J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover was an American law-enforcement official who directed the Bureau of Investigation and then the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nearly five decades. He oversaw the FBI’s expansion into a powerful national police and intelligence institution, while his long tenure remains controversial because of political surveillance, secret files and abuses of investigative power.

Hoover became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 and remained head when it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. He professionalised parts of federal policing and built a powerful public image for the FBI, but his tenure was also marked by extensive political surveillance, secret files and abuses directed at radicals, civil-rights activists and other perceived opponents. He stayed in office until his death in 1972.

In Timothy Ashby’s Devil’s Den, Edgar Hoover and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. In Timothy Ashby’s In Shadowland, Edgar Hoover after the exhumation of Quentin Roosevelt’s grave in France reveals that the body buried there is not the president’s son.