J. Edgar Hoover – The Man & the Secrets: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry (Author)

• New

  Illustrated
  2001

  $24.49

  Shocking, grim, frightening, Curt Gentry's masterful portrait of America's top policeman is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how a paranoid director created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone who opposed him. The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; and what part he played in the investigations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.47

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $15.02

  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.