March 1, 2006
Forget J. Edgar Hoover Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST In response to my passing suggestion in a recent review of Taylor Branch’s new book, At Canaan’s Edge, that the U.S. government consider removing J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI’s national headquarters, my friend Fred Schwarz makes a good case against getting carried away with historical finger-pointing. On the whole, I agree with Fred’s premise. But with regard to J. Edgar Hoover, I do not. Hoover was, in simple terms, an unreconstructed racist who hounded Martin Luther King, Jr.—and King’s political associates—without mercy. He employed blackmail, extortion, illegal wiretaps, illegal bugs, and coordinated political sabotage to destabilize King’s professional and personal relationships, to hurt the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s fundraising operations, and to undermine other leading members of the black civil rights struggle. One needn’t even delve into his organization’s questionable maintenance of a national detention list, which kept tabs on tens of thousands of liberal activists—all of whom the FBI was prepared to arrest summarily, and without charges, on the attorney general’s order; or his organization’s strange collusion with prominent Klansmen; or his expert use of political blackmail to maintain a bureaucratic edge for several decades. In the post-Hoover era, we can only hope that the FBI has evolved from a lawless organization into a law-abiding, law-enforcing organization. Indeed, everything we know about it suggests that it has done just that. All the more reason to take Hoover’s name off that building. It’s nothing short of unseemly to name the headquarters of the federal government’s law-enforcement arm after a man who broke as many laws as he enforced. It inspires very little confidence in those who would like to know that we have moved beyond those less enlightened times when the federal government violated citizens’ rights to property and person with impunity. Now more than ever, in fact, it would do a world of good to see the beltway power elite repudiate the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.
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