On November 11, ``J.Edgar’’, a motion picture epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Naomi Watts and directed by Clint Eastwood hits the screens nationwide, giving audiences the opportunity to bear witness to a dramatic depiction of John Edgar Hoover,’s idealistic side, his dark side and most certainly his voyeuristic side as America’s top cop for almost 50 years gathers deeply guarded secrets and listens to wiretaps of the important and powerful from his FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.
With so much territory to cover during Hoover’s long tenure; from the Red Scare to the public shenanigans of John Dillinger, ``Ma'' Barker, Bonnie and Clyde to the explosive dossiers assembled on high profile public figures like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., it will be a tall order indeed for Mr. DiCaprio to capture the essence of arguably the most controversial FBI director in U.S. history.
Let’s just hope the film doesn’t disappoint and lives up to its all-star billing.
For those interested in catching up on some history on Mr. Hoover before heading off the theaters, I’ve assembled some facts, feats, and historic footnotes about the FBI’s former director.
John Edgar Hoover
• Born: January 1, 1895.
• Nickname: ``Speed’’, a boyhood nickname he earned after carrying groceries for elderly neighbors for just a few nickels.
• Early in his FBI career, Hoover liked to smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes
• 1913: Graduated from Central High School in Washington D.C.
• In 1913, while attending law school, Hoover took a $30 a month job as a book cataloguer in the Library of Congress. It was here where he learned the value of maintaining a systemized coding system, which required placing the topic, title, author, and location on individual index cards in order to easily locate an item. Hoover applied a similar system in tracking criminals later in his career with the FBI.
• Hoover’s family lived in a two-story stucco house at 413 Seward Square in a neighborhood known as ``Pipetown’’, just seven blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
• 1917: Earned a law degree from George Washington University.
• In 1917, begins working at the Justice Department as a 21-year-old clerk.
• From 1919 to 1921, Hoover helped the Justice Department conduct the ``Palmer Raids’’ in which they rounded up a number of suspects in U.S. cities, who the Department believed were socialists, anarchists and radicals, charging them with attempting to overthrow the government.
• August 22, 1921: Hoover is named assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation.
• December, 1924: Hoover is named permanent director of the Bureau of Investigation; later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI.
• Shortly after assuming active control of the Bureau, Hoover turns a haphazardly stored finger printing collection he inherited into a national database that could be accessed by local and state law enforcement officials in order to match fingerprints at a crime scene.
• In 1930, Hoover establishes the Uniform Crime Report, which are national statistics used to determine whether there is a pattern to crimes being committed and whether it’s on the rise or is decreasing.
• By 1931, Hoover and the FBI had compiled 10 million sets of fingerprints; by 1974 it had surpassed 159 million.
• June 18, 1934: In response to gangsters like John Dillinger evading the law, Congress passed a number of federal crime laws, which for the first time gave Hoover and his agents the right to carry firearms with the authority to make arrests.
• July 22, 1934: John Dillinger was gunned down by the FBI after exiting the Biograph Theater in Chicago, accompanied by his girlfriend Polly Hamilton after seeing the movie, ``Manhattan Melodrama’’ starring Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy.
• 1933: Hoover is believed to have coined the term ``G-Men ‘’ (government agent) in a newspaper article.
NOTE: According to The Oxford English Dictionary, ``G-Men’’ was first used in F.D. Pasley’s 1931 book, `` Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-made Man’’ when he writes: ``He offered a G man (Government agent) ten gran' to forget it.’’
• 1934: The FBI budget stood at $2, 589, 500.
• Beginning in 1935, Hoover establishes the FBI Police Training School; renamed the FBI National Police Academy in 1936 and the FBI National Academy in 1945.
• Hoover labeled American legendary crime figure Kate ``Ma’’ Barker, ``a she wolf…a veritable beast of prey.’’ Barker was killed with her youngest son, Fred, on January 16, 1935 at Lake Weir, Florida.
• James Cagney became the first actor to depict a Bureau agent in the 1935 motion picture ``G-Men’’ The success of the film immediately bestowed celebrity status to Hoover and his department, making them appear as heroes in the eyes of the American public.
• August 5, 1935: Time Magazine publishes the first of three cover stories on J. Edgar Hoover; the other two would come on August 8, 1949 and December 22, 1975.
• 1936: A detective magazine called ``Feds’’ published a feature on Hoover in which they dubbed him ``Public Hero Number One.’’
• May 1, 1936: J. Edgar Hoover makes his first and only arrest in New Orleans: that of an associate of the Barker gang-Alvin "Old Creepy" Karpis.
• In addition to ``Ma’’ Barker and Dillinger, other high profile criminals that were tracked down under Hoover's watch included: Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde.
• May 29, 1946: Hoover informs President Truman of a suspected ring of spies in Washington ``noted for their pro-Soviet leanings, and all too eager to learn America’s atomic secrets, among them, Alger Hiss.
• 1948-49: Hoover is instrumental to California Congressman Richard M. Nixon with the investigation of Alger Hiss. In 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjuring himself during his testimony which centered on his involvement with a Soviet spy ring.
• In 1950, Hoover sanctions an FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. The idea was actually hatched by International News Service (INS) reporter James Donovan who asked the FBI to provide him with the most dangerous criminals the FBI was currently tracking. The list appeared in the Washington Daily News on February 7, 1949.
• 1950-54: Hoover provides Senator Joseph McCarthy with a list of suspected Communists working within the U.S. State Department.
• Beginning in 1951, Hoover compiled a ``Sexual Deviates’’ index program, which was a list of known homosexuals of past and present employees of several department within the U.S. government. When the ``Sexual Deviates’’ indexes were destroyed in 1977, the files numbered over 300,000 pages.
• Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted a campaign of domestic counterintelligence through a program called COINTELPRO (the Counterintelligence Program) which initially targeted the Communist Party in the United States in 1950's; it then expanded in subsequent decades to include anti-Vietnam protestors, white supremacists and Civil Rights leaders. By 1960, the FBI had compiled 432,000 open files on subversives.
• January 10, 1964: The FBI begins transcribing tapes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., along with a few of his associates from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and two female employees from the Philadelphia Naval Yard at the Willard Hotel, drinking and engaging in sexual activity. Wiretaps were additionally planted in King’s rooms on February 22, 1964 at the Hyatt House in Los Angeles. The conversations included King’s bawdy descriptions of John F. Kennedy’s sex life, along with a vulgar reference to JFK’s wife, Jacqueline Kennedy.
• May 8, 1964: President Lyndon Johnson waves the FBI’s mandatory retirement requirement at age 70 in order for the 69 year-old Hoover to remain as director of the FBI. ``The nation cannot afford to lose you’’, the president said.
• In 1966, a Gallup poll found 84 percent of Americans in favor of the work the FBI’s office was doing. By 1975, it had dipped to 52 percent.
• By 1969, the FBI had compiled 754.000 personal files on individuals.
• Hoover died at his Washington D.C. home on May 2, 1972. Soon after his death , Helen Gandy, Hoover’s lifelong partner and executive assistant for 52 years, shredded or destroyed his most sensitive personal files.
• Hoover was buried in Congressional Cemetery, just 13 blocks from the home he was raised in as a young boy.
• High profile names Hoover had personal files of, included: Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller III, Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
• In all, Hoover remained director of the FBI for 48 years, served 11 presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon; and 18 Attorney Generals from A. Mitchell Palmer to John Mitchell.
• The FBI headquarters in 1975 contained 6.5 million files, filling 7,000 six-drawer file cabinets.
• By 1979 the FBI field offices housed an additional 300,000 cubic feet of files.
• According to Bowker's Books in Print database, there are currently 61 adult books, and 4 juvenile books published or distributed in the United States about J. Edgar Hoover.
-Bill Lucey
WPLucey@gmail.com
November 8, 2011
Source: The FBI Archives; ``PuppetMaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover’’ by Richard Hack; ``Young J. Edgar’’ by Kenneth Ackerman
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I've acquired a ring that appears to be very old. It says HOOVER inside white and one side red and other side blue. I'm just trying to see if there is any history behinde it.
Posted by: Ms. Kelli Bramlett | 01/31/2013 at 12:16 AM