Quote:A biography that may change your mind about J. Edgar Hoover

After reading Gage, I have changed my mind about Hoover. He is not the caricature villain I thought I knew when I came of age in the turbulent 1960s. Hoover was a man of profound contradictions. While he had enough empathy to send flowers to Jenkins, he also orchestrated the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO intelligence operations against civil rights leaders and antiwar activists, wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and many other private citizens, and enabled the rise of a deeply racist conservative movement that is still poisoning the American body politic. Gage provides proof that Hoover was no rogue elephant, acting entirely on his own. Instead, we learn that Hoover invariably did what he did with the full knowledge of the men he served in the White House and Congress. It was President Franklin Roosevelt who first authorized Hoover to use wiretaps to collect domestic political intelligence. And Hoover regularly briefed the White House and Congress on COINTELPRO.
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Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. He is working on a biography of Roy Cohn.