G-Man

As director of the FBI for decades, J. Edgar Hoover helped build a massive, professionalized national security state and hounded leftists out of public life.

A zealot through and through, he ran the FBI like a religious sect.

The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

The author of a new biography explains how liberals played an important role in enabling Hoover’s antidemocratic crusade.

Before his abuses of power were exposed, he was celebrated as a scourge of Nazis, Communists, and subversives.

The FBI’s successful campaign against white supremacists is also a cautionary tale.

The F.B.I. director promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within.

Behind his tough image, the longtime FBI director was a man of profound contradictions.