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

The so-called Lavender Scare, an effort to purge the federal government of gay people, arose soon after the end of World War II. America at the time regarded relationships between members of the same sex as perversions, and a 1948 report by sexologist Alfred Kinsey that gay culture was far more widespread than assumed led to a panic. There was also fear that gay people in government could be vulnerable to Soviet espionage efforts, whether as targets of blackmail or because their presumptively inferior moral character could make them susceptible to betraying their country.

In the early Cold War, the Army Security Agency (which would soon become part of the National Security Agency) shared with Hoover thousands of decrypted cables between Moscow and Soviet offices throughout the United States. The cables helped Hoover to identify many Americans working on behalf of the Soviet government. However, Hoover was reluctant to share the evidence of these cables in open court, and so he decided to keep them secret. They were not declassified until the 1990s.

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Johnson administration called for a commission to investigate and compile a report of what happened and what to do going forward. Hoover was worried that the report would be unfavorable to the FBI, which had compiled a file on the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been an outspoken supporter of the Castro regime in Cuba and had even defected to the Soviet Union, eventually coming home with a Russian wife. As the commission began its work, Hoover steered the focus toward the question of Oswald’s guilt, rather than the institutional failures that let him slip through the cracks. Hoover’s eagerness to wrap up the case and move on has fueled widespread speculation that there was more to the assassination, and that Hoover was concealing that information, but there is little hard evidence.