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Hoover and His FBI: A Study in Mediocrity?
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12917 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1987 |
4,239 Words |
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
SECRECY AND POWER
The Life of J. Edgar Hoover
Richard Gid Powers
New York: The Free Press, 1987
605 pp., $27.95
For nearly fifty years, John Edgar Hoover was the head of the federal government's principal agency for law enforcement, and the man most responsible for protecting the United States from espionage and sabotage. Richard Gid Powers' book is a thoroughly researched and absorbing biography not only of Hoover the man, but of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he shaped in his own image. Made into an extension of Hoover's own personality, the FBI possessed not only its director's virtues but his defects. But for Powers' efforts, though, many of the recesses and peculiarities of Hoover's personality would doubtless be doomed to obscurity.
Clearly Hoover's organizational ability, dedication, and hard work were instrumental in forming the FBI - as were, unfortunately, his narrow-mindedness and prejudice. And the FBI, perhaps unjustly - has had to share the violent reversals suffered by Hoover's reputation - for, as Powers notes, it has improved since Hoover's death in 1972. From a small and rather disreputable agency in the 1920s, entangled in the worst scandals of the Harding administration, it became one of the most admired government agencies in the period from the New Deal to the end of the Eisenhower presidency. Subsequently, when its misdeeds were discovered in the 1970s, the FBI suffered a precipitous decline in public esteem from which it has not yet recovered. In fact, it is probable that both the early admiration and
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