Previous accounts of how Hoover clung to his position for so long have tended to stress his capacity to intimidate, and even blackmail, Presidents. Gage certainly does not deny Hoover’s talent and taste for these dark arts, but she wants to emphasize a simpler explanation, one less flattering to America’s self-regard. For a very long time, most Americans admired Hoover. In the nineteen-thirties, the Bureau’s white-collar officers acquired a new mystique when, at Franklin Roosevelt’s behest, they took on gangsters such as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. For the first time since the Bureau’s founding, in 1908, agents were allowed to make arrests and carry guns—they shot Dillinger down as he left a movie theatre in Chicago, where he’d been watching a gangster picture. Though initially wary of the press and publicity, Hoover proved adept at turning them to his advantage. The Bureau opened its doors to the public for tours, and coöperated with Hollywood studios on a spate of films and, later, a TV series that glamorized F.B.I. agents and offered tantalizing glimpses of the agency’s state-of-the-art forensics. (My father acted in one of these F.B.I. lovefests, a B movie called “Parole Fixer,” from 1940. He was treated to a trip to headquarters, including a turn in the basement shooting range, and a highly flattering, personally autographed charcoal portrait of Hoover.) Outside the director’s office was a display case that contained an array of confiscated weapons, along with John Dillinger’s death mask and bloodstained straw boater.
But Hoover’s purview took in far more than crime. By the late nineteen-forties, he had become the country’s most reliable anti-Communist warrior, more sober (in all senses of the word) and less erratic than Joseph McCarthy, and in it for the long haul. While husbanding his hoard of secrets, he managed to fashion himself into a sort of avuncular avatar of conservative Americanism. Until the COINTELPRO revelations, that persona insured his wide appeal. In interviews with reporters and in speeches before women’s clubs and the American Legion, Hoover extolled Christian faith and the importance of Sunday school; inveighed against “sob sisters,” defense lawyers, “convict lovers,” criminal-justice reformers, and civil-rights “agitators”; and harped on the unrelenting threat of Communism to the American way of life. “The truth is that Hoover stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government, down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing,” Gage writes. In 1964, after he gave a press conference in which he denounced King as America’s “most notorious liar,” fifty per cent of Americans sided with Hoover and just sixteen per cent sided with King. (The rest were undecided.) And, as the Nixon story shows, Hoover’s crepuscular hold over Presidents was tenacious. He served under eight of them, four Republicans and four Democrats, and, Gage makes clear, most were either beholden to him or scared of him, or both.