61 pages 2 hours read

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

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2022

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Part 3, Chapters 26-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 26-31 Summary

FDR’s death left the presidency to Harry Truman, a mostly unknown Missouri politician who had attacked Hoover and the FBI for their infringements on civil liberties, although Truman may have been retaliating for federal charges against his old Kanas City party boss, Tom Pendergast. Hoover wanted the FBI to house a permanent and worldwide intelligence agency, while “Wild Bill” Donovan competed for his own Office of Strategic Services to win the same role. Hoover despised Donovan as a reckless administrator whose wartime connections with Soviet agents in Europe made him soft on communism. The FBI’s network in Latin America had surveilled Nazi smuggling and other efforts, but their significance paled in comparison to the SS’s war waged behind Nazi lines. While Roosevelt was alive, an investigation favored the FBI as better organized and less susceptible to abuses, but Truman came in with no preexisting knowledge of the debate, and so Hoover worked to ingratiate himself with the new president as he had several times before. When the war ended in August 1945, Hoover laid the groundwork for another public-relations blitz to celebrate the bureau’s wartime accomplishments, and Truman made the promising move of disbanding the OSS on October 1. But rather than tap the FBI for global intelligence, Truman initially looked to the military services to form a Central Intelligence Group, while the FBI restricted its activities to within the country. By the summer of 1946, Truman ordered Hoover to cease all operations abroad, and in response, Hoover ordered his agents to destroy all records of their activities rather than turn it over to their successors. This episode ensured a bitter relationship between Hoover and Truman for the rest of the administration.

Denied the opportunity to pursue foreign intelligence, Hoover turned to the issue of lynching in the Jim Crow South. Although he had not pursued that topic with vigor in the past, he now saw it as a potential success from which he could expand the FBI’s jurisdiction. Prosecutions of lynchings were very challenging due to the difficulty of securing cooperating witnesses, and Hoover’s own definition of lynching narrowed the range of available cases considerably. Hoover did make a serious attempt to investigate several of these gruesome crimes—despite his racial attitudes, he despised vigilantism—but was never able to make a successful case. After an especially heinous mass murder in Monroe, Georgia, in July 1946, with victims including women and an Army veteran, the FBI undertook an exhaustive four-month investigation and identified 10 suspects, but the grand jury brought no charges related to the massacre. Southern defiance of federal law brought Hoover and Truman into an uneasy partnership, and the FBI responded to subsequent events much more quickly and decisively than they had in the past, securing grand-jury indictments for an entire lynch mob in South Carolina. Hoover testified before Congress asking for more expansive federal power to prosecute lynching and other civil rights crimes, although some fired back that Hoover’s nearly all-white agency was ill-equipped to handle such cases. Southern Democrats defeated the effort, and Hoover would never again make civil rights his focus, turning instead to communism.

Shortly after the Second World War, the nation encountered its second Red Scare after high-profile members of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations faced accusations (many of them later confirmed by declassified cables) of being Soviet agents. Having already assembled a massive file regarding real and suspected communist activity, Hoover found his proper postwar mission. The Soviet Union briefly enjoyed public favor as a prominent wartime ally, but Hoover had never relented in his surveillance of suspected communists, especially on learning of Soviet spy rings in the United States. The bombshell testimony of Whittaker Chambers, a former communist turned government informant, seemed to prove Hoover’s theory that progressive government bureaucrats were either secret communists or pliable to suit communist purposes. Despite Hoover’s admiration of Roosevelt, it seems that the president himself took insufficient stock of the threat in order to accommodate his wartime ally. Although Truman proved far more hawkish on communism, he made a glaring exception by nominating Harry Dexter White to serve as inaugural director of the International Monetary Fund, even as Hoover sought to investigate accusations of contacts with Soviet agents. Frustrated again with the White House, Hoover turned to Congress to support his anticommunist crusade.

The Republicans won a decisive victory in the 1946 midterms, in part due to Hoover’s public warnings of an imminent communist threat and lackadaisical White House response. Hoover was typically more comfortable operating in the bureaucracy than the legislature, although he had built connections with the Appropriations Committee to ensure a larger budget year after year. A new opportunity to build relationships with Congress came with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had formed in 1938 but would take on a new and prominent role under incoming Republicans as the center of a sweeping investigation into the communist threat. FBI agents constituted a significant bulk of the committee’s investigative staff. While Truman strengthened a national-security state for containing communism abroad, Hoover and HUAC fought the war at home. Hoover testified before HUAC only once, but they continued to cooperate as their focus turned to suspected communists working in Hollywood.

Hoover also worked with the Army Security Agency to intercept the communications of Soviet spies in the United States. This project, known as Venona, would later vindicate some of Hoover’s suspicions when they were declassified in 1990, but it was difficult to turn their fragmentary information into actionable cases at the time. HUAC featured the explosive showdown between Whittaker Chambers and the suspected communist Alger Hiss, and the FBI managed to detect and penetrate a Soviet spy ring involving a Justice Department employee, ultimately resulting in a series of convictions. Despite the apparent victory, Hoover feared backlash from communists and their liberal dupes, and so he decided to keep the Venona cables secret rather than share them with a government he did not trust with that information.

Hoover received some public criticism for his prosecutions of communists, and he responded bitterly and publicly. Hoover then doubled down on the religious side of his public persona to strengthen the contrast between godly America and atheistic communism. Although Hoover was an intermittent churchgoer at best, his rhetoric aligned with a religious mood in postwar America. According to Hoover, raising children under the discipline of Christian principles would shield them from crime and communism alike. Hoover found an ally in Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, which reconciled Christian teaching to modern notions of social psychology, just as Hoover’s own moralism was linked with administrative efficiency and media savvy. Hoover’s anticommunism made him just as attractive to Catholic figures as Protestants or evangelicals and helped raise the public profile of a religion that remained suspicious and foreign to many Americans. Then, too, Hoover was uniquely positioned to use the power of the state to enforce their shared moral vision.

Chapters 26-31 Analysis

In many ways, the Cold War represents the culmination of many of Hoover’s priorities throughout his long career. Anticommunism was hardly new in American society, but geopolitical rivalry with the Soviet Union made it a central feature of political life, seeming to validate Hoover’s years of warning about the red menace. Fear of communism established a bipartisan consensus in favor of a government powerful enough to contain a threat that was understood as posing dangers from within as well as without. Politicians on either side of the aisle who failed to express proper toughness were unlikely to have much of a political future. Most importantly for Hoover, he had used the Second World War to assemble an apparatus of surveillance and counterintelligence capable of meeting the threat head on.

Although Hoover appeared poised to be the ultimate Cold Warrior, the new set of circumstances also exposed new vulnerabilities. Harry Truman may have been untested, but he entered the office at a critical moment for the presidency. The commencement of the Atomic Age following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left the president with an unprecedented degree of control over matters of war and peace. Congress has not declared war a single time since. The possibility of war with the USSR prompted Truman to reorganize foreign policy institutions within the new Department of Defense (the Departments of the Army and Navy had previously been separate from the War Department) and to create the National Security Council, which operated directly out of the White House. This left no room for the Justice Department, and by extension the FBI, in any foreign engagement with communist forces. After grudgingly ceding control of overseas intelligence gathering to the CIA, Hoover went looking for a war at home. Southern resistance to desegregation orders was the most obvious example of illegal resistance to federal law, but this was hardly a fight Hoover found to be worth pursuing. This was due in part to his own prejudices and suspicion of Black activism, and also a pragmatic recognition that the FBI had neither the resources nor the remit to overcome fierce resistance from local police and the majority of the white population. When it became clear that Southern Democrats would not do anything to improve the bureau’s capacity, Hoover simply moved on.

Once Hoover could finally train his sights on domestic communists, the record was mixed. Hoover’s access to the Venona cables made him part of a major intelligence coup on par with the wartime cracking of German and Japanese codes. As Gage points out, the cables validated Hoover’s overall portrait of an extensive Soviet spy network in the United States, but it was murkier with respect to particular cases. The evidence was often too fragmentary to mount a prosecution, especially against someone like Harry Dexter White, who had the support of the president until his untimely death. Using the cables as evidence also carried the risk of sharing this priceless information with other agencies, which Hoover resisted on the grounds of both bureaucratic politics and concern that those agencies might have Soviet spies of their own. Hoover was able to score convictions, most notably of Alger Hiss, but it seemed unsatisfactory to subject one communist agent to a three-year prison sentence when there was evidence of a vast conspiracy to bring down the US government. As a result, he would soon turn to developing and waging his own unique style of political warfare. 

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