NCJ Number
117509
Date Published
1988
Length
489 pages
Annotation
This biography of J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI for 48 years, draws on previously unknown and sensitive Bureau files as well as interviews with Hoover family members, agents, politicians, and "targets" of FBI investigations to reveal the man, the administrator, and the power-monger who manipulated American politics for a half century.
Abstract
Although many relevant records were destroyed, the authors obtained access to office files maintained by Hoover and two of his key aides along with other sensitive records such as the break-in file, index for authorized wiretaps and bugs, Hoover's directives to heads of FBI field offices and agents, and files pertaining to prominent personalities, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John and Robert Kennedy, and Attorney General Harlan Stone and Homer Cummings. This book reveals that in 1925 Hoover secretly began to maintain an "Obscene File" in the FBI laboratory and two other files in his office that were kept separate from the FBI's central records system and that recorded accounts of sexual activities and damaging personal information on dissident activists, prominent leaders and personalities, even presidents and first ladies. In addition, Hoover had his aides keep "summary memoranda" on members of Congress, reporting on their "subversive activities" and "immoral conduct." He also had aides create office files in which memoranda labeled "Do Not File" itemized illegal break-ins by agents authorized by Hoover; these "files" were also kept apart from the Bureau's central records and were regularly destroyed. Chapter notes, subject index. (Publisher summary modified)