Download or read book Hoover s FBI and the Fourth Estate written by Matthew Cecil and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Federal Bureau of Investigation was an agency devoted to American ideals, professionalism, and scientific methods, directed by a sage and selfless leader--and anyone who said otherwise was a no-good subversive, bent on discrediting the American way of life. That was the official story, and how J. Edgar Hoover made it stick--running roughshod over those same American ideals--is the story this book tells in full for the first time. From Hoover's first tentative media contacts in the 1930s to the Bureau's eponymous television series in the 1960s and 1970s, FBI officials labored mightily to control the Bureau's image--efforts that put them not-so-squarely at the forefront of the emerging field of public relations. In the face of any journalistic challenges to the FBI's legitimacy and operations, Hoover was able to create a benign, even heroic counter narrative, thanks in part to his friends in newsrooms. Matthew Cecil's own prodigious investigation through hundreds of thousands of pages from FBI files reveals the lengths to which Hoover and his lackeys went to use the press to hoodwink the American people. Even more sobering is how much help he got from so many in the press. Conservative journalists like broadcaster Fulton Lewis, Jr. and columnist George Sokolsky positioned themselves as "objective" defenders of Hoover's FBI and were rewarded with access, friendship, and other favors. Some of Hoover's friends even became adjunct-FBI agents, designated as Special Service Contacts who discreetly gathered information for the Bureau. "Enemies," on the other hand, were closely monitored and subjected to operations that disrupted their work or even undermined and ended their careers. Noted journalists like I. F. Stone, George Seldes, James A. Wechsler, and many others found themselves the subjects of FBI investigations and, occasionally, named on the Bureau's "custodial detention index," targeted for arrest in the case of a national emergency. With experience as a political reporter, a press secretary, and a scholar and professor of journalism and public relations, Matthew Cecil is uniquely qualified to conduct us through the maze of political intrigue and influence peddling that mark--and often mask--the history of the FBI. His work serves as a cautionary tale about how manipulative government agents and compliant journalists can undermine the very institutions and ideals they are tasked with protecting.
Download or read book Branding Hoover s FBI written by Matthew Cecil and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hunting down America's public enemies was just one of the FBI's jobs. Another—perhaps more vital and certainly more covert—was the job of promoting the importance and power of the FBI, a process that Matthew Cecil unfolds clearly for the first time in this eye-opening book. The story of the PR men who fashioned the Hoover era, Branding Hoover's FBI reveals precisely how the Bureau became a monolithic organization of thousands of agents who lived and breathed a well-crafted public relations message, image, and worldview. Accordingly, the book shows how the public was persuaded—some would say conned—into buying and even bolstering that image. Just fifteen years after a theater impresario coined the term “public relations,” the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover began practicing a sophisticated version of the activity. Cecil introduces those agency PR men in Washington who put their singular talents to work by enforcing and amplifying Hoover's message. Louis B. Nichols, overseer of the Crime Records Section for more than twenty years, was a master of bend-your-ear networking. Milton A. Jones brought meticulous analysis to bear on the mission; Fern Stukenbroeker, a gift for eloquence; and Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, a singular charm and ambition. Branding Hoover's FBI examines key moments when this dedicated cadre, all working under the protective wing of Associate Director Clyde Tolson, manipulated public perceptions of the Bureau (was the Dillinger triumph really what it seemed?). In these critical moments, the book allows us to understand as never before how America came to see the FBI's law enforcement successes and overlook the dubious accomplishments, such as domestic surveillance, that truly defined the Hoover era.
Download or read book The Burglary written by Betty Medsger and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS (IRE) BOOK AWARD WINNER • The story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists—quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans—that made clear the shocking truth that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation. “Impeccably researched, elegantly presented, engaging.”—David Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review • “Riveting and extremely readable. Relevant to today's debates over national security, privacy, and the leaking of government secrets to journalists.”—The Huffington Post It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists set out to use a more active, but nonviolent, method of civil disobedience to provide hard evidence once and for all that the government was operating outside the laws of the land. The would-be burglars—nonpro’s—were ordinary people leading lives of purpose: a professor of religion and former freedom rider; a day-care director; a physicist; a cab driver; an antiwar activist, a lock picker; a graduate student haunted by members of her family lost to the Holocaust and the passivity of German civilians under Nazi rule. Betty Medsger's extraordinary book re-creates in resonant detail how this group scouted out the low-security FBI building in a small town just west of Philadelphia, taking into consideration every possible factor, and how they planned the break-in for the night of the long-anticipated boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, knowing that all would be fixated on their televisions and radios. Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public’s perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Burglary is an important and gripping book, a portrait of the potential power of nonviolent resistance and the destructive power of excessive government secrecy and spying.
Download or read book Hoover s FBI written by Cartha D. DeLoach and published by Regnery Pub. This book was released on 1997-05 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number three man in the FBI in the 1960s sets the record straight about J. Edgar Hoover on issues including the Kennedy and King assassinations and his alleged blackmailing of members of Congress
Download or read book The Manufacture of Consent written by Stephen M. Underhill and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal—so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover’s rhetorical agency. Drawing on Classification 94, a vast trove of recently declassified records that documents the longtime FBI director’s domestic propaganda campaigns in the mid-twentieth century, Underhill shows that Hoover used the growing power of his office to subvert the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and redirect the trajectory of U.S. culture away from social democracy toward a toxic brand of neoliberalism. He did so with help from Republicans who opposed organized labor and Southern Democrats who supported Jim Crow in what is arguably the most culturally significant documented political conspiracy in U.S. history, a wholesale domestic propaganda program that brainwashed Americans and remade their politics. Hoover also forged ties with the powerful fascist leaders of the period to promote his own political ambitions. All the while, as a love letter to Clyde Tolson still preserved in Hoover’s papers attests, he strove to pass for straight while promoting a culture that demonized same-sex love. The erosion of democratic traditions Hoover fostered continues to haunt Americans today.
Download or read book Hoover s Secret War against Axis Spies written by Raymond J. Batvinis and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world was at war, America precariously poised on the sidelines. But already a second secret war was well underway with the United States very much in the thick of it. While he fought on the home front to consolidate the FBI's intelligence gathering power, J. Edgar Hoover was conducting an all-out campaign to make his agency America's first foreign espionage service--a campaign that would lead to an uneasy alliance with British intelligence in a brilliantly successful operation to undermine Germany throughout the Second World War. While pieces of the story have been told before, only now, in this work by FBI historian and former agent Raymond Batvinis, does this crucial chapter in the history of World War II, and of the FBI, received its full due. Taking up the tale begun in his acclaimed Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, Batvinis mines a wealth of heretofore untapped resources to expose Hoover's remarkable connivances and accomplishments in concert--and occasionally contention--with the Allies in outsmarting German intelligence. Hoover's Secret War opens up a world of spy rings, secret and double agents, surveillance, codes and ciphers, wire taps, microdots, mail drops, invisible ink, radio transmissions, and deception and disinformation as it tracks the warring nations spreading their intelligence tentacles throughout Europe and North and South America. As it documents the rocky evolution of the FBI's relationship with Britain's vaunted M15 and M16, the book brings to light the feud between Hoover and William Stephenson, director of the British Secret Intelligence Service's U. S. operation, BSC. Batvinis reveals how the agency gained access to ULTRA intelligence, thanks to the British decryption of the ENIGMA code, along with the strenuous efforts to keep the Germans in the dark about it. He uncovers eye-opening details of the FBI's participation in the famed "Double-Cross System, which effectively "turned" German agents against the Fatherland, among them a flamboyant, larger-larger-than-life playboy, a world famous French flyer, and a lecherous Dutchman. Batvinis tells for the first time how the Bureau manipulated these agents, and how it transmitted deceptive information critical to the Normandy landings, the Allied invasion of the Marshall Islands, and the atomic bomb program, among other matters. Rich with secrets and surprises worthy of the finest spy fiction, this true story of espionage and counterintelligence gives us our first clear look at the secret second world war, and a significant moment in history--for the FBI, for America, and for the world.
Download or read book Hoover s War on Gays written by Douglas M. Charles and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-09-18 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the FBI, the “Sex Deviates” program covered a lot of ground, literally; at its peak, J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious “Sex Deviates” file encompassed nearly 99 cubic feet or more than 330,000 pages of information. In 1977–1978 these files were destroyed—and it would seem that four decades of the FBI’s dirty secrets went up in smoke. But in a remarkable feat of investigative research, synthesis, and scholarly detective work, Douglas M. Charles manages to fill in the yawning blanks in the bureau’s history of systematic (some would say obsessive) interest in the lives of gay and lesbian Americans in the twentieth century. His book, Hoover’s War on Gays, is the first to fully expose the extraordinary invasion of US citizens’ privacy perpetrated on a historic scale by an institution tasked with protecting American life. For much of the twentieth century, when exposure might mean nothing short of ruin, gay American men and women had much to fear from law enforcement of every kind—but none so much as the FBI, with its inexhaustible federal resources, connections, and its carefully crafted reputation for ethical, by-the-book operations. What Hoover’s War on Gays reveals, rather, is the FBI’s distinctly unethical, off-the-books long-term targeting of gay men and women and their organizations under cover of “official” rationale—such as suspicion of criminal activity or vulnerability to blackmail and influence. The book offers a wide-scale view of this policy and practice, from a notorious child kidnapping and murder of the 1930s (ostensibly by a sexual predator with homosexual tendencies), educating the public about the threat of “deviates,” through WWII’s security concerns about homosexuals who might be compromised by the enemy, to the Cold War’s “Lavender Scare” when any and all gays working for the US government shared the fate of suspected Communist sympathizers. Charles’s work also details paradoxical ways in which these incursions conjured counterefforts—like the Mattachine Society; ONE, Inc.; and the Daughters of Bilitis—aimed at protecting and serving the interests of postwar gay culture. With its painstaking recovery of a dark chapter in American history and its new insights into seemingly familiar episodes of that story—involving noted journalists, politicians, and celebrities—this thorough and deeply engaging book reveals the perils of authority run amok and stands as a reminder of damage done in the name of decency.
Download or read book Hoover s FBI written by William W. Turner and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970, and here reprinted with a new introduction and epilogue by the author, a former FBI agent. Turner examines the Bureau's most famous cases, discloses the parallels in the growth of the FBI and of organized crime, and shows the extraordinary power Hoover wielded over eigh
Download or read book The FBI and J Edgar Hoover written by Charles River Editors and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading "We are a fact-gathering organization only. We don't clear anybody. We don't condemn anybody." - J. Edgar Hoover No single figure in 20th century American history inspires such opposing opinions as J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In his time, he was arguably the most powerful non-elected figure in the federal government. Serving under eight presidents (and outliving two of them), he remains the longest-serving head of a major government office, and Hoover died as he began: a civil servant, having been appointed by the Attorney General and serving at the pleasure of the president. That said, no civil servant had ever accrued to themselves the power and public attention that Hoover did. To many Americans in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Hoover was a real American hero. In a country suffering from the Great Depression and the crime wave of the early 1930s, Hoover was the symbol of law and order as his "G-Men" used the newest in scientific crime solving methods to bring gangsters like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson to justice. In the 1940s, he protected a country at war from German and Japanese spies and saboteurs. In the 1950s, he led the charge against Soviet spies and domestic communists who he saw as undermining the institutions of the country. Every boy in the country wanted to be a G-Man, helping Mr. Hoover ferret out anyone who would harm the United States. However, by the 1960s and 1970s, Hoover the hero had become Hoover the villain. Various exposes and investigations revealed a darker side to the legend, one that included serious violations of the civil liberties of individuals. Hoover's G-Men, it was discovered, engaged in illegal break-ins and wiretaps of suspected subversives, wrote fake letters that undermined the reputations of public individuals, paid informants for information, and pushed the groups they belonged to into committing illegal acts. It was alleged that Hoover led a personal vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr. and the entire Civil Rights Movement. Hoover, it was said, had stayed in office so long by gathering secret files of damaging information about politicians (including presidents) that shortly after his death in 1972, the Hoover legend was in tatters, replaced by a caricature of a vain, vindictive, power-mad petty dictator who was a closet cross-dresser. As with most larger-than-life figures, the truth lies somewhere between two myths. Views of Hoover as hero and Hoover as villain contain elements of truth. The same man who took a small insignificant office of the Justice Department and transformed it into the premier national law enforcement agency in the world was the same man who approved (or at least had knowledge of) actions that violated the Constitution he was sworn to uphold. The director who ordered his agents in the 1960s to destroy the Ku Klux Klan when they were engaging in violent acts against Civil Rights protesters also surveyed the leading figure of the Civil Rights Movement. J. Edgar Hoover was in many ways a walking contradiction, but his apparent contradictions embodied the issues at the heart of 20th century America. The FBI and J. Edgar Hoover: The History and Legacy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Under Its First Director examines the events that led to the formation of the FBI, the most important cases it was involved in, and the controversies surrounding Hoover's methods. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the FBI under Hoover like never before.
Download or read book The True Story of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI written by Deneberg and published by Scholastic Paperbacks. This book was released on 1995-12-01 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the former chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, focusing on the FBI's impact on the major law enforcement issues of the 1920s through the early 1970s.
Download or read book From the Secret Files of J Edgar Hoover written by Athan Theoharis and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 1993-02-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents uncovered from the late FBI director's secret files reveal for the first time the shocking extent of FBI activities in collecting and using derogatory information about prominent Americans and political groups. Historian Athan Theoharis charges that Hoover was an "indirect blackmailer," exploiting the FBI's resources to serve the political interests of the White House and to advance his own political and moral agenda. None of the documents in five separate secret files was intended ever to be disclosed; Mr. Theoharis procured them after intensive research in FBI files using the Freedom of Information Act. The memoranda, letters, telephone transcriptions, and other materials printed here detail a wide range of excesses and include Hoover's providing information about political adversaries to the Johnson and Nixon White Houses; John F. Kennedy's affair with Washington gossip columnist Inga Arvad; FBI monitoring of Supreme Court clerks and staff; the tracking of Adlai Stevenson by the FBI as a homosexual; Hoover's interest in the drinking and sexual habits of congressmen; an anonymous letter attacking Martin Luther King, Jr., composed and sent to Dr. King by the FBI; and much more. Mr. Theoharis describes Hoover's ingenious Do Not File system as well as the FBI's Sex Deviate program and Obscene File.
Download or read book Inside Hoover s FBI written by Neil J. Welch and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The FBI's top field agent launched a covert operation in deepest secrecy-ABSCAM. He tells about the FBI--its past, its present, and its future.
Download or read book The FBI s Obscene File written by Douglas M. Charles and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do pop artist Andy Warhol, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and cinematic comedians Abbott & Costello have in common? They all found a prominent place in the FBI's "Obscene File." In this startling new study Douglas Charles reveals how, for more than seventy years, FBI officials placed obscenity, pornography, and the politics of morality among their topmost concerns. Illuminating this largely neglected aspect of FBI history, Charles charts the evolution of the Bureau's efforts to combat the spread of obscenity and its perceived insidious effects. He contends that, especially during the five decades under J. Edgar Hoover, these efforts became a surprisingly high priority and at times were expressly wielded for political ends, even as Hoover hid the file from public view in order to preserve the Bureau's squeaky-clean image. Charles recounts how the "Obscene File" was conceived and organized by Hoover and describes its contents, which included magazines, films, and artwork in addition to dossiers on offenders. He examines the FBI's targeting of 1940s and '50s "race music" with its depictions of "lewd and licentious acts in obscene and foul language." He describes how the FBI collected photos of activities at gay bars and prosecuted businesses that published "obscene" pro-gay magazines, and how it participated in the "Lavender Scare" that targeted gays in the federal government. He also details the FBI's efforts to short-circuit the distribution of the film Deep Throat and disrupt the pornographic movie industry. On the political front, Charles tells how Hoover found a fellow crusader in Richard Nixon, who hijacked the obscenity issue to rally an electoral base weary of an "anything-goes" decade. But as changing mores and laws redefined obscenity, subsequent directors moved away from Hoover's approach and focused more on mob control of pornography, kiddie porn, and the war on drugs. Subsequently, the "Obscene File" mostly fell into disuse during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the latter president unable to gain any traction with his own obscenity initiatives. Taking in the whole scope of these operations, Charles's insightful history offers a previously unseen look at a major facet of FBI activities and contributes significantly to our understanding of Hoover and his legacy.
Download or read book Official and Confidential written by Anthony Summers and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling author’s revealing, “important” biography of the longtime FBI director (The Philadelphia Inquirer). No one exemplified paranoia and secrecy at the heart of American power better than J. Edgar Hoover, the original director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For this consummate biography, renowned investigative journalist Anthony Summers interviewed more than eight hundred witnesses and pored through thousands of documents to get at the truth about the man who headed the FBI for fifty years, persecuted political enemies, blackmailed politicians, and lived his own surprising secret life. Ultimately, Summers paints a portrait of a fatally flawed individual who should never have held such power, and for so long.
Download or read book G men Hoover s FBI in American Popular Culture written by Richard Gid Powers and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Calling the Police! Calling the G-Men! Calling all Americans to War on the Underworld" was the sign-on of the first radio program to portray the agents of the FBI as action heroes. Thus began the remarkable collaboration between the government agency and the merchants of popular culture that was to continue for over forty years. In G-Men Richard Gid Powers explores the cultural forces that permitted the rise and fostered the fall of the nation's secret police as national heroes. He examines popular attitudes toward crime from the standpoint of functionalist (Durkheimian) theory and surveys the FBI's image in popular entertainment from the thirties to the recent "Today's FBI" as a vicarious ritual of national solidarity to explain the popularity of the action detective formula. Soundly based on extensive research and interviews, the book provides an account of how the FBI and the mass entertainment industry were able to transform the bureau and its biggest cases into popular mythology. Hoover and his FBI became national heroes through identification with the action detective hero of crime entertainment. Hoover's popular culture role made him and his bureau sacrosanct symbols of national pride and unity, but in turn made it very difficult for them to do anything that would not conform to the public's preconceptions about action heroes. Powers shows that the dynamics of popular culture are integral to an explanation of the collapse of the bureau's reputation following Hoover's death. Had Hoover and the popularizers of the FBI not attempted to turn the popular culture G-Man into an embodiment of traditional American virtues, the illegal activities that came to light following Hoover's death would have been excused as inconsequential in the larger context of a hard-boiled "War on the Underworld." G-Men examines a classic case of the manipulation of popular culture for political power. Seldom in American culture has such manipulation been so successful. As Powers states: "At the same time Hoover was casting his shadow over American public life his G-Men were the stars of movies, radio adventures, comics, pulp magazines, television series, even bubble gum cards." But he finds that Hoover--far from controlling his own destiny and the power of the agency he had built--was created, shaped, and then destroyed by the dynamics of popular culture and the public expectations it generated.
Download or read book The Bureau written by William C. Sullivan and published by New York : Norton. This book was released on 1979 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dark Days in the Newsroom written by Edward Alwood and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-28 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark Days in the Newsroom traces how journalists became radicalized during the Depression era, only to become targets of Senator Joseph McCarthy and like-minded anti-Communist crusaders during the 1950s. Edward Alwood, a former news correspondent describes this remarkable story of conflict, principle, and personal sacrifice with noticeable élan. He shows how McCarthy's minions pried inside newsrooms thought to be sacrosanct under the First Amendment, and details how journalists mounted a heroic defense of freedom of the press while others secretly enlisted in the government's anti-communist crusade. Relying on previously undisclosed documents from FBI files, along with personal interviews, Alwood provides a richly informed commentary on one of the most significant moments in the history of American journalism. Arguing that the experiences of the McCarthy years profoundly influenced the practice of journalism, he shows how many of the issues faced by journalists in the 1950s prefigure today's conflicts over the right of journalists to protect their sources.