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"The legacies of Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn seem like they might be with us forever. Yet Christopher Elias finds in them startling new connections between gender, sexuality, and national security in 20th-century US politics--a paradigm he christens 'security state masculinity.' Elias integrates biographies of the trio with a history of gossip magazines and their tactics--such as insinuation, guilt by association, hyperbole, and alarmism, not to mention cynicism, slang, and photographic manipulation--which all three used to consolidate their power. The story of security state masculinity reached its climax in the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were rife with insinuations and coded threats. Using gossip as a lens, Elias shifts our understanding of the development of American political culture" -- ǂc Provided by publisher.
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...
A New York Times–bestselling author’s revealing, “important” biography of the longtime FBI director (The Philadelphia Inquirer). No one exemplified paranoia and secrecy at the heart of American power better than J. Edgar Hoover, the original director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For this consummate biography, renowned investigative journalist Anthony Summers interviewed more than eight hundred witnesses and pored through thousands of documents to get at the truth about the man who headed the FBI for fifty years, persecuted political enemies, blackmailed politicians, and lived his own surprising secret life. Ultimately, Summers paints a portrait of a fatally flawed individual who should never have held such power, and for so long.
Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022 “Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”—The Washington Post “A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”—The Wall St...
"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.
"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.
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.
Presents a graphic biography of former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who served under eight presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2023 Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Winner of the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy Winner of the American History Book Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlisted for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction When he became director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater into a modern machine. He stayed in power for decades, and created a personal fiefdom unrivalled in US history. In this masterful, multi-award-winning biography, Beverley Gage explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career. In Gage’s port...
The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation explains the startling facts about the major menace of our time, communism: what it is, how it works, what its aims are, the real dangers it poses, and what loyal American citizens must know to protect their freedom. MASTERS OF DECEIT is a powerful and informative book—a firsthand account of American communism from its beginnings to the present, written by a man more intimately familiar with the complete story than any other American. Mr. Hoover shows the day-to-day operations of the Communist Party, USA: who the communists are, what they claim, why people be-come communists and why some break away. He describes life within the Party, com...