The Master of Secrets

Hoover became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 at age 29, appointed to clean up a scandal-ridden agency. He was extraordinarily effective at that — for approximately five minutes of historical time. What he then built, over the next four decades, was something the American founders explicitly did not want: a permanent, centralized domestic intelligence apparatus accountable to no one but its director. C1

The mechanism was simple and devastating: files. Hoover kept files on everyone of consequence. Senators. Governors. Presidents. Journalists. Civil rights leaders. Celebrities. His "Official and Confidential" personal files were maintained separately from official FBI records, kept in his office, and destroyed immediately upon his death by his personal secretary, Helen Gandy. C1 Whatever was in those files — and former officials, senators, and associates have described their content in general terms as deeply compromising — gave Hoover leverage that no president dared test. John F. Kennedy despised him. Lyndon Johnson feared him. Richard Nixon wanted to fire him. None of them did. C2

LBJ's explanation was the most candid. Asked why he didn't fire Hoover, Johnson reportedly said it was better to have him inside the tent than outside it. C2 This is the language of a man who understood that Hoover's files were a gun pointed at anyone who crossed him. LI

COINTELPRO — the FBI's Counterintelligence Program — operated from 1956 to 1971. It was not a security program in any defensible sense. It was a covert operation designed to neutralize political movements the FBI deemed subversive. Those movements included: the civil rights movement, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the antiwar movement, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Communist Party USA. C1

The tactics documented in the Church Committee's 1975 Senate investigation included:

• Anonymous letters designed to destroy marriages, careers, and alliances within targeted organizations C1
• Planting informants who encouraged violence and illegal activity to justify arrest C1
• Forged documents designed to incite conflict between rival groups — including between the Black Panther Party and the US Organization, which contributed to murders C1
• Surveillance of attorneys, violating attorney-client privilege C1
• Coordination with local law enforcement in operations that resulted in killings, including the 1969 raid that killed Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his bed while he slept C1

The Church Committee's final report called COINTELPRO a "sophisticated vigilante operation" and documented that the program's stated goal, in Hoover's own words, was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" targeted groups. C1 These are not the words of law enforcement. They are the words of a political operation against American citizens exercising constitutional rights.

Hoover's campaign against Martin Luther King Jr. is among the most documented abuses of federal power in American history. The FBI began surveilling King in 1958. C1 Hoover personally despised King — he called him "the most dangerous Negro in America" in an internal memorandum — and directed a sustained effort to destroy him politically, personally, and psychologically. C1

The FBI wiretapped King's phones, bugged his hotel rooms, and recorded his private conversations and intimate encounters. C1 In November 1964 — weeks after King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — the FBI sent King an anonymous letter. The letter used material gathered from surveillance to suggest King was a fraud, accused him of being a "filthy abnormal animal," and explicitly suggested that he had "just 34 days" before his "filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." The letter concluded with a passage that federal courts and the Senate Intelligence Committee have characterized as a suggestion that King commit suicide. C1 A recording of sexual encounters, compiled from hotel surveillance, was enclosed.

This letter was sent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States government to a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Hoover approved it. It was not an aberration. It was policy.

Hoover never married. His constant companion for over forty years was Clyde Tolson, Associate Director of the FBI and effectively the second most powerful man in the bureau. They arrived at work together every morning. They lunched together daily at Harvey's Restaurant. They vacationed together. They attended social events together. When Hoover died in 1972, he left his estate to Tolson — not to family, not to the bureau, to Tolson. Tolson accepted the estate and moved into Hoover's house. C1

The nature of their relationship is one of the most debated questions in American political biography. Most major Hoover biographers — including Curt Gentry, Anthony Summers, and Tim Weiner — have concluded that the preponderance of evidence suggests Hoover was a closeted gay man. C2 The specific claims vary. The more sensationalized accounts (cross-dressing at parties, etc.) come from single-source or disputed testimony and are graded C3 by this publication. What is not disputed is the four-decade relationship with Tolson, the lifelong bachelorhood, and the institutional pattern. C1

The institutional pattern is the most important part. Hoover systematically purged gay men from the FBI and used the threat of exposure of homosexuality as a weapon against political targets. C1 He ran a government program — the "Sex Deviate" program — that collected and disseminated information about the sexual orientation of government employees, politicians, and public figures. C1 The man most feared in America for the secrets he kept used other people's secrets as weapons. If the historical consensus about his own sexuality is accurate — and the preponderance of evidence suggests it is — then Hoover's entire career can be read as an elaborate, institutionally violent act of self-projection. LI OA