J. Edgar Hoover - remember him?
(So infamous, they even wrote songs about him)
The name J.Edgar Hoover has been fading from Americas collective memory the past few decades. He died in 1972. But from 1924 up until his death he ran the FBI, taking it from a somewhat bumbling government agency into a monolith that was synonymous with eavesdropping, wiretaps, file keeping, political power plays, espionage and dirty tricks. He was the reason all subsequent FBI Directors had term limits. He made the FBI his life and his kingdom and was in charge right up to the last. He was the guy with all the secrets and he made a lot of innocent lives uncomfortable as the result.
Here he is from September 23, 1940 giving an address to the America Legion Convention in Boston, talking about one of his favorite subjects, The Communist Threat and "Foreignism".
With all that paranoia floating around, it's a wonder anybody slept at night.
did sleep very well then. Almost every single older house I've worked in (I do carpentry) has a cement or boarded up room with air vents and shelving for food storage. Older people who were kids then have told me that they did indeed have nightmares sometimes. People didn't step "outside the lines" too much in those days.
The man looked GREAT in a negligee and high heels.
the frilly panties!
right up tight.
a perky crinoline!
Now I'm all moist!
;)
One's imagination can be a wonderful thing!
It's the only kind of entertainment we can afford anymoer.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Gay Edgar Hoover!
"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”
- John Stuart Mill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGM3ZTP2nw
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
The guy had issues.
For some reason Tom Delay comes to mind. I don't know why.
What is your conceptual, continuity?
He was pervasive isn his time, either as protector or villain, depending on your brand of fear.
As a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist I know that Hoover delighted in his power and Kennedy's death. It allowed him to marginalize and avenge himself on Robert Kennedy.
He is proof that warrantless spying and extra-legal interrogations make monsters of those given such power.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Your insight is greatly appreciated.
What is your conceptual, continuity?
Intersting it was the American Legion he spoke to.
According to what I've read about General Smedley Butler, he didn't like the American Legion.
They encouraged or ignored retired soldiers being hired as strike breakers, factory goon squads.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Intersting?
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Didn't get to this post soon enough to catch you.
I'm handicapped, the playoffs are on ;)
Or both?
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
{Off Topic. Wrong Thread. SiteMonitor}
What is your conceptual, continuity?
i dont think anyone should have that much power. just my 2 cents. :)
He's also the main one responsible for destroying many of the social movements of the 60s, via Cointelpro and other programs, directed particularly at the Black Panthers.
at the FBI. The Feebs are still America's political secret police. For example, the political hit on NY governor Elliot Spitzer came from federal law enforcement. Also, consider the many instances of the FBI's dubious to outright criminal behavior around the events of 9/11. And the periodical lawsuits filed by non-white agents against the bureau for discrimination.
But these are nothing compared to the power Hoover wielded through his carefully maintained intelligence files.
He was a virtual king long before W. was (?) elected.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
All too often, sitting here in China, looking at my new iMac, I can't see the link for video clips on C&L. I can't see the link for the clip of Hoover this time; neither on Safari or Firefox. Anyone else have the problem?
But here in Calif, Firefox is working fine.
But I have seen alot of people having a hard time with the videos lately. Must be a tech glitch.
What is your conceptual, continuity?
suggest using a firefox plugin that will set up a proxy
Here's the Youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDeJsQUjVc0
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
YouTube is blocked in China ever since somebody wanted to spread all those nasty lies about the PLA beating protesters in Tibet. We need to be protected from those rumors. The pictures got in anyway. The leaders will never understand that blocking information does the country more harm than any news article or film clip can.
without him, they never woulda flourished
while they were growing during depression era america, he made sure that the fbi and treasury went after 2 bit hoods and bank robbers
sure, they got capone, but that was only because he made a spectacle of himself and had to be taken down
in the meantime, the ny, la, chicago, no and other cities grew in power and strength
what a great man
Wow, you don't get that kind of job security these days. Anywhere.
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
Only in Nixon's America.
Not forgetting Hoover's boyfriend who had the #2 job in the FBI for the same number of years...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tolson
In my little, not fondly remembered home town, the local John Birch Society gave every high school graduate a copy of Masters of Deceit.
And I fondly recall Martha Mitchell (remember her?) remarking in 1970 that 'if you've seen one FBI Director, you've seem 'em all."
by denying their existence. He was more interested in chasing commies. It wasn't until Joe Valachi started talking that he had to admit that there was such a thing as organized crime. My dad said the Bureau knew full well, but was not allowed to admit it.
My mother was one of his personal phone operators. Her job was to listen in on his calls with important officials to prove he never exactly blackmailed them but just mentioned the "jacket" (file) he had on them. He blackmailed EVERYONE.
My mother was terrified of that man (but worshiped him as well) 5 years after he died.
Look at the pictures of the Joseph McCarthy witch hunts; there was a young lawyer named Nixon and Hoover handing him notes on whomever he was trying to ruin.
BTW..he thought the worst thing he could accuse someone of was being a "homosexual"! He tried to say that about MLKing, JFK, and RFK and anyone else he didn't like.
Robert Kennedy worked for McCarthy as an aide for a while.
J. Egar and Dick Cheney would have made a great couple , true love .
"But from 1924 up until his death he ran the FBI, taking it from a somewhat bumbling government agency into a monolith that was synonymous with eavesdropping, wiretaps, file keeping, political power plays, espionage and dirty tricks."
I don't recall any allegations of torture..... but my recall isn't what my recall used to be.
We have 2.3 million people in prison here in the US, half them are for drugs, debt, petty offenses and assorted political and racial offenses, like not deferring to the bosses.
Extra judicial murders and tortures in the US generally happens in the County Jail system, a place where theres almost no oversight, local feudal fiefdoms.
In the mid-80s at Marquette, I took a history seminar on "The FBI, the Presidency, and the Media," taught by Anton Theoharis, who's one of the top Hoover experts in the country. In the class, most of the grade was based on our group paper--my group was assigned the topic of the FBI's activities against the student antiwar movement in the '60s, and the bulk of our sources were original FBI documents Theoharis had acquired through FOIA. Most of the reports were pretty rote stuff, but there were some fascinating things that weren't blacked out.
My favorite, but one I couldn't incorporate into the paper unfortunately, was the report by a young NYC field agent who had been temporarily reassigned to Chicago for the '68 Dem convention to blend in with the protestors. At the top of the page, the agent starts to tell how he was strolling down Michigan Avenue at 3:00 one morning when he was approached by some Chicago police. Most of the rest of the page is blacked out, but at the end of the page, it read "But, regardless of what happened to me, I do not feel that the CPD used excessive force"!! I loved how I could tell, with only a few words legible, that an undercover FBI agent was mistaken for a student and abused as one by the CPD.
Should rot in hell just for what he did to Jean Seberg:
During the later part of the 1960s, Seberg used her high-profile image to voice support for the NAACP and supported Native American school groups such as the Mesquaki Bucks at the Tama settlement near her home town of Marshalltown, for whom she purchased $500 worth of basketball uniforms. She also supported the Black Panther Party. Though she had done nothing illegal, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered her a threat to the American state. Her telephone was tapped and her private life was closely observed. She knew about it and felt chased.
Seberg had an affair with student revolutionary Carlos Nevarra. In 1970, when she was seven months pregnant, the FBI created a false story leaked to the media that the child she was carrying was not fathered by her husband, but by a member of the Black Panthers Party. She gave birth to a girl on August 23, 1970, but the infant died two days later. Seberg stated that the trauma of the false rumours brought on premature labor, and blamed the FBI for the death of her baby. Seberg's husband divorced her shortly after discovering that Nevarra was the father of her child.
Devil in a blue dress?
I guess dressing up like a drag queen wasn't considered subversive enough for Mr "don't I look pretty in this dress" Hoover...
He liked the boys.
Public Enemies opens July 1. Billy Crudup plays a young J.E.Hoover of '33 and '34.
That speech is worth careful parsing. For example, he contrasts "Americanism" and "foreignism." At the time, did those words have a widely understood coded meaning? Or was it just "whatever you like" vs. "whatever you don't like"?
We have to be secretive. We at the FBI want the power to ourselves. Spy and inform on your neighbors. Enemy agents (foreign-inspired fellow citizens) are everywhere among us. Etc.
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