J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (87 page)

Hoover hated Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S Truman, who tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the FBI director in check. Hoover and Truman are shown here with Attorney General J. Howard McGrath.
UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos.

Hoover established an immediate rapport with President Dwight David Eisenhower. Their mutual admiration, however, didn’t keep Hoover from investigating rumors regarding Ike and his mistress Kay Summersby. The president and the FBI director are shown here with Attorney General Herbert Brownell, discussing plans to “exterminate” the Communist party. It was during Eisenhower’s administration that Hoover launched his highly illegal, and sometimes deadly, COINTELPROs, the FBI’s secret wars against dissent.
UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos.

The FBI director had a much closer personal relationship with Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard M. Nixon, that dated back to the Hiss case. Hoover bragged to his aides that he had created Nixon. It was not an idle boast. The pair are shown here at Bowie racetrack in 1959.
National Archives 65-H-1515.

The FBI director kept massive files on President John F. Kennedy, his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and their father, Joseph Kennedy, as well as their wives and other women. Jack and Bobby’s plan to replace Hoover was aborted by the president’s assassination.
Wide World and National Archives 65-H-1676-1.

Hoover and Lyndon Baines Johnson lived across the street from each other while the latter was a congressman. On becoming president, LBJ waived the FBI director’s mandatory retirement at age seventy, but kept him on a short leash.
National Archives 65-H-2204.

Hoover secretly helped Richard Nixon become president. In return, Nixon tried twice to fire the FBI director. Although both times Hoover emerged from the Oval Office with his job intact, the plottings of Nixon’s “palace guard” took their toll on the director. The two are shown here just after Nixon’s election, at New York’s Hotel Pierre, when Hoover planted the seed that would ultimately lead to Richard Nixon’s downfall.
UPI/Bettmann and National Archives 65-H-2821.

The two faces of J. Edgar Hoover. The last formal portraits of the FBI director were taken in the fall of 1971, by Yoichi Okamoto, President Johnson’s favorite photographer. Hoover is shown here in his outer office, where he greeted visitors.
Yoichi Okamoto.

For the aged FBI director, October 1971 must have been the cruelest month. He had to fire his rebellious number three man, William Sullivan; President Nixon tried to fire him; he attempted to destroy his most secret files, but found he couldn’t; and Frank Baughman, his oldest friend, died of cancer. Hoover is shown here being greeted by the sheriff and former FBI agent Ed Duff, on his arrival in Daytona Beach, Florida, for Baughman’s funeral. Looking old and tired, Hoover nearly fell coming down the ramp of the plane.
Wide World Photos.

Once in his inner sanctum, Hoover seemed to collapse. These photographs, including the one which appears on the cover, were taken a few months before the FBI director’s seventy-seventh, and last, birthday.
Yoichi Okamoto.

Following J. Edgar Hoover’s death, Congress voted permission for his body to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. It was a remarkable honor, accorded to only twenty-one other Americans—presidents, statesmen, and war heroes—and never before to a civil servant, or a cop.

To protect Hoover’s body from vandals, Communists, or a possible nuclear blast, FBI officials selected a lead-lined coffin, weighing well over a thousand pounds. Two of the young servicemen who carried the coffin suffered ruptures, while one of the honor guard, shown above, collapsed.
Wide World Photos.