessed not only its director's virtues but his defects. But for Powers' efforts, though, many of the recesses and peculiarities of Hoover's personality would doubtless be doomed to obscurity.
Clearly Hoover's organizational ability, dedication, and hard work were instrumental in forming the FBI - as were, unfortunately, his narrow-mindedness and prejudice. And the FBI, perhaps unjustly - has had to share the violent reversals suffered by Hoover's reputation - for, as Powers notes, it has improved since Hoover's death in 1972. From a small and rather disreputable agency in the 1920s, entangled in the worst scandals of the Harding administration, it became one of the most admired government agencies in the period from the New Deal to the end of the Eisenhower presidency. Subsequently, when its misdeeds were discovered in the 1970s, the FBI suffered a precipitous decline in public esteem from which it has not yet recovered. In fact, it is probable that both the early admiration and the later revulsion were rather exaggerated. Powers himself seems to waver uneasily between a restrained respect for Hoover and a detestation of him; and some of his explanations for Hoover's actions do not seem entirely defensible. They seem to owe more to ideological and sociological preconceptions than to the study of a man whose personality remains shadowy. The extent to which Hoover remains a mystery is typified by the several pages Powers expends on the issue of Hoover's sex life. Hoover apparently had no relations with women - or else he was amazingly skillful at hiding them - but maintained an unusually close friendship with his assistant Clyde Tolson; a cloud of rumor hung over their relationship even during Hoover's lifetime. But Powers' lengthy discussion could have been summarized in a single sentence. There is no proof, or disproof, of the claim that Hoover was a homosexual. We are, at least, spared a chapter titled "The Secret Passion of J. Edgar Hoover."
Hoover and His Values
One serious flaw in Powers' book is his repetitious attempts to explain too much of Hoover's life and actions as inspired by his fervent attachment to certain values and the social milieu in which he grew up. Now, as Powers recognizes to some extent, Hoover was too much Ye Compleat Bureaucrat for this to be anything like the whole story; but there are more immediate problems with Powers' ideas about the influence of values and background.
Some of Powers' conceptions seem blunt and confused, and others do not seem to have any connecting thread to Hoover himself. Here Powers was apparently thrown off the track by prevalent obsessions about American society, especially as it existed at the turn of
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