Download or read book Young J Edgar written by Kenneth Ackerman and published by Kenneth Ackerman. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 2, 1919, bombs exploded simultaneously in nine American cities. One destroyed the home of the Attorney General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer. In the aftermath of World War I, America faced a new enemy-radical communism. Palmer vowed a crackdown, and, to lead it, he chose his youngest assistant, twenty-four year-old J. Edgar Hoover. Under Palmer's wing, Hoover helped execute a series of brutal nationwide raids, bursting into homes without warning, arresting over 10,000 Americans and assembling secret files on hundreds of thousands of suspects and political enemies. A handful of lawyers like Clarence Darrow and future Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Harlan Fisk Stone dared to defend accused radicals in the name of free speech and civil liberties. YOUNG J. EDGAR brings to life Palmer's raids and Hoover 's coming of age, a metaphor on post-9/11 America. It reaches the heart of our current debate on personal freedoms in a time of war and fear. Editorial Reviews "[F]eatures demagogues; terrorists; a gullible, xenophobic public; rogue law enforcement officials; and good guys, both in and out of government, who discredit the raids. Ackerman captures well the pathological character of the young Hoover.... " -Publishers Weekly "[A] history to savor." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch Ackerman ("Boss Tweed") does an outstanding job portraying the Teflon quality of Hoover.... 'Young J. Edgar' is a book that demonstrates forcefully the corrupting nature of power in the hands of flawed government officials. It's panoramic, detailed and extremely timely. -- Huntington News As hard as Mr. Ackerman is on Hoover, he does not demonize him.... [A] chilling account of how the rule of law in a war on terror can be subverted into a war of terror. --New York Sun "Ackerman's extremely well-written and thoroughly researched history ... convincingly refuted Hoover's dishonest effort to minimize his own central role in promoting the first Red Scare of the World War I and early 1920s era." -- Athan Theoharis, Emeritus Professor at Marquette University and author of The FBI and American Democracy, and The Quest for Absolute Security.
Download or read book Young J Edgar written by Kenneth D. Ackerman and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 2, 1919, bombs exploded simultaneously in nine American cities, and the nation suddenly found itself facing a new threat-radical terrorism. Then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer vowed a crackdown to be led by his youngest assistant, J. Edgar Hoover. Under Palmer's wing, Hoover helped execute a series of brutal nationwide raids-bursting into homes without warrants, arresting over ten thousand Americans-and assembled secret files on thousands of political enemies. Despite public backlash against the abuses, these were the first steps in Hoover's remarkable rise to power. Young J. Edgar is the “compelling” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY) and “fast-paced” (KIRKUS REVIEWS) story of Hoover's early career-one that reaches to the heart of our modern debate over personal freedom in a time of war and fear.
Download or read book The Director written by Paul Letersky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book ever written about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by a member of his personal staff—his former assistant, Paul Letersky—offers unprecedented, “clear-eyed and compelling” (Mark Olshaker, coauthor of Mindhunter) insight into an American legend. The 1960s and 1970s were arguably among America’s most turbulent post-Civil War decades. While the Vietnam War continued seemingly without end, protests and riots ravaged most cities, the Kennedys and MLK were assassinated, and corruption found its way to the highest levels of politics, culminating in Watergate. In 1965, at the beginning of the chaos, twenty-two-year-old Paul Letersky was assigned to assist the legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who’d just turned seventy and had, by then, led the Bureau for an incredible forty-one years. Hoover was a rare and complex man who walked confidently among the most powerful. His personal privacy was more tightly guarded than the secret “files” he carefully collected—and that were so feared by politicians and celebrities. Through Letersky’s close working relationship with Hoover, and the trust and confidence he gained from Hoover’s most loyal senior assistant, Helen Gandy, Paul became one of the few able to enter the Director’s secretive—and sometimes perilous—world. Since Hoover’s death half a century ago, millions of words have been written about the man and hundreds of hours of TV dramas and A-list Hollywood films produced. But until now, there has been virtually no account from someone who, for a period of years, spent hours with the Director on a daily basis. Balanced, honest, and keenly observed, this “vivid, foibles-and-all portrait of the fabled scourge of gangsters, Klansmen, and communists” (The Wall Street Journal) sheds new light on one of the most powerful law enforcement figures in American history.
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 The Burglary written by Betty Medsger and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 609 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 J Edgar Hoover The Man and the Secrets written by Curt Gentry and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-02-17 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Eleanor Roosevelt was right: Hoover’s FBI was an American gestapo." —Newsweek Shocking, grim, frightening, Curt Gentry’s masterful portrait of America’s top policeman is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how a paranoid director created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone who opposed him. The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; as well as insight into the Watergate scandal and what part he played in the investigations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Download or read book G Man Pulitzer Prize Winner written by Beverly Gage and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022 “Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”—The Washington Post “A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”—The Wall Street Journal A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a 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. We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people--many of them communists or racial minorities or both-- did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of 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 through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party. 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.
Download or read book Secrets Uncovered written by Millie McGhee and published by Inland Empire Services. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gossip Men written by Christopher M. Elias and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn were titanic figures in midcentury America, wielding national power in government and the legal system through intimidation and insinuation. Hoover’s FBI thrived on secrecy, threats, and illegal surveillance, while McCarthy and Cohn will forever be associated with the infamous anticommunist smear campaign of the early 1950s, which culminated in McCarthy’s public disgrace during televised Senate hearings. In Gossip Men, Christopher M. Elias takes a probing look at these tarnished figures to reveal a host of startling new connections among gender, sexuality, and national security in twentieth-century American politics. Elias illustrates how these three men solidified their power through the skillful use of deliberately misleading techniques like implication, hyperbole, and photographic manipulation. Just as provocatively, he shows that the American people of the 1950s were particularly primed to accept these coded threats because they were already familiar with such tactics from widely popular gossip magazines. By using gossip as a lens to examine profound issues of state security and institutional power, Elias thoroughly transforms our understanding of the development of modern American political culture.
Download or read book Master of Deceit written by Marc Aronson and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the story of America during J. Edgar Hoover's reign as head of the FBI.
Download or read book Puppetmaster written by Richard Hack and published by Phoenix Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2007 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many of J. Edgar Hoover's achievements and insecurities are well-documented, the author of "Hughes" and "Clash of the Titans" reveals for the first time the most hidden secrets of Hoover's private life and exposes previously undisclosed conduct that threatened to compromise the security of the entire nation. of photos.
Download or read book Mafia Summit written by Gil Reavill and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of how a small-town lawman in upstate New York busted a Cosa Nostra conference in 1957, exposing the Mafia to America. In a small village in upstate New York, mob bosses from all over the country—Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Cuba boss Santo Trafficante, and future Gambino boss Paul Castellano—were nabbed by Sergeant Edgar D. Croswell as they gathered to sort out a bloody war of succession. For years, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had adamantly denied the existence of the Mafia, but young Robert Kennedy immediately recognized the shattering importance of the Apalachin summit. As attorney general when his brother JFK became president, Bobby embarked on a campaign to break the spine of the mob, engaging in a furious turf battle with the powerful Hoover. Detailing mob killings, the early days of the heroin trade, and the crusade to loosen the hold of organized crime, this momentous story will captivate fans of Gus Russo and Luc Sante. Reavill scintillatingly recounts the beginning of the end for the Mafia in America and how it began with a good man in the right place at the right time. “The best, and best-written, true-crime story I’ve ever read. It’s as suspenseful, detailed, racy, and knowing as a novel by Hammett or Chandler.” —Howard Frank Mosher, award-winning author of North Country “A close investigation into the crime bosses’ upstate New York summit and its grisly aftermath, Reavill’s book accurately recreates one of the golden eras of American organized crime.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Act of Treason written by Mark North and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination of how J. Edgar Hoover knew President Kennedy would be assassinated and the coverup that followed the assassination.
Download or read book Bobby and J Edgar Revised Edition written by Burton Hersh and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 950 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW WITH A NEW PREFACE In this riveting account of the explosive relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, renowned journalist and author Burton Hersh sets their highly publicized clashes in the context of Joe Kennedy’s ongoing manipulation of Congress and his children’s careers, and his lifelong connections to organized crime. Theirs was a unique triumvirate, marked by conflict and betrayal, and culminating in a near-Shakespearean tragedy. Based on compelling new research, and told in gripping anecdotal style, Hersh chronicles the complex relationship between the two antagonists, from their early brushes during the McCarthy years to their controversial deaths.
Download or read book J Edgar Hoover Clyde Tolson written by Darwin Porter and published by Blood Moon Productions. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darwin Porter's saga of power and corruption has a revelation on every page - cross-dressing, gay parties, sexual indiscretions, hustlers for sale, alliances with the Mafia, criminal activity by the FBI and an obsessive and voyeuristic interest in the sex lives of Washington and Hollywood celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Katharine Hepburn and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Download or read book Masters Of Deceit The Story Of Communism In America And How To Fight It written by J. Edgar Hoover and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation explains the startling facts about the major menace of our time, communism: what it is, how it works, what its aims are, the real dangers it poses, and what loyal American citizens must know to protect their freedom. 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 be-come 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 thou-sands 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. MASTERS OF DECEIT is one of the most important books of our time—a warning of the clear and present danger to our way of life.
Download or read book Masters of Deceit written by J.Edgar Hoover and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
