When J. Edgar Hoover died suddenly in May 1972, there had been one director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the previous 48 years. In the nearly 46 years since that day, there have been 15 of them.
Some of Hoover’s successors—William Webster, Louis Freeh, Robert Mueller—have been better than others and, admittedly, a few were only briefly in office as acting directors. But the picture of a riven, highly politicized, even dysfunctional federal agency that has emerged in recent months is not a pretty one and prompts a revisionist conclusion: None of the chaos and bureaucratic cannibalism and ineptitude that have emerged from the Trump-Russia saga would ever have occurred in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Of course, as everybody knows, Hoover has long been ensconced in popular mythology as a folk villain. You can make almost any claim about his motives and instincts, or tell tall tales about his behavior, without fear of contradiction. He was certainly a Washington empire-builder and strategic wielder of power accumulated over the decades. He was a firm, one might say zealous, anti-Communist—with antiquarian views about American society—in an era when the challenge of the Soviet Union to the West was not considered a joke.
He was also decidedly peculiar. Hoover was a lifelong bachelor—conclusive evidence of his sexual life, if there was one, is entirely speculative—and his singular devotion to his mission had a rigid, defensive, even obsessive-compulsive element. He was a mass of eccentricities and biases, some endearing, others less so; and some of the enduring folklore about Hoover—that he blackmailed a series of public figures with voluminous files on private misbehavior or that he was a cross-dresser—is fictitious.
To be sure, Hoover’s long tenure in office—too long, by any measure—was both a strength and weakness. In the course of his youthful construction and leadership of the Justice Department’s bureau of investigation after World War I, he came to represent to most Americans a reliable bulwark of competence and vigilance against crime, wartime saboteurs, radical terror, and communism, foreign and domestic. At the same time, he came to identify the federal struggle against violence and subversion with his own interests, and the FBI, which had pioneered a scientific, professionalized approach to criminal detection and law enforcement, became calcified as Hoover grew old.
Still, at the present moment, it is worth recalling (in the words of Hoover’s best and most perceptive biographer, Richard Gid Powers) that
Moreover, while Hoover’s transgressions were not trivial—he was not always subservient to the presidents he served, and his methods sometimes hovered near the boundaries of legality—the historical record is considerably more complicated, and complimentary to Hoover.
His fondness for secrecy and indirection, for example, very much appealed to Franklin Roosevelt, who made good use of their unlikely and mutually advantageous alliance throughout the 1930s and World War II. By contrast, Hoover and Harry Truman disliked and distrusted one another, and Truman’s low opinion endures in posterity. Yet Hoover had reasons to be wary of Truman, whose administration was a curious mixture of statesmen and courthouse gang.
Much has been written of the delicate relations between Hoover and John F. Kennedy, and in particular Attorney General Robert Kennedy, ostensibly Hoover’s boss. But Hoover’s knowledge of the Kennedys’ Rat Pack behavior—their personal indiscretions and the president’s secondhand connections to organized crime—impelled him to warn them and offer private counsel, thereby protecting the brothers from embarrassment.
His loyalty was usually to principles, not men. Indeed, in close readings of correspondence and memo-randa, Hoover will emerge as an unexpected voice of reason in the councils of government, especially in such episodes as the panicked aftermath of Kennedy’s murder. Throughout the Cold War and into the Vietnam and civil rights eras, Hoover is at once the author of the domestic spying program (COINTELPRO) that damaged the FBI after his death, and an advocate for constitutional restraint about civil liberties. As is well known, Hoover regarded Martin Luther King Jr. with distaste; less well known is his status as Lyndon Johnson’s smartest ally against the Ku Klux Klan.
In short, Hoover was a complicated and contradictory figure, with qualities and defects in abundance. But he did not endure as long as he did without reason, and while his judgment could be variable, his executive control and discipline—indeed, his knowledge of his powers and limitations, as well as his devotion to the FBI’s prerogatives—were absolute. It is impossible to imagine Hoover mishandling the vexed matter of Hillary Clinton’s private email server in the fashion of James Comey, much less publicly rebuking Clinton in a presidential election year.
The same might well be said of the Trump-Russia inquiry, which has now devolved into partisan combat, unhelpfully assisted by the White House and Congress. One Democratic talking point on the subject is that revelations about the FBI and other intelligence agencies have prompted Republicans to “revile” federal institutions they once “venerated.” Yet the reverse is equally true: Democrats, especially on Capitol Hill, now venerate institutions they once reviled.
In any case, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover must be smiling down on the spectacle—or more likely, looking on in dismay. For as his long and instructive career reveals, agencies of government, even those with storied histories, full of tenured civil servants, are merely human institutions fully capable of losing their way.
