G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

Shortly after the Soviet Union stunned the world by conducting a successful nuclear test in September 1949 and the Chinese Communist Party seized control of that country only a week later, Hoover scrambled to find those responsible for sharing America’s atomic secrets with the enemy. British agents first arrested the atomic engineer Klaus Fuchs and handed him over to the FBI for interrogation. In the course of rolling up Fuchs’s network, they came across Julius Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, and when they refused to cooperate and name other names, the Justice Department decided to make an example out of them. Hoover refused to divulge the information on the Rosenbergs from the Venona cables, which was ambiguous enough to induce a confession on lesser charges. Instead, the Rosenbergs were portrayed as diabolical spymasters, with evidence so damning it had to be kept secret. The jury found them guilty, and with Cold War tensions high due to the Korean War, the judge followed Hoover’s suggestion to put both Rosenbergs to death. Shortly afterward it came to light that Adrian “Kim” Philby, a British spy who had liaised with Hoover to hunt Soviet agents, was himself a Soviet agent. The discovery humiliated the FBI and cast clouds of doubt over the Rosenberg case.

In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin announced that 205 State Department employees were “card-carrying communists.” Despite his own anticommunism, Hoover was reluctant to embrace the senator’s antigovernment populism and loose relationship with the truth. For the time being, he shared some FBI information with the senator while avoiding any public show of support. Hoover also resisted efforts from a Democratic-led Senate committee to hand over files that would corroborate, or disprove, some of McCarthy’s specific accusations. Hoover found another ally in the senior senator from Wisconsin, Patrick McCarran, and helped him draft a bill requiring all suspected subversives to register with the federal government, with the potential for internment camps in wartime. The bill passed over Truman’s veto, establishing a committee that would work closely with the FBI to share intelligence on potential threats. In sum, Hoover had the institutional backing to do what McCarthy could not do by himself, and so the senator looked for ways in which they could work together.

McCarthy later expanded his targets to include gay citizens in the federal government, which would later be known as the “Lavender Scare.” Hoover had understandably been reluctant to tackle this issue publicly, given the rumors surrounding his own life. Fear of gay culture was at an all-time public high due to the reports of Alfred Kinsey, a sexologist who suggested that it was far more widespread than previously thought. Privately, Hoover expressed an interest in psychoanalysis and resolving the conflicts within one’s own persona, but publicly he scaled back his social appearances and was less inclined to have Tolson appear as his companion in public, although they continued to vacation together. Hoover kept the FBI fairly distant from congressional purges of gay individuals, except for creating a file of government employees arrested for “morals” charges. In this case his primary interest was proving that the FBI had no gay people within its own ranks. Rumors continued to swirl about Hoover’s personal life, often resulting in the FBI tracing the source and threatening them with legal action. Meanwhile, the Lavender Scare ruined careers and lives, although Hoover proved discrete when it came to allegations regarding some high-ranking political figures, including Senator McCarthy.

Dwight David Eisenhower, the heroic general of World War II, assumed the presidency in 1953 and quickly proved a more reliable to ally to Hoover than Truman had been. HUAC was finally aligned with the White House, and although Eisenhower was not particularly right-wing or Christian, he endorsed Hoover’s vision of a struggle against atheism, and appointed as his vice president the staunchly anticommunist Richard Nixon, a failed candidate for the FBI, who later made a name for himself attacking Alger Hiss. Eisenhower even helped to patch up the relationship between the FBI and the CIA, as his appointed head of the agency, Allen Dulles, pledged himself to cooperating with Hoover. Eisenhower’s Justice Department expanded the FBI’s powers and relaxed federal oversight over the bureau. The attorney general confirmed Hoover’s suspicions that Harry Dexter White, deceased by that time, was in fact a Soviet agent, which Truman continued to deny. Hoover testified before Congress to opine on White’s guilt, winning widespread public acclaim and securing his partnership with the White House.

The White Affair led Senator McCarthy to redouble his public campaign against communism, lest the administration deprive him of his chosen issue. In a fateful speech, McCarthy suggested that Eisenhower was soft on communism. McCarthy continued to praise Hoover, and he dispatched his staffer, a closeted gay man named Roy Cohn who would later serve as counsels to mob bosses and a young Donald Trump, to liaise with Hoover. McCarthy’s staff also included several FBI agents, and to avoid accusations of impropriety, Hoover cut off the flow of information to the senator. McCarthy’s accusations against the Army brought a firm response from the former general in the White House. At the height of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Hoover accused the senator of falsifying documents, after which the president denounced him. Censured by the senate, McCarthy died shortly afterward, allegedly as a result of alcohol addiction. McCarthy’s downfall established Hoover as the country’s primary anticommunist, which Eisenhower confirmed by awarding him the National Security Medal in the spring of 1955.

The next great crisis after McCarthyism came from the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Hoover had opposed then governor Earl Warren’s internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II, but now Chief Justice Warren was the champion of civil liberties. The norm of desegregation outpaced the law itself, and soon Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, desegregated, leaving Kappa Alpha as a lone all-white holdout, with Hoover’s support. Hoover understood that the FBI would have to enforce federal laws, but there was no clear methodology for cooperating with state and local officials, and Hoover was inclined to dismiss Black activists as communists or dupes of Soviet influence. The FBI struggled to investigate several acts of racial violence, taking no role in the horrific murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, whose murderers were acquitted by a local all-white jury. Hoover complained that the FBI lacked the resources and jurisdiction to act, while also alienating the same white audiences he had cultivated with his persona of Christian anticommunism. When legislation created a new Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department, Hoover suggested that they and not the FBI take responsibility for enforcing federal law on those matters.

In 1957, Eisenhower was reelected, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author wrote a bestselling and highly favorable account of the founding of the FBI called The FBI Story, and reports of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Stalin before the Communist Party congress revealed major fissures within the Soviet government. Despite these positive notes, Hoover feared that communists would come back from setbacks even stronger than before and looked for ways to maintain popular vigilance. One result was COINTELPRO (“Counterintelligence Program”), which would take anticommunist efforts away from Congress and the Courts and locate them squarely within the FBI. Public prosecutions would give way to anonymous letters and disinformation, in the hope that radical groups would turn on themselves. With the Supreme Court limiting legal avenues of surveillance, Hoover embraced illegal methods such as wiretapping without a warrant. Even so, the project was not entirely secret, and Congress or the Justice Department could have done more to restrict the program had either wished to do so.