J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $4.50

  Now to be published in paperback, Curt Gentry's masterly portrait of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, reveals how such a paranoid yet powerful man was able to create the myth of an invisible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, this peculiarly private man held virtually unchecked public power. He terrorised every president from Roosevelt to Nixon but shrank from human contact. Demanding loyalty, he used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone critical of him. How did he help create McCarthyism, blackmail the Kennedy brothers, influence the Supreme Court? What was his web of connections to notorious mobsters?

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $6.97

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $3.28

  Shocking grim, and at times, darkly comic, this devastatingly detailed biography chronicles the rise of the nation's legendary top policeman--and the reign of terror that made the FBI the closest thing America had to a gestapo. Curt Gentry reveals Hoover as a paranoid man who intimidated every president from FDR to Nixon, yet shrank from human contact. And he describes in riveting detail how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, influenced the Supreme Court, and sabotaged the Warren Commission's investigation of the assassination of JFK. A hypochondriac who became a national hero, a bachelor prude obsessed with sexual slander, J. Edgar Hoover literally changed the course of history with the files known in the Justice Department as twelve drawers full of political cancer.