The Secrets of J. Edgar Hoover

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

As Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover exercised a dictatorial influence over the department – and, it seems, everyone else. Meticulous and vindictive, he frequently weaponised secrets while carefully guarding his own. Deborah Friedell grapples with his overwhelming and disturbing legacy in her sweeping review of G-Man, the first Hoover biography in thirty years. She joins Tom to discuss some of the most puzzling features of Hoover’s personality and approach to policing. Should he have known about Pearl Harbor? Was he in cahoots with the Mafia? And what was his problem with bald men? Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/hooverpod Subscribe to Close Readings: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is my colleague Deborah Friedell, a contributing editor at the LRB, who has a piece in the current issue
0:21.3	on J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI for nearly 50 years from before it was the FBI until
0:27.6	his death in 1972. The piece is a review of G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and The Making of the American
0:34.0	Century by Beverly Gage. Hello, Deborah, and thank you very much for joining
0:38.0	me again. Hello, Tom. So Hoover is famous for, well, for many things, but also including for knowing
0:44.5	everyone's secrets and for having a few secrets of his own. But one of the most striking revelations
0:50.4	in your piece, for me anyway, was that his first job was as a librarian
0:54.3	cataloging books at the Library of Congress, which is a method or a methodology that he
0:59.2	brought with him to the FBI. So was J. Edgar Hoover always a librarian at heart?
1:05.5	I think he was. So this is pretty much Hoover's first job. He's a teenager. He's going to night school at George
1:14.4	Washington for law, and they have a special program for federal employees. It's accelerated.
1:21.7	And in order to qualify, Hoover gets a job at the Library of Congress. And he's in the sort of books processing department.
1:31.3	At that time, apparently the library acquired more than 100,000 new books a year in multiple languages for many countries.
1:41.0	And supposedly, Hoover was just a prodigy. He could classify and sort and retrieve material
1:49.2	faster than any other librarian. And you can see he takes this when he becomes director of the FBI.
1:56.9	One of the things he's known for when he goes to work for the Bureau, and which
2:02.5	helps his rise, is that he's able to classify, he's able to create a system for classifying
2:09.5	fingerprints, which before computers just seems so incredible to me. It's almost hard to get my
2:16.4	mind around it. But to figure out a way, yeah,
2:19.2	so that if you had a suspect's fingerprints, you didn't have to go through thousands of cards.
2:24.4	There was a way to have it systemized. And he took that job at the Library of Congress,
2:29.3	partly because he lived in Washington already. And he was a creature of Washington, D.C.
	...

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