John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the fifth and final director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) and the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). President Calvin Coolidge first appointed Hoover as director of the BOI, the predecessor to the FBI, in 1924. After 11 years in the post, Hoover became instrumental in founding the FBI in June 1935, where he remained as director for an additional 37 years until his death in May 1972 – serving a total of 48 years leading both the BOI and the FBI under eight presidents.
Hoover expanded the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency and instituted a number of modernizations to policing technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover also established and expanded a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List.
Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have routinely violated both the FBI's own policies and the very laws which the FBI was charged with enforcing, to have used the FBI to harass and disrupt political dissidents, as well as civil rights leaders and organizations, and to have extensively collected information on officials and private citizens using illegal surveillance, wiretapping, and burglaries. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was able to intimidate and threaten high-ranking political figures.
Hoover was born on New Year's Day 1895 in Washington, D.C., to German American Anna Marie (née Scheitlin; 1860–1938) and Dickerson Naylor Hoover (1856–1921), chief of the printing division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, formerly a plate maker for the same organization. Dickerson Hoover was of English and German ancestry. Hoover's maternal great-uncle, John Hitz, was a Swiss honorary consul general to the United States. Among his family, he was the closest to his mother, who despite being "inclined to instruction", showed great affection towards her son.
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Hoover was born in a house on the present site of Capitol Hill United Methodist Church, located on Seward Square near Eastern Market in Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood. A stained glass window in the church is dedicated to him. Hoover did not have a birth certificate filed upon his birth, although it was required in 1895 in Washington. Two of his siblings did have certificates, but Hoover's was not filed until 1938 when he was 43.
Hoover lived his entire life in Washington, D.C. He attended Central High School, where he sang in the school choir, participated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, and competed on the debate team. During debates, he argued against women getting the right to vote and against the abolition of the death penalty. The school newspaper applauded his "cool, relentless logic". Hoover stuttered as a boy, which he later learned to manage by teaching himself to talk quickly—a style that he carried through his adult career. He eventually spoke with such ferocious speed that stenographers had a hard time following him.
Hoover was 18 years old when he accepted his first job, an entry-level position as messenger in the orders department at the Library of Congress. The library was a half mile from his house. The experience shaped both Hoover and the creation of the FBI profiles; as Hoover observed in a 1951 letter, "This job ... trained me in the value of collating material. It gave me an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence."
In 1916, Hoover obtained a Bachelor of Laws from the George Washington University Law School, where he was a member of the Alpha Nu Chapter of the Kappa Alpha Order, a Southern fraternity. While Kappa Alpha Order later deemed Confederate General Robert E. Lee as their spiritual founder, this happened after Hoover’s time as an active member. Some prominent Kappa Alpha alumni, who had an influence on Hoover's future beliefs, included author Thomas Dixon and John Temple Graves. Hoover graduated with an LL.M. in 1917 from the same university. While a law student, Hoover became interested in the career of Anthony Comstock, the New York City U.S. Postal Inspector, who waged prolonged campaigns against fraud, vice, pornography, and birth control.
Department of Justice
War Emergency Division
Immediately after getting his LL.M. degree, Hoover was hired by the Justice Department to work in the War Emergency Division. He accepted the clerkship on July 27, 1917, aged 22. The job paid $990 a year ($24,900 in 2025 dollars) and was exempt from the draft. Hoover soon became the head of the Division's Alien Enemy Bureau, authorized by President Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of World War I to arrest and jail allegedly disloyal foreigners without trial. He received additional authority from the 1917 Espionage Act. Out of a list of 1,400 suspicious Germans living in the U.S., the Bureau arrested 98 and designated 1,172 as arrestable.
In August 1919, the 24-year-old Hoover became head of the Bureau of Investigation's new General Intelligence Division, also known as the Radical Division because its goal was to monitor and disrupt the work of domestic radicals. America's First Red Scare was beginning, and one of Hoover's first assignments was to carry out the Palmer Raids. Hoover and his chosen assistant, George Ruch, monitored a variety of U.S. radicals. Targets during this period included Marcus Garvey; Rose Pastor Stokes and Cyril Briggs; Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman; and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who, Hoover maintained, was "the most dangerous man in the United States". In 1920, at D.C.'s Federal Lodge No. 1 in Washington, D.C., the 25-year-old Hoover was initiated as a Freemason. He went on to join the Scottish Rite in which he was made a 33rd Degree Inspector General Honorary in 1955.
Head of the Bureau of Investigation
In 1921, Hoover rose in the Bureau of Investigation to deputy head, and in 1924 the Attorney General made him the acting director. On May 10, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Hoover as the fifth Director of the Bureau of Investigation, partly in response to allegations that the prior director, William J. Burns, was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal. When Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, it had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents. Hoover fired all female agents and banned the future hiring of them.
Hoover was sometimes unpredictable in his leadership. He frequently fired Bureau agents, singling out those he thought "looked stupid like truck drivers," or whom he considered "pinheads". He also relocated agents who had displeased him to career-ending assignments and locations. Melvin Purvis was a prime example: Purvis was one of the most effective agents in capturing and breaking up 1930s gangs, and it is alleged that Hoover maneuvered him out of the Bureau because he was envious of the substantial public recognition Purvis received.
In December 1929, Hoover oversaw the protection detail for the Japanese Naval Delegation who were visiting Washington, D.C., on their way to attend negotiations for the 1930 London Naval Treaty (officially called Treaty for the Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armament). The Japanese delegation was greeted at Washington Union (train) Station by U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson and the Japanese Ambassador Katsuji Debuchi. The Japanese delegation then visited the White House to meet with President Herbert Hoover.
Depression-era gangsters
In the early 1930s, criminal gangs carried out large numbers of bank robberies in the Midwest. They used their superior firepower and fast getaway cars to elude local law enforcement agencies and avoid arrest. Many of these criminals frequently made newspaper headlines across the United States, particularly John Dillinger, who became famous for leaping over bank cages, and repeatedly escaping from jails and police traps.
The robbers operated across state lines, and Hoover pressed to have their crimes recognized as federal offenses so that he and his men would have the authority to pursue them and get the credit for capturing them. Initially, the Bureau suffered some embarrassing foul-ups, in particular with Dillinger and his conspirators. A raid on a summer lodge in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, called "Little Bohemia", left a Bureau agent and a civilian bystander dead and others wounded; all the gangsters escaped.
Hoover realized that his job was then on the line, and he pulled out all stops to capture the culprits. In late July 1934, Special Agent Melvin Purvis, the Director of Operations in the Chicago office, received a tip on Dillinger's whereabouts that paid off when Dillinger was located, ambushed, and killed by Bureau agents outside the Biograph Theater. Hoover was credited for overseeing several highly publicized captures or shootings of outlaws and bank robbers. These included those of Machine Gun Kelly in 1933, of Dillinger in 1934, and of Alvin Karpis in 1936, which led to the Bureau's powers being broadened.
In 1935, the Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It was not simply a name change. A great deal of restructuring was done. In fact, Hoover visited the lab of Canadian forensic scientist Wilfrid Derome twice – in 1929 and 1932 – to plan the foundation of his own FBI laboratory in the United States.
In 1939, the FBI became pre-eminent in domestic intelligence, thanks in large part to changes made by Hoover, such as expanding and combining fingerprint files in the Identification Division, to compiling the largest collection of fingerprints to date, and Hoover's help to expand the FBI's recruitment and create the FBI Laboratory, a division established in 1932 to examine and analyze evidence found by the FBI.
During the 1930s, Hoover persistently denied the existence of organized crime, despite numerous organized crime shootings as Mafia groups struggled for control of the lucrative profits deriving from illegal alcohol sales during Prohibition, and later for control of prostitution, illegal drugs and other criminal enterprises. Hoover was reluctant to pursue the Mafia as he knew that organized crime investigations typically required excessive man hours while resulting in a relatively small number of arrests. He also feared that placing underpaid FBI agents—who had a starting annual salary $5,500 in the mid 1950s—in close contact with wealthy mobsters could undermine the FBI's reputation of incorruptibility.
This practice of deliberate denial and faux-ignorance of organized crime and the Mafia repeatedly brought Hoover into conflict with President John F. Kennedy's pick for Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, who by contrast was determined to make these a priority for the Justice Department and shift the focus away from communism. In the past Hoover had been able to circumvent the authority of the Attorney General by going over their head directly to the President and persuading them to support his point of view; with Kennedy entering the White House in 1961 however and his brother/closest advisor heading up the Justice Department, Hoover had lost his only advantage over Robert as he knew the President's trust in his brother was unshakeable and was forced to begrudgingly go along with the Attorney General's crusade against organized crime and the Mafia but never gave it full-throated support despite the successes it brought.
Many writers believe Hoover's denial of the Mafia's existence and his failure to use the full force of the FBI to investigate it were due to Mafia gangsters Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello's possession of embarrassing photographs of Hoover in the company of his protégé, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson. Other writers believe Costello corrupted Hoover by providing him with horseracing tips, passed through a mutual friend, gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Hoover had a reputation as "an inveterate horseplayer" and was known to send special agents to place $100 bets for him. Hoover once said the Bureau had "much more important functions" than arresting bookmakers and gamblers.
Although Hoover built the reputation of the FBI arresting bank robbers in the 1930s, his main interest had always been Communist subversion, and during the Cold War he was able to focus the FBI's attention on these investigations. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, he paid little attention to criminal vice rackets such as illegal drugs, prostitution, extortion, and flatly denied the existence of the Mafia in the United States. In the 1950s, evidence of the FBI's unwillingness to investigate the Mafia became a topic of public criticism. After the Apalachin meeting of crime bosses in 1957, Hoover could no longer deny the existence of a nationwide crime syndicate. In fact, Cosa Nostra's control of the Syndicate's many branches operating criminal activities throughout North America prevailed and was heavily reported in popular newspapers and magazines. Hoover created the "Top Hoodlum Program" and went after the syndicate's top bosses throughout the country.
Investigation of subversion and radicals
Hoover was concerned about what he claimed was subversion, and under his leadership the FBI investigated tens of thousands of suspected subversives and radicals. According to critics, Hoover tended to exaggerate the dangers of these alleged subversives and many times overstepped his bounds in his pursuit of eliminating that perceived threat. William G. Hundley, a Justice Department prosecutor, joked that Hoover's investigations had actually helped the American communist movement survive, as Hoover's "informants were nearly the only ones that paid the party dues." Due to the FBI's aggressive targeting, by 1957 the membership of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) had dwindled to less than 10,000, of whom some 1,500 were informants for the FBI.
Florida and Long Island U-boat landings
The FBI investigated rings of German saboteurs and spies starting in the late 1930s and had primary responsibility for counterespionage. The first arrests of German agents were made in 1938 and continued throughout World War II. In the Quirin affair during World War II, German U-boats set two small groups of Nazi agents ashore in Florida and on Long Island to cause acts of sabotage within the country. The two teams were apprehended after one of the agents contacted the FBI and told them everything – he was also charged and convicted.
Wiretapping
During this time period, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, out of concern over Nazi agents in the United States, gave "qualified permission" to wiretap persons "suspected ... [of] subversive activities". He went on to add in 1941 that the U.S. Attorney General had to be informed of its use in each case. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson left it to Hoover to decide how and when to use wiretaps, as he found the "whole business" distasteful. Jackson's successor at the post of Attorney General, Francis Biddle, did turn down Hoover's requests on occasion. An example of J. Edgar Hoover approving wiretaps is the Nixon wiretaps.
Concealed espionage discoveries
In the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Hoover the task to investigate both foreign espionage in the United States and the activities of domestic communists and fascists. When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the FBI under Hoover undertook the intensive surveillance of communists and other left-wing activists in the United States. The FBI also participated in the Venona project, a pre-World War II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States. They did not initially realize that espionage was being committed, but the Soviets' multiple use of one-time pad ciphers (which with single use are unbreakable) created redundancies that allowed some intercepts to be decoded. These established that espionage was being carried out. Hoover kept the intercepts – America's greatest counterintelligence secret – in a locked safe in his office. He chose not to inform President Harry S. Truman, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, or Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and General George Marshall while they held office. He informed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the Venona Project in 1952.
Plans for expanding the FBI to do global intelligence
After World War II, Hoover advanced plans to create a "World-Wide Intelligence Service". These plans were shot down by the Truman administration. Truman objected to the plan, emerging bureaucratic competitors opposed the centralization of power inherent in the plans, and there was a considerable aversion to creating an American version of the "Gestapo".
Plans for suspending habeas corpus
In 1946, Attorney General Tom C. Clark authorized Hoover to compile a list of potentially disloyal Americans who might be detained during a wartime national emergency. In 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War, Hoover submitted a plan to President Truman to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain 12,000 Americans suspected of disloyalty. Truman did not act on the plan.
COINTELPRO and the 1950s
In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute people for their political opinions, most notably communists. Some of his aides reported that he purposely exaggerated the threat of communism to "ensure financial and public support for the FBI." At this time he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was first used to disrupt the CPUSA, where Hoover ordered observation and pursuit of targets that ranged from suspected citizen spies to larger celebrity figures, such as Charlie Chaplin, whom he saw as spreading Communist propaganda.
COINTELPRO's methods included infiltration, burglaries, setting up illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents, and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations. Some authors have charged that COINTELPRO methods also included inciting violence and arranging murders. This program remained in place until it was exposed to the public in 1971, after the burglary by a group of eight activists of many internal documents from an office in Media, Pennsylvania, whereupon COINTELPRO became the cause of some of the harshest criticism of Hoover and the FBI. COINTELPRO's activities were investigated in 1975 by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, called the "Church Committee" after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho); the committee declared COINTELPRO's activities were illegal and contrary to the Constitution.
Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed Deputy Attorney General in early 1974, FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley thought such files either did not exist or had been destroyed. After The Washington Post broke a story in January 1975, Kelley searched and found them in his outer office. The House Judiciary Committee then demanded that Silberman testify about them.
Reaction to civil rights groups
Hoover had opposed the Civil Rights Movement and often falsely linked its figures like Martin Luther King Jr. as subversive communist threats to the established order and "American way of life". In 1956, several years before he targeted Martin Luther King Jr., Hoover had a public showdown with T. R. M. Howard, a civil rights leader from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI's failure to investigate thoroughly the racially motivated murders of George W. Lee, Lamar Smith, and Emmett Till. Hoover wrote an open letter to the press singling out these statements as "irresponsible".
Later through the FBI program COINTELPRO, Hoover issued directives to "discredit, disrupt, and destroy" civil rights leaders and organizations, authorizing wire taps and other forms of surveillance to try to gather information that could be used to discredit them. In the 1960s, Hoover's FBI monitored John Lennon, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. COINTELPRO tactics were later extended to organizations such as the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others. Hoover's moves against people who maintained contacts with subversive elements, some of whom were members of the civil rights movement, also led to accusations of trying to undermine their reputations.
The treatment of Martin Luther King Jr. and actress Jean Seberg are two examples: Jacqueline Kennedy recalled that Hoover told President John F. Kennedy that King had tried to arrange a sex party while in the capital for the March on Washington and that Hoover told Robert F. Kennedy that King had made derogatory comments during the President's funeral. Under Hoover's leadership, the FBI sent an anonymous blackmail letter to King shortly before he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, indicating "There is only one thing left for you to do", which King interpreted as an exhortation for him to commit suicide; however, King's interpretation of the letter has not been proven, with more portions of the letter being made public in 2014 which revealed that it also praised "older leaders" in the civil right movement such as Roy Wilkins and urged King to step aside and let other men lead the movement.
The Church Committee, a U.S. Senate subcommittee led by U.S. Senator Frank Church which investigated numerous controversial FBI activities, found in 1976 that the FBI's intent was to push King out of SCLC leadership. King's aide Andrew Young claimed in a 2013 interview with the Academy of Achievement that the main source of tension between the SCLC and FBI was the government agency's lack of black agents, and that both parties were willing to co-operate with each other by the time the Selma to Montgomery marches had taken place.
In one 1965 incident, white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen, who had given chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a young black man; one of the Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe, an acknowledged FBI informant. The FBI spread rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the CPUSA and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement. FBI records show that Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Nevertheless, three Klansmen would be convicted in a federal trial for Liuzzo's murder in December 1965.
Hoover also personally ordered the cessation of the Federal inquiry into the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan that killed four girls. By May 1965, local investigators and the FBI had identified suspects in the bombing and witnesses, and this information was relayed to Hoover. No prosecutions of the four suspects ensued even though the evidence was reportedly "so strong that even a white Alabama jury would convict". There had been a history of mistrust between local and federal investigators.
Hoover wrote in a memo that the chances of a conviction were remote and told his agents not to share their results with federal or state prosecutors. In 1968, the FBI formally closed their investigation into the bombing without filing charges against any of their named suspects. The files were sealed by order of Hoover. Hoover in 1970 personally authorized "black-bag" jobs against the Weather Underground per testimony from William C. Sullivan. In 1976, congressional investigations reviewed the FBI's campaign against King and criticized it as being "one of the most abusive of all FBI programs".
Late career and death
One of his biographers, Kenneth Ackerman, wrote that the allegation that Hoover's secret files kept presidents from firing him "is a myth". President Richard Nixon was recorded in 1971 as stating that one of the reasons he would not fire Hoover was that he was afraid of Hoover's reprisals against him. Similarly, Presidents Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy considered dismissing Hoover as FBI Director, but ultimately concluded that the political cost of doing so would be too great. In 1964, Hoover's FBI investigated Jack Valenti, a special assistant and confidant of President Lyndon Johnson, married to Johnson's personal secretary, but who allegedly maintained a homosexual relationship with a commercial photographer friend.
Hoover personally directed the FBI investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, just days before Hoover testified in the earliest stages of the Warren Commission hearings, President Lyndon B. Johnson waived the then mandatory U.S. Government Service Retirement Age of 70, allowing Hoover to remain the FBI Director "for an indefinite period of time". Hoover had been among those to suggest the setting up of the commission, faced with a suspicious public, Hoover wrote to White House aide Walter Jenkins that "the thing I am concerned about is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin". The House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report in 1979 critical of the performance by the FBI, the Warren Commission, and other agencies. The report criticized the FBI's (Hoover's) reluctance to investigate thoroughly the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.
When Nixon took office in January 1969, Hoover had just turned 74. There was a growing sentiment in Washington, D.C., that the aging FBI chief should retire, but Hoover's power and friends in Congress remained too strong for him to be forced to do so. Hoover remained director of the FBI until he died of a heart attack in his Washington home, on May 2, 1972, whereupon operational command of the Bureau was passed onto Associate Director Clyde Tolson. On May 3, 1972, Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray – a Justice Department official with no FBI experience – as acting director of the FBI, with W. Mark Felt becoming associate director.
Hoover's body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, where Chief Justice Warren Burger eulogized him. Up to that time, Hoover was the only civil servant to have lain in state according to The New York Daily News. At the time, The New York Times observed that this was "an honor accorded to only 21 persons before, of whom eight were Presidents or former Presidents." President Nixon delivered another eulogy at the funeral service in The National Presbyterian Church, and called Hoover "one of the Giants, [whose] long life brimmed over with magnificent achievement and dedicated service to this country which he loved so well". Hoover is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., next to the graves of his parents and a sister who had died in infancy.
Legacy
FBI
Biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman summarizes Hoover's legacy thus:
