Hoover Edgar Quotes

I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.

If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.

There is something addictive about secrets.

[Re: J. Edgar Hoover] His knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow.

So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it.

The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.

Remember what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover? I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.

I cannot believe we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself ~ George McGovern

Edgar Hoover? I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice.

it is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. —J. Edgar Hoover

By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, and the young William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist. It had been replaced by the world of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson.

Speaking candidly to a peer requires us to risk exposure. Speaking uphill to a leader is scarier. Speaking to the top leader of the organization is scarier still. And in a paramilitary organization of many layers like the FBI, dominated for its first half-century by a single person, J. Edgar Hoover, the hill is mighty steep. And it is harder than that, because getting the speakers to overcome their impostor complex is only half the answer. The leaders must also overcome their own impostor complex—their fear of being less than perfect.

Take the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. I remember as a child how I used to choke up every morning "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Now it didn't say, "I pledge allegiance to racism, to capitalism, and to neo­colonialism, and J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon, .and Ronald Reagan, and Mace, and billy clubs and dead niggers on the street shot by pigs." I mean it didn't say that shit, you see.

As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What

They regarded silence as collaboration with injustice.

Vince had answered the door in a body-hugging satin gown with a basket of fruit on his head. “J. Edgar Hoover?” I asked him.

This guy is a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover,” Johnny said. “You can’t even raise your voice to him.” “He’s a businessman,” the Don said blandly. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.

The whole dam breaks after that. The FBI drops the Federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. All of a sudden they don’t seem very interested in the case, despite the salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds and the rest of it. Then back in San Francisco, and Kesey is standing in front of the judge in a faded sport shirt, work pants and boots. The judge has a terrific speech ready, saying this case has been blown up out of proportions in the press and it is only a common dope case as far as he is concerned, and Kesey is no dragon, just an ordinary jackass … and Kesey is starting to say something and Hallinan and Rohan are crouched for the garrote, but again it’s over and Kesey is out on bail in San Francisco, too. It’s unbelievable. He’s out after only five days.

Did you ever hear what J. Edgar Hoover said about justice?” she asked. “He probably said a lot, but I don’t recall any of it offhand.” “He said that justice is incidental to law and order. I think he was right.

The fact he has some kind of bond with you is quite extraordinary", she [Deep Throat's daughter] said. "He doesn't remember Ed Miller and other FBI guys. He remembers J. Edgar Hoover". Well, I thought, Hoover and me.

good start would be a clean break with the FBI’s past—and a signal to all of American law enforcement—by removing J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the headquarters building and naming it in honor of civil rights icon John Lewis.

If J. Edgar Hoover used the Osage murder probe as a showcase for the bureau, a series of sensational crimes in the 1930s stoked public fears and enabled Hoover to turn the organization into the powerful force recognized today.

If J. Edgar Hoover had something like Total Information Awareness, would his agents have used it, as they did all the other means available to them, to harass civil rights activists, reds, poor people's organizations, unionists, & peaceniks? Most certainly!

Finally, in detailing the history of J. Edgar Hoover and the formation of the FBI, I drew on several excellent books, particularly Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover, Sanford Ungar’s FBI, Richard Gid Powers’s Secrecy and Power, and Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies.

Later that same year John F. Kennedy was elected president by a thin margin. The first thing he did was appoint his brother attorney general of the United States. This put Bobby in charge of the Justice Department, all of the United States attorneys, and of the FBI and the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. And the first thing Bobby Kennedy did was turn against the very men who helped elect his brother. For the first time in American history an attorney general committed his office to the eradication of organized crime. Toward

for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.

Of particular interest to the communists is the influence of fellow travelers and sympathizers in the “thought-molding” field: teachers, script writers, newspapermen, news analysts. If these individuals can be subjected to the slightest bit of communist thought control, the Party will have won a major victory.

Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world. There is no evidence that the score is ever evened in this life or any after. The barbarian Andrew Jackson rejoiced in mass murder, regaled in enslavement, and died a national hero. For three decades, J. Edgar Hoover incited murder and perfected blackmail against citizens who only sought some equal pursuit of liberty and happiness. Today his name is affixed to a building that we are told was erected in the pursuit of justice. Hitler pushed an entire people to the brink of extinction, escaped human censure, and now finds acolytes among some of the very states he conquered. The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.

My anxiety level was rising pretty fast now. Visits with the FBI can do that to you, I guess. I'd had bad experiences with them before. Ironically, so had Kit. They're good people, mostly, but something got screwed up along the way. I guess that's what happen when J. Edgar Hoover is your daddy. Talk about the road to perdition.

of those New York construction workers were honored at the White House a few weeks later by President Nixon. He thanked them for showing their patriotism the day they beat students. He gave them flag lapel pins, and they gave him a yellow hard hat like the ones they wore the day they assaulted students, seventy of whom were seriously injured.

Walt Disney, because of his fervent anticommunism, developed a cordial relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. Herbert Mitgang goes so far as to argue that 'from 1940 until his death in 1966 [Walt Disney served] as a secret informer for the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On a spring day in 1988…a Massachusetts man who collected books about local history was rummaging through a bin in a New Hampshire antiques barn when something caught his eye. Beneath texts on fertilizers and farm machines lay a slim, worn pamphlet with tea-colored paper covers, titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, by an unnamed author identified simply as “a Bostonian.” He was fairly certain he had found something exceptional, paid the $15 price, and headed home, where Tamerlane would spend only one night. The next day, he contacted Sotheby’s, and they confirmed his suspicion that he had just made one of the most exciting book discoveries in years. The pamphlet was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s first text, written when he was only fourteen years old, a find that fortune-seeking collectors have imagined happening upon probably more than they’d like to admit. The humble-looking, forty-page pamphlet was published in 1827 by Calvin F.S. Thomas, a relatively unknown Boston printer who specialized in apothecary labels, and its original price was about twelve cents. But this copy, looking good for its 161 years, most of which were probably spent languishing in one dusty attic box after another, would soon be auctioned for a staggering $198,000.

Trump said he wished he had fired Comey at the beginning of the administration but now he wanted Comey out. Bannon disagreed and offered this argument to Trump alone in the Oval Office: “Seventy-five percent of the agents do hate Comey. No doubt. The moment you fire him he’s J. fucking Edgar Hoover. The day you fire him, he’s the greatest martyr in American history. A weapon to come and get you. They’re going to name a special fucking counsel. You can fire Comey. You can’t fire the FBI. The minute you fire him, the FBI as an institution, they have to destroy you and they will destroy you.” Bannon thought Trump did not understand the power of the permanent institutions—the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon and the broader military establishment. He also did not understand the sweeping powers of a special counsel who could be appointed to investigate everything a president touched.

The Church Committee investigation clearly showed that J. Edgar Hoover had a personal vendetta against Dr. King, and it has been reported he lost no love for the Kennedy brothers. The Kennedys were not only on the wrong side of Hoover's FBI, they were on the wrong side of the CIA as well. JFK fired several top intelligence officers (he asked for Allen Dulles' resignation) and at the time of his death he was privately talking about reorganizing the entire U.S. intelligence service.

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it. • chapter eight • Russell Bufalino In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps. Ironically,

If Hoover had decided to step down at that moment in 1959, after thirty-five years at the FBI’s helm, we might remember him differently: as a popular and well-respected government official, often cruel and controversial but a hero to more Americans than not. Instead, he stayed on through the 1960s and emerged as one of history’s great villains, perhaps the most universally reviled American political figure of the twentieth century. His abuses and excesses, from the secret manipulations of COINTELPRO to his deep-seated racism, offer a troubling case study in unaccountable government power.

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

He hunts the biggest of all game! Public enemies that even the G-men cannot reach! This 1939 signature was reportedly revamped after top G-man J. Edgar Hoover complained. For many years thereafter it was He hunts the biggest of all game! Public enemies who try to destroy our America! With his faithful valet, Kato, Britt Reid, daring young publisher, matches wits with the underworld, risking his life that criminals and racketeers within the law may feel its weight by the sting of the Green Hornet! And at the end, the inevitable newsboy, hawking his wares: “Special extry! Paper! Police smash smuggling racket! Foreign diplomat involved! Read all about it! Green Hornet still at large!

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “mistrusted and disliked all three Kennedy brothers. President Johnson and Hoover had mutual fear and hatred for the Kennedys,” wrote the late William Sullivan, for many years an assistant FBI director. Hoover hated Robert Kennedy, who as Attorney General was his boss, and feared John. In turn, the President distrusted Allen Dulles, and eased him out as CIA director after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. When JFK moved to lower the oil depletion allowance, he incurred the displeasure of John McCloy, whose clients’ profits would be trimmed. Hoover, Dulles and McCloy did not belong to the Kennedy fan club. Hoover controlled the field investigation when the president was shot. Dulles and McCloy helped mold the final verdict of the Warren Commission.

Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J. Edgar Hoover, the spymaster who held presidents under his thumb. And in foreign relations, exercising more effective authority than perhaps anyone else in U.S. history, it was Douglas MacArthur.

Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed “Hoover in some kind of gay situation,” according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often said of Hoover, “I fixed that sonofabitch.” Meyer Lansky’s widow also later claimed that her husband had acquired “hard proof of Hoover’s homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations.”59 The photos showed Hoover engaged in sexual activity, specifically oral sex, with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson.60 There is considerable, separate evidence from the period that the close, professional relationship between Hoover and Tolson was also intimate and that this was an “open secret” in Washington.61

Nixon’s unwavering pragmatism did not work with everyone. From the moment he arrived in Washington, he exuded such odor of personal ambition that the old order was offended. Bob Taft never forgave him for helping to tilt the nomination to Ike. But that personal grievance aside, Taft had not liked him anyway—for Nixon seemed to represent something new and raw in the Senate. To Taft, he was “a little man in a big hurry.” Goldwater later wrote that he was “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Even J. Edgar Hoover, who was so helpful to Nixon during the Hiss case and whom Nixon worked hard courting, decided early on that Nixon tended to take too much credit for himself. Hoover’s closest aide, Clyde Tolson, wrote in a memo to the director that Nixon “plays both sides against the middle.” Hoover noted on the same memo, “I agree.

Above the doors it reads, ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN, PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING. These things happened for two reasons: because women went looking for Elizebeth’s ghost, and because her ghost was making noise in the archives. She was there inside the Marshall Library, rattling the doors of the vault, and she was in the “government tombs,” the National Archives, where her records from the Invisible War were finally declassified. The ghost also cried out from unexpected places. Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth—William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge.

Violent anti-communist fears by the military and munition makers justified the transformation of a once democratic nation into the fascist state we have today. Members of the Nazi Party now hold key positions in our universities, factories, aircraft and aerospace programs.14 When the Nazi empire collapsed in 1945, General Reinhard Gehlen joined forces with our OSS. Gehlen was placed in charge of wartime intelligence for Foreign Armies East. “It was not long before Gehlen was back in business, this time for the United States. Gehlen named his price and terms.”15 A series of meetings was arranged at the Pentagon with Nazi Gehlen, Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover and others.16 The Gehlen organization combined forces and agents with the OSS, which was soon to become known as the CIA. Experts in clandestine and illegal control of Germany through political assassinations and reversal of judicial processes became the teachers of Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. They helped form the new CIA in 1947, based upon clandestine activities in Nazi Germany.17

In the weeks ahead, Oppenheimer, Acheson and Lilienthal did their best to keep the Acheson-Lilienthal plan alive, lobbying the bureaucracy and the media. In response, Baruch complained to Acheson that he was “embarrassed” that he was being undercut. Hoping that he could still influence Baruch, Acheson agreed to bring everyone together at Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday afternoon, May 17, 1946. But as Acheson worked to contain the atomic genie, others were working to contain, if not destroy, Oppenheimer. That same week, J. Edgar Hoover was urging his agents to step up their surveillance of Oppenheimer. Though he hadn’t a shred of evidence, Hoover now floated the possibility that Oppenheimer intended to defect to the Soviet Union. Having decided that Oppenheimer was a Soviet sympathizer, the FBI director reasoned that “he would be far more valuable there as an advisor in the construction of atomic plants than he would be as a casual informant in the United States.” He instructed his agents to “follow Oppenheimer’s activities and contacts closely. . . .

The establishment of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908—led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover—was a direct response to the revolutionary wave that gripped the American working class. FBI agents, often little more than state-employed goons and thugs, ruthlessly hunted down those on the left. The FBI spied on and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African Americans—antiwar groups, and later the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices. They illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps, created blacklists, and demanded loyalty oaths. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. By the time they were done, America’s progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.

The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s

Hoover wanted the new investigation to be a showcase for his bureau, which he had continued to restructure. To counter the sordid image created by Burns and the old school of venal detectives, Hoover adopted the approach of Progressive thinkers who advocated for ruthlessly efficient systems of management. These systems were modeled on the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer, who argued that companies should be run “scientifically,” with each worker’s task minutely analyzed and quantified. Applying these methods to government, Progressives sought to end the tradition of crooked party bosses packing government agencies, including law enforcement, with patrons and hacks. Instead, a new class of technocratic civil servants would manage burgeoning bureaucracies, in the manner of Herbert Hoover—“ the Great Engineer”—who had become a hero for administering humanitarian relief efforts so expeditiously during World War I. As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What’s more, here was a way for Hoover, a deskbound functionary, to cast himself as a dashing figure—a crusader for the modern scientific age. The fact that he didn’t fire a gun only burnished his image. Reporters noted that the “days of ‘old sleuth’ are over” and that Hoover had “scrapped the old ‘gum shoe, dark lantern and false moustache’ traditions of the Bureau of Investigation and substituted business methods of procedure.” One article said, “He plays golf. Whoever could picture Old Sleuth doing that?

Further evidence for this comes from journalist and author Burton Hersh who alleges in his book Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America that Hoover had also been tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who helped run a sexual blackmail operation in New York that involved young male prostitutes.67 Kaminsky claimed to have been New York-bred, but federal investigators later stated he was originally from Baltimore. Some reports claim Kaminsky had ties to Israel, having served in the Israel Defense Forces.68 The ring, which was called “The Chickens and the Bulls” by the NYPD, targeted prominent men who were closeted homosexuals throughout the United States, many of them married with families. Among those who had been blackmailed were a Navy admiral, two generals, a US congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor and well-known actors and television personalities.69 That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos showing Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.70 Kaminsky successfully avoided arrest for 11 years, having “disappeared” from a New York courthouse undetected during his sentencing hearing.71 Why would Hoover have been involved with the activities of Kaminsky? There are only a few possibilities. One possibility is that Hoover had been blackmailed by Kaminsky, though it’s more likely that Kaminsky instead had ties to figures in organized crime that had already blackmailed Hoover long before. Another possibility is that Hoover was cozy to a second sexual blackmail operation targeting closeted homosexual men because he sought to pad his own library of blackmail for personal and professional gain.

Who really benefited from the death of President Kennedy? Oswald only served as a straw man.[86] Unbeknownst to him, he was being prepared by the CIA and the FBI for his role as a scapegoat. Do not forget that there are often mind control elements at work in these kinds of political assassinations (See chapter 44, Josef Mengele and Monarch Mind Control). Lyndon B. Johnson had foreknowledge of the plan to kill Kennedy. His longtime lover, Madeleine Brown, wrote about Johnson’s foreknowledge of the assassination in her book Texas in the Morning (see also Benjamin Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy 1975). One day before Kennedy was killed, Johnson said: “Tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat, that’s a promise.” Why John Kennedy choosed Lyndon Johnson as his running mate is unknown. He and his brother Robert did not like Johnson at all. They knew that Johnson stole the election that put him in the US Senate. There were also many scandals swirled around Johnson as vice president and a string of murders that may be associated with him. To his assistant Hyman Raskin, Kennedy once said: “You know, we had never considered Lyndon. But I was left with no choice. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems.” Who were those bastards? Did he refer to the Illuminati? There is no doubt that Kennedy had been submitted to blackmail. Kennedy excused his choice of Johnson several times: “The whole story will never be known. And it’s just as well that it won’t be.” Lyndon Johnson, who was an Illuminati mole, was up to his neck into the conspiracy. He had orders to cover everything up. Within hours of the killing, he placed all the weight of his newly acquired authority to obstruct the quest for the truth. He received the full support of the CIA and FBI director Edgar Hoover, who circulated a memo asserting his conviction that Oswald had acted on his own initiative. Harvey Oswald fired just three bullets from above and behind. Did he really wound all the limousine’s occupants with these shots? The killing of Kennedy is more complex than is usually admitted. Officially, one of Oswald´s bullets hit Kennedy twice and Governor John Connally who was sitting in the front seat of the limousine, three times!

Edgar brushed aside all talk of recruiting women, claiming that they ‘could never gunfight, and all our agents must know how to do that.

(they would cost $30,000 each by the end of his career)

The Bureau boasted thirteen blacks by the end of that year, out of a total agent force of 6,000 men.

There were Hoover blankets, the newspapers used by the destitute to ward off the cold; Hoover flags, pockets empty of money; and Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the homeless.

In his day, as is still often the case today, anything other than evident heterosexuality could destroy a public official. Acutely aware of the danger, Edgar overcompensated. Like several other public figures with a secret homosexual life, Edgar often behaved viciously toward fellow homosexuals.

Welles had allegedly tried to bribe several black male Pullman staff members to have sex with him in his compartment

Edgar behaved at the track as though he did not know what everyone in law enforcement knew, that racetrack gambling was the single most important source of revenue for organized crime.

Millions of Russians found themselves gripped by a tyranny incomparably worse than that of the Czar.

a funeral dirge will be sung either over the Soviet Republic

Folks-Shtimme,

God grant

For once, by sheer weight of numbers, Edgar’s wrath was thwarted.

You must understand that you’re working for a crazy maniac and that our duty is to find out what he wants and to create the world that he believes in, and to show him that’s the way things are

The art of the police consists in not seeing what there is no use seeing.’ Napoleon Bonaparte

Party leaders stay in fancy hotels or take vacations, while rank-and-file members are hounded to donate the last dollar

The huge seventy-billion a year ‘defense’ budget

The FBI, the CIA, the NSA—to different degrees Elizebeth pressed her thumb into the clay of all these agencies when the clay was still wet. She helped to shape them and she battled them, too, a woman hammering herself into the history of what we now call the “intelligence community.” But when powerful men started telling the story, they left her out of it. In 1945, Elizebeth’s spy files were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war. So she had to sit silent and watch others seize credit for her accomplishments, particularly J. Edgar Hoover.

When Elizebeth sent them a decrypt, the FBI placed it in their own SIS filing system, with a new four-digit identifying number, and the FBI invented new names for the radio networks that Elizebeth had already named. This is how the history of the Invisible War would become distorted; these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements.

the

Eastland had been born in 1904 into a crucible of Mississippi racial violence. Just months before his birth, his father had led a lynch mob seeking vengeance for the murder of Eastland’s uncle. The mob killed at least three people before finally capturing the alleged murderers, a Black couple. Eastland’s relatives beat the suspects, cut off their fingers and ears, and tortured them with corkscrews before burning the couple alive in front of a crowd a thousand strong. Named for his murdered uncle, Eastland had been groomed to take over his family’s plantation holdings, and to maintain the social and political order on which it rested. Upon arriving in Washington in 1941, he had carved out a place for himself as an outspoken champion of white supremacy. He opposed any federal policy that might disrupt it.

The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, responded by operating a covert counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, that targeted civil rights leaders and activists, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who were deemed dangerous or suspected of Communist Party affiliation.

The building itself—classical exterior, art deco interior—stands in contrast to the brutalist architecture of the FBI building, and the contrast captures something of the reality. The J. Edgar Hoover Building represents the instrumental aspects of justice, the Robert F. Kennedy building represents the ideal.

Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover ordered FBI agents to protect the visiting fascist.

The lengths his detractors would go were made clear in declassified FBI memoranda. J. Edgar Hoover authored a series of memos suggesting they “develop counter-intelligence measures to neutralize him [Gregory]. This should not be in the nature of an expose, since he already gets far too much publicity. Instead, sophisticated completely untraceable means of neutralizing Gregory should be developed.

Who got the Indian Sign on you? How did it start? At age 12, worrying that J. Edgar Hoover was watching you jack off through his Washington telescope? Was it the bogey-man they scared you with? "Don't make dirty-dirty in your pants or ogres will come and eat you"? Circumcision the most cruel and inhuman attack on the genital accepted by your doctors; why? Schedule feeding that fucked up the minds of a generation; why? Is that how they get the soldiers for their wars? The whip-and-belt boys, the uniform-and-discipline boys, the Pentagon boys, all one big happy spanking-orgy?

The “J. Edgar Hoover of public health” has presided over cataclysmic declines in public health, including an exploding chronic disease epidemic that has made the “Fauci generation”—children born after his elevation to NIAID kingpin in 1984— the sickest generation in American history, and has made Americans among the least healthy citizens on the planet. His obsequious subservience to the Big Ag, Big Food, and pharmaceutical companies has left our children drowning in a toxic soup of pesticide residues, corn syrup, and processed foods, while also serving as pincushions for 69 mandated vaccine doses by age 18—none of them properly safety tested.55 When Dr. Fauci took office, America was still ranked among the world’s healthiest populations. An August 2021 study by the Commonwealth Fund ranked America’s health care system dead last among industrialized nations, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy.

At the height of the FBI’s power,” Sarah began, “J. Edgar Hoover said that the biggest threat to national security was Black unity. They killed a sympathetic president, Martin, and Malcolm; dismantled the Black Panthers, labeled them as enemies of the United States; and then flooded our communities with drugs and guns and sent in more police for more arrests to fill up prisons. And that’s just in my lifetime. So, if money is power, giving people this money makes them a threat.” Sarah spoke like she knew from experience.

So she had to sit silent and watch others seize credit for her accomplishments, particularly J. Edgar Hoover. A gifted salesman, Hoover successfully portrayed the FBI as the major hero in the Nazi spy hunt. Public gratitude flowed to Hoover, increasing his already considerable power, making him an American icon, virtually untouchable until his death in 1972.

In the decade since 9/11, the FBI has built the largest network of spies ever to exist in the United States—with ten times as many informants on the streets today as there were during the infamous Cointelpro operations under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—with the majority of these spies focused on ferreting out terrorism in Muslim communities.

The suspicion was unrelated to anything King said or did; it began, almost entirely, with the FBI’s presumption that the presence of former Communist Party activists within the SCLC made King a threat to national security. For J. Edgar Hoover, the investigation of King quickly became personal.

Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected—not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf.

Under Cheney’s direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

You right,” Hawk said. “Couldn’t happen. Be like J. Edgar Hoover running around in a dress.” “Exactly,” I said. “Impossible.

NOT A GOOD MOVE, Mama.’ ‘Why not?’ said Emma. ‘Jim Knowles has never been supportive, and frankly I’ll be glad to be rid of him.’ ‘Remember what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover? I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

J. Edgar Hoover, the pugnacious director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), put it country-simple for a lay audience when he declared in a widely quoted 1961 speech: "The three biggest threats to America are the Communists, the Beatniks, and the Eggheads." America's secret police chief with the bulldog visage was exaggerating when he fingered the reds, for he knew that the Communist Party USA by this time was largely a front for government spies masquerading as authentic members. As for the eggheads—Hoover never bothered to explain who they were or why they were dangerous.

Justice is incidental to law and order

These groups have long been present in U.S. history. Above all, black and brown dissident groups—but also those from indigenous and Asian/Asian-American, as well as white communities—have arisen to challenge their communities’ dispossession. They are viewed by the state as in need of monitoring, control, even “neutralization,” to use FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s term for the destruction, division, defamation, and even death that the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) unleashed upon dissident groups in the 1970s and 1980s. U.S. officials also have often had to wage a veritable civil war against low-wage workers, farmers, and others; so much so, in fact, that historian Howard Zinn has referred to the big business war on labor as “The Other Civil War.

not Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, or Sam Giancana; not H. L. Hunt or Clint Murchison; not James Angleton, Bill Harvey, or David Morales; not Curtis LeMay, Charles Willoughby, or John McCloy; not even J. Edgar Hoover; and certainly not Lee Harvey Oswald—had the motive, the means, the opportunity, the demonstrated pattern of previous criminal, even murderous conduct and the overall demented resolve to see it through. Only one man met all of the criteria required for the murder of John F. Kennedy: Lyndon B. Johnson.

One of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Black Panther Party] is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it. This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks. . . . You state that the Bureau under the [Counterintelligence Program] should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] “Breakfast for Children.” You state that this is because many prominent “humanitarians,” both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You have obviously missed the point. —J. Edgar Hoover to FBI Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, May 27, 1969

Nobody has proved that the NSA or GCHQ committed grave and deliberate breaches of the law. In the big scandals of the 1960s, the FBI illegally bugged American citizens and tried to blackmail the government's political opponents. For example, it wanted to make Martin Luther King commit suicide, by threatening him with the exposure of his adultery. No comparable examples have been produced now, and I do not believe any will be. Nobody has produced individual victims of illegal NSA activity. There is no evidence of wilful, systematic breaches of the law by the NSA, or of contempt within its ranks, at any level, for judicial and legislative oversight. There is no modern counterpart of J Edgar Hoover, the brooding madman who brought the FBI to its darkest hour.

The goal was a U.S. Gestapo. Senator Ervin described the espionage squad inside the White House as a “gestapo mentality.” J. Edgar Hoover refused any part of the gestapo, saying the secret Domestic Intelligence operations “denied our civil liberties.” The Inter-Agency Group (IAG) on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security includes members from the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, Counter-Intelligence agencies of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Police Departments.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had made the Black Panthers a top priority and, naturally, had publicly “declared war” on them.

President Lyndon Johnson was forced to select a commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. Texas authorities were called upon to conduct the original investigation. There were too many suspicious people around the world who believed a conspiracy existed. Those rumors had to be squelched. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI never budged from its position that Lee Harvey acted alone. Any evidence that didn’t conform to this conclusion was ignored. Twenty-six volumes of witness testimony and exhibits were published, and only 8,000 copies were sold. No more reprints. The contradiction between the conclusions of the Warren Report, and the abundance of discrepancies in the other volumes, makes fascinating reading. Chief Justice Earl Warren, John J. McCloy and Allen Dulles were LBJ’s logical choices. President Kennedy didn’t trust CIA Director Dulles. Now JFK was dead and Dulles would be in charge of all possible “conspiracy” investigations. Richard Nixon, temporarily retired from politics for the first time since 1946, selected Rep. Gerald Ford to sit on this commission. Nixon selected Ford a second time when he ran home to escape impeachment during the Watergate hearings.

Roosevelt liked to laugh. He liked to chitchat. One of his favorite amusements was summoning J. Edgar Hoover to the Oval Office and getting the lowdown on Washington gossip.

April 26: Marilyn attends the Newspaper Public Convention luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria. She is photographed with Hedda Hopper and J. Edgar Hoover.

Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87