J. Edgar Hoover, who served as director of the F.B.I. for an astonishing 48 years, has long been remembered as the stuff of liberal nightmares: a redbaiter, a wiretapper, a sower of discord through covert manipulations.
As the Yale historian Beverly Gage makes abundantly clear in “G-Man,” her revelatory new biography of Hoover, all of this is true. But by casting him as a “rogue actor,” Gage argues, we neglect to see Hoover for who he really was — less an outsider to the so-called postwar consensus than an integral part of it. He served eight presidents, four Democrats and four Republicans. For all the sunniness projected by the American century, Hoover was its shadow, ever-present and inextricable. This book doesn’t rescue Hoover’s reputation but instead complicates it, deepening our understanding of him and, by extension, the country he served.
