A stolid career bureaucrat who at first glance lacked a political constituency, J. Edgar Hoover is one of the most important and unlikely figures in modern America. When he died in 1972 at the age of 77, the Christian Science Monitor opined: “There probably will never be anybody like Mr. Hoover again.” “Nor should there be,” the writer concluded. In her new biography, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century, Yale historian Beverly Gage tells us why.
Hoover served 48 years as the FBI’s head, amassing power and influence that coincided with the rise of America on the world stage. A native of Washington, D.C., Hoover joined the Department of Justice in 1917 during World War I. By 1921, he was appointed assistant director of what was then merely called the Bureau of Investigation. Three years later, at the mere age of 29, he was appointed director of what would, a decade later, be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
