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 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 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 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 J Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies written by John Sbardellati and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1942 and 1958, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a sweeping and sustained investigation of the motion picture industry to expose Hollywood’s alleged subversion of "the American Way" through its depiction of social problems, class differences, and alternative political ideologies. FBI informants (their names still redacted today) reported to Hoover’s G-men on screenplays and screenings of such films as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), noting that "this picture deliberately maligned the upper class attempting to show that people who had money were mean and despicable characters." The FBI’s anxiety over this film was not unique; it extended to a wide range of popular and critical successes, including The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Crossfire (1947) and On the Waterfront (1954). In J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies, John Sbardellati provides a new consideration of Hollywood’s history and the post–World War II Red Scare. In addition to governmental intrusion into the creative process, he details the efforts of left-wing filmmakers to use the medium to bring social problems to light and the campaigns of their colleagues on the political right, through such organizations as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, to prevent dissemination of "un-American" ideas and beliefs. Sbardellati argues that the attack on Hollywood drew its motivation from a sincerely held fear that film content endangered national security by fostering a culture that would be at best apathetic to the Cold War struggle, or, at its worst, conducive to communism at home. Those who took part in Hollywood’s Cold War struggle, whether on the left or right, shared one common trait: a belief that the movies could serve as engines for social change. This strongly held assumption explains why the stakes were so high and, ultimately, why Hollywood became one of the most important ideological battlegrounds of the Cold War.
Download or read book The Burglary written by Betty Medsger and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2014 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary: An account of the 1971 break-in of the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists cites their roles in triggering major changes in the FBI and confirming that J. Edgar Hoover had run a personal shadow-FBI.
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 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 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 The Boss written by Athan G. Theoharis and published by Diane Books Publishing Company. This book was released on 1998-11-01 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors cracked the secret filing system of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI until he died in 1972. This is his definitive biography with unprecedented accuracy and comprehensive primary evidence. Draws on previously unknown and extremely sensitive FBI files as well as interviews with Hoover family members, agents, politicians, and 3targets2 of FBI investigations to reveal the man, the administrator, and the power-monger who manipulated American politics for half a century. Investigates the extent to which 3Hoover made a mockery of the American Constitution and its system of checks and balances2 by immunizing the FBI from critical scrutiny.
Download or read book Hoover s FBI written by Cartha DeLoach and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To challenge the misinterpretations, distortions, and untruths that have appeared in biographies of J. Edgar Hoover, DeLoach--the number three man in the FBI throughout the tumultuous '60s--has written a precise, highly readable narrative that should set the record straight once and for all. Photos.
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 The Einstein File written by Fred Jerome and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-06-17 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at how the FBI, with the help of other government agencies, set out to collect information to use against Einstein.
Download or read book The Bureau written by William C. Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 1981-12-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A former FBI agent, fired because of his criticism of J. Edgar Hoover, recounts his experiences with the Bureau and describes some of the excesses resulting from its over-zealous administration
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.
