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Former special agent and assistant director of the FBI, Ray Wannall, writes a comprehensive, insider's commentary regarding one of the most powerful, but enigmatic personalities of our time. Highly revealing and provocative, FOR THE RECORD sheds light on efforts to undermine Hoover's legacy and startling details as to events involving Martin Luther King, the Kennedy family, the Nixon administration, and much much more!
A ground-breaking, myth-shattering expose reveals the dark secrets of J. Edgar Hoover. At last, readers will learn of the late FBI chief's menacing abuse of power and public trust--from his closet homosexuality to his manipulation by the Mafia to his subversion of the Warren Commission's probe into the assassination of JFK. An 8-week NYT bestseller from the author of Conspiracy and Goddess.
"The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Eleanor Roosevelt was right: Hoover’s FBI was an American gestapo." —Newsweek Shocking, grim, frightening, Curt Gentry’s masterful portrait of America’s top policeman is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how a paranoid director created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone who opposed him. The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; as well as insight into the Watergate scandal and what part he played in the investigations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn were titanic figures in midcentury America, wielding national power in government and the legal system through intimidation and insinuation. Hoover’s FBI thrived on secrecy, threats, and illegal surveillance, while McCarthy and Cohn will forever be associated with the infamous anticommunist smear campaign of the early 1950s, which culminated in McCarthy’s public disgrace during televised Senate hearings. In Gossip Men, Christopher M. Elias takes a probing look at these tarnished figures to reveal a host of startling new connections among gender, sexuality, and national security in twentieth-century American politics. Elias illustrates how th...
The true story behind the Nazi saboteurs captured on Long Island in 1942, their betrayal by J. Edgar Hoover, and the shameful secret behind the case the established the reputation of the FBI. At 4 AM on a foggy morning in 1942, Nazi submarines discharged eight men along the coasts of Long Island and Florida. A few days later, J. Edgar Hoover further burnished his reputation by announcing the swift capture of Nazi soldiers found prowling our shores, intent on sabotage. Omitted from the record (and still denied by the FBI) is the true story behind Hoover's greatest publicity coup: the saboteurs' leader, George Dasch, betrayed his own country by turning himself in first to a disbelieving FBI. Hoover promised Dasch clemency and assurances that the jerry-rigged "military tribunal" created to try the men as "unlawful combatants" was merely a formality to protect loved ones from Nazi retribution. Using documentation from the FBI archives, interviews and memoirs, David Alan Johnson carefully recounts the mounting betrayals in this utterly engrossing saga.
During his forty-eight years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover scrupulously maintained secret office files and arranged for special filing procedures to safeguard "sensitive" information.
The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal—so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover’s rhetorical agency. Drawing on Classification 94, a vast trove of recently declassified records that documents the longtime FBI director’s domestic propaganda campaigns in the mid-twentieth century, Underhill shows that Hoover used the growing power of his office to subvert the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and redirect the trajectory of U.S. culture away from social democracy toward a toxic brand of neoliberalism. He did so with help from Republicans who opposed organiz...
"In 1965, at the beginning of the chaos, twenty-two-year old Paul Letersky was assigned to assist the legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who'd just turned seventy and had, by then, led the Bureau for an incredible forty-one years. Hoover was a rare and complex man who walked confidently among the most powerful. His personal privacy was more tightly guarded than the secret "files" he carefully collected--and that were so feared by politicians and celebrities. Through Letersky's close working relationship with Hoover, and the trust and confidence he gained from Hoover's most loyal senior assistant, Helen Gandy, Paul became one of the few able to enter the Director's secretive--and sometimes perilous--world. Since Hoover's death half a century ago, millions of words have been written about the man and hundreds of hours of TV dramas and A-list Hollywood films produced. But until now, there has been virtually no account from someone who, for a period of years, spent hours with the Director on a daily basis."--Amazon.
Contrasts the law enforcement achievements of America's one-time most powerful lawman with the hidden secrets of Hoover's private life, which included a series of sexual indiscretions, criminal behavior, and a long-time alliance with the Mafia.
Between 1942 and 1958, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a sweeping and sustained investigation of the motion picture industry to expose Hollywood’s alleged subversion of "the American Way" through its depiction of social problems, class differences, and alternative political ideologies. FBI informants (their names still redacted today) reported to Hoover’s G-men on screenplays and screenings of such films as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), noting that "this picture deliberately maligned the upper class attempting to show that people who had money were mean and despicable characters." The FBI’s anxiety over this film was not unique; it extend...