Book Review: The Director

As a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s I only heard good stuff about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.  One example is a classic movie most folks my age have seen called The FBI Story. It starred Jimmy Stewart and featured a cameo appearance by J. Edgar Hoover:

Then the 1970s came and with it the protest era.   Everything that was good was now bad, and there were a string of books (mostly written by disgruntled former FBI execs) about J. Edgar Hoover.  I’ve read them all, and I pretty much dismissed them as the whinings of guys who had an agenda.  After college and the Army, I spent a few years in the US defense industry, and the security manager in one of the companies was a retired FBI agent.  I asked him if all the negative J. Edgar Hoover stuff had any truth to it and his answer was an emphatic no.  “J. Edgar Hoover was a charismatic guy and a real gentleman,” he said.  “We all thought the world of him.”

When I saw a Wall Street Journal review of The Director (written by Paul Letersky, who was a personal assistant to J. Edgar Hoover), I knew I wanted to read it.  I bought The Director on Amazon and thoroughly enjoyed the book. It countered the propaganda previously published about Hoover (and what motivated the urchins who wrote those lies) and told an interesting story.  Some things I found fascinating included:

• • Hoover didn’t carry a gun.  I thought that was interesting.  I knew that Hoover received one of the very first Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers in the 1930s, but he didn’t personally carry a gun.
  • Hoover was never big on personal security.  He didn’t keep a security contingent at his home, he dined out nearly every day, and he frequently went for walks around his neighborhood on his own.
  • Contrary to what most folks think, Hoover deplored wiretaps and worked hard to minimize them.  He knew they could backfire, and his principal concern was avoiding anything that could embarass the FBI.
  • Hoover didn’t “blackmail” U.S. Presidents.   The story about Hoover informing John F. Kennedy that the FBI knew about his affair with a Mafia kingpin’s mistress is true, but Hoover did it to protect Kennedy (who broke off the affair the next day).  Hoover never used that information to his advantage, nor did he ever reveal it.

There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.  Trust me on this…if you want a good read, pick up a copy of The Director.

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