Beverly Gage.
BEVERLY GAGE
g-man: J.edgar hoover and the making of the 20th century (2023)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Biograpy Prize.
Winner of the American History Book Prize.
J. Edgar Hoover was the controversial Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from its founding in 1935 until his death in 1972. It is rumoured that one of the reasons he had such long tenure was that he had accumulated incriminating files on each of the eight US Presidents under whom he served and might have leaked these if he were sacked.
Hoover pursued organised crime, arguing that whenever gangs’ activities crossed state lines the FBI could legitimately intervene. He also had the FBI investigate communists and other ‘subversives’ on a huge scale. His pressure on the Communist party of the USA was such that by 1957 its membership had shrunk to 10,000, of which 1,500 were paid FBI informants. He was notorious for excluding minorities and homosexuals from the staff of the FBI.
The New Yorker described Gage’s biography of Hoover as ‘Astonishing’.
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Beverly Gage is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale Univrsity. She took her undergraduate degree at Yale, and her PhD at Columbia University.
