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In the super-heated anticommunist politics of the early Cold War period, American liberals turned to the FBI. With the Communist party to the left of them and McCarthyism to the right, liberal leaders saw the Bureau as the only legitimate instrument to define and protect the internal security interests of the state. McCarthyism provided ample proof of the dangers of security by congressional investigation. In response, liberals delegated extensive powers to J. Edgar Hoover--creating a domestic intelligence capacity that circumvented constitutional and legal controls. This balanced account of the link between liberal leaders in the United States and the growth of the FBI will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in the American political climate. William Keller identifies a tension between liberalism and the security of the state that can never be fully resolved, and analyzes the exact mechanisms through which liberals and liberal government came to tolerate and even venerate an authoritarian state presence in their midst. The author shows how the liberal offensive against domestic communism succeeded both in weakening McCarthyism and in disabling the Communist party in the United States. What was the cost of these successes? Keller's answer assesses the liberal community's contribution to changes in the FBI between 1950 and 1970: its transformation into an independent, unaccountable political police. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Argues that during the Cold War the FBI was given increased powers that circumvented legal controls
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 organized labor and Southern Democrats who supported Jim Crow in what is arguably the most culturally significant documented political conspiracy in U.S. history, a wholesale domestic propaganda program that brainwashed Americans and remade their politics. Hoover also forged ties with the powerful fascist leaders of the period to promote his own political ambitions. All the while, as a love letter to Clyde Tolson still preserved in Hoover’s papers attests, he strove to pass for straight while promoting a culture that demonized same-sex love. The erosion of democratic traditions Hoover fostered continues to haunt Americans today.
"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.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS (IRE) BOOK AWARD WINNER • The story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists—quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans—that made clear the shocking truth that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation. “Impeccably researched, elegantly presented, engaging.”—David Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review • “Riveting and extremely readable. Relevant to today's debates over national security, privacy, and the leaking of government secrets to journalists.”—The Huffington Post It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists set out to use a more active, but nonviolent, method of civil disobedience to provide hard evidence once and for all that the government was operating outside the laws of the land. The would-be burglars—nonpro’s—were ordinary people leading lives of purpose: a professor of religion and former freedom rider; a day-care director; a physicist; a cab driver; an antiwar activist, a lock picker; a graduate student haunted by members of her family lost to the Holocaust and the passivity of German civilians under Nazi rule. Betty Medsger's extraordinary book re-creates in resonant detail how this group scouted out the low-security FBI building in a small town just west of Philadelphia, taking into consideration every possible factor, and how they planned the break-in for the night of the long-anticipated boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, knowing that all would be fixated on their televisions and radios. Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public’s perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Burglary is an important and gripping book, a portrait of the potential power of non­violent resistance and the destructive power of excessive government secrecy and spying.
Examination of how J. Edgar Hoover knew President Kennedy would be assassinated and the coverup that followed the assassination.
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 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.