The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.


The luster is gone from crime fighting image of J Edgar Hoover. He, along with the rest of Federal Bureau of Investigation are remembered for taking on Al Capone, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger along with a host of other really bad guys. However pure his motivation was in the early days, it is clear he was not immune to the lust for power and control.

He was not enamored with the new president coming into the White House after the 1960 election... and he liked the new Attorney General Robert Kennedy even less. Books have been written about their strained relationship and that is too much to cover here. Perhaps his biggest problem was one of the calendar. Hoover was rapidly approach the mandatory retirement age for federal employees. He had approached the new president for a waiver of the rule, but it was not forthcoming from the younger man.

Hoover always had a good relationship with Lyndon Johnson, but the new president was from another era and another mind set. Kennedy was not the only focus of his dislike and distrust. He had no use for hippies and he agreed with assistant director, William Sullivan that it was necessary that Rev Martin Luther King Jr be proven to be a fraud.

Hence the investigation of Dr King, including wire tapped recordings and photographs of embarrassing activities began. While it was technically out of bounds for the CIA to monitor Americans, it was completely within the scope of FBI's crime fighting practices. What was not generally acceptable was using these recordings to blackmail public figures in an effort to control them.

That these efforts failed made Dr King's demise in Memphis essential. Those who accepted the FBI's conclusion that James Earl Ray have trouble explaining the the trees between Dr King's motel and Ray's supposed perch had been trimmed back just days before giving him an unobstructed view of the balcony where the preacher died.

But Ray was not the first “lone gunman” declared by Hoover and company. It was reliably reported that Hoover made an appearance at the Dallas home of Clint Murchison the night of November 21, before flying back to Washington. There is no evidence that he had anything to do with the assassination, but when the president was killed, Hoover insisted that the investigation center on Lee Harvey Oswald as a disaffected former Marine and a lone gunman.

That is the way the field agents conducted the investigation and that is the evidence presented to the WaLinkrren Commission. There were some awkward questions about the FBI's contact with Lee Oswald prior to November 22, 1963, but they were ambiguously side stepped and the investigation moved on. The lone gunman was the official story coming out of the nation's capital and the media picked it up and ran with it... and the people accepted what they were told.

Several years later, the Church Committee began looking into recent assassinations. Assistant Director Sullivan was called to testify. Unfortunately he was killed in a “hunting accident” before this could take place. In fact, five other senior FBI officials were no longer among the living when the committee convened.

The end result was that Hoover's friend, Lyndon Johnson, was president and Hoover was granted the retirement waiver and he remained ensconced in his position guiding the information flow from his part of the federal government in ways to benefit Washington's powerful elite.

Hoover's own life was full of activities that could be embarrassment to him as well as the organization, but his own files on potential enemies gave him effective immunity from being called to account... even his relationship with assistant Clyde Tolson.

Because of his and the CIAs relationship with organized crimes to carry out their goals, Hoover tended not to want to recognize that there was such a thing as the Mafia. The 1957 raid on the mobster summit in Appalachia forced him to recognize the crime organization, but his enforcement was still quite selective.
 

Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It
by J Edgar Hoover

Masters of Deceit is a powerful and informative book--a firsthand account of American communism from its beginnings to the present, written by a man more intimately familiar with the complete story than any other American. Mr. Hoover shows the day-to-day operations of the Communist Party, USA: who the communists are, what they claim, why people become communists and why some break away. He describes life within the Party, communist strategy and tactics, methods of mass agitation and underground infiltration, espionage, sabotage, and its treatment of minorities. The picture of what life in this country would be under communism (toward which thousands of misguided Americans actually are working now!) is vivid and shocking.

The forceful, driving message of this book is clarified with many incidents and anecdotes, definitions of communist terms, key dates, and a list of international communist organizations and publications which illustrate the communist Trojan horse in action. And it concretely outlines just what you can do now to combat the evils of the "false religion" of communism, so that you can stay free.

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
by Beverly Gage

G-Man is the groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape. Hoover transformed a scandal-riddled law-enforcement backwater, into a modern machine—one just as oppressive as it was promising. He rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of the state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history. Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family to a strongarm for white supremacists and the politicized Christian right, serving eight presidents. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.
 

J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson: Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America's Most Famous Men and Women
by Darwin Porter

The book examines the hidden sexual secrets of long-time companions, FBI Directors J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, and their decades-long obsession with the darkest indiscretions of famous Americans.

This is history’s first exposure of J. Edgar’s obsession with voyeuristic sex and its links to the priorities of his law enforcement agency. It’s the most detailed and most shocking insight into J. Edgar Hoover ever published, an unprecedented overview of a life devoted to unveiling other people’s darkest secrets while rigorously concealing his own. Award-winning celebrity biographer Darwin Porter answers the questions you’ve always wanted to know. But if you’d asked them during Hoover’s heyday, he’d probably have had you investigated and punished.