Since President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention of appointing his political loyalist Kash Patel as the director of the F.B.I., critics have warned that we’re heading back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. should be so lucky.
Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan independence. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he grew up imbued with the idea that career-long government service was one of life’s noblest aspirations. As a D.C. resident, Hoover could not vote, and though he was a staunch conservative, he never joined a political party. Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the F.B.I. as a partisan force to protect Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. If such naked politicization happens to undermine public faith in the F.B.I., so much the better. In Patel’s book “Government Gangsters,” published last year, he describes the Bureau’s top officials—along with other “Deep State” executives—as a group of “spiteful mandarins” hell-bent on destroying the country in service of their “uniformly left wing” desires. He warns, “Democrats and the Deep State are on the same team.”
The idea that people who work at the F.B.I. are closet leftists conspiring to bring down the Republic has to be one of the more bizarre takes in a political moment with no shortage of them. But such is the state of our politics, in which self-proclaimed protectors of “law and order” attack the national-security establishment, while reluctant liberals defend its professionalism and autonomy. Hoover would agree with Patel that what happens at the F.B.I. matters. However, the similarities mostly end there. Hoover used to describe the Bureau as the “one bulwark” against a hidden left-wing conspiracy that penetrated all corners of American life. In Patel’s world, the F.B.I. is the conspiracy.
Hoover became the director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation exactly a century ago, under Harlan Fiske Stone, who was then the Attorney General. Stone wanted to clean up a division of the department that had become infamous for spying on dissidents and deploying its agents as political enforcers for the corrupt Harding Administration. Hoover had started at the Justice Department right out of law school. He rose quickly, was promoted to head the department’s new Radical Division in 1919, at the age of twenty-four, then given the position of assistant director of the Bureau at twenty-six. Though Hoover was tainted by the department’s controversies, Stone believed that he was a reformer at heart. The appointment process was simple at the time; the Attorney General, not the President, chose the director, without any need for Senate confirmation. Nobody at the time imagined that the Bureau, staffed with just a few hundred ill-trained agents, would grow into a federal colossus—or that Hoover would want to stay in the job for the next forty-eight years.