History with David Rubenstein

(theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein and I'm delighted to be in conversation today with Beverly Gage.

She is professor of the History of America in the 20th Century at Yale University.

And we're gonna talk today about her new book, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Ma king of the American Century.

So he ran the FBI for 48 years, obviously, a record, uh, for that kind of, uh, service to our country in one agency.

In your view, after spending all this time reading about him, writing about him, uh, do you admire him more than you did before or less than you did before, given all the things you now know?

GAGE: I would say that I admire him more, and that's in part because I started out with the image that I think most people have of J. Edgar Hoover, which is a, a, a pretty one-dimensional villain.

Um, so there is really only one direction that, that one could go on that front.

(audience laughs) GAGE: Um, but I did find a number of things and a number of moments where I really did admire what he was doing.

RUBENSTEIN: So he was controversial in some circles because he was thought to have files on many important people, politicians, president of the United States and so forth.

And is it true that he actually had files on all these people and was that the source of his power or was that just a rumor?

GAGE: Well, it is true that he had many of those files, some of them on, on high political figures, but one of the things that I wanted to do was get away from thinking of that as his only source of power, because actually, he was an incredibly skilled wielder of power through his political relationships, through public relations, through the ways that he built the FBI, um, through a whole host of other things that really aren't captured in that, in that image of him as just someone intimidating other people.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so, where was he born?

GAGE: He was born in Washington.

He died in Washington.

This is a Washington story.

RUBENSTEIN: So who was his father and his mother?

Were they prominent people at the time or what did they do?

GAGE: Uh, they were relatively modest people.

So his father was a kind of midlevel career government servant.

He, he worked in the, uh, in the printing service of a, uh, scientific survey.

Um, his mother came from a slightly more prominent family of Swiss diplomats.

RUBENSTEIN: So he went to public schools?

GAGE: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: And he did pretty well as a student?

GAGE: He did, he came up through the Washington Public School System, which was a segregated school system at the time.

And he was sort of a star student.

He was valedictorian of his class in high school.

RUBENSTEIN: So after he graduates, he didn't have the money to go to a traditional college at the time.

So he went to something that was a little bit less than that.

What was it?

GAGE: Uh, it's placed called George Washington University... RUBENSTEIN: Which was different...

But was different then ... GAGE: Right, exactly.

RUBENSTEIN: From it is now.

GAGE: It looked a lot different.

It was basically a kind of night school for aspiring government servants.

So a lot of students, uh, worked at the government by day and went to GW at night, which is what... RUBENSTEIN: And so he did that for about a year or so?

GAGE: Uh, he did that for four years.

RUBENSTEIN: Four years, okay.

GAGE: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And he got ultimately a degree as a lawyer?

GAGE: He got a law degree and a master's degree in law.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, but he got a job with the federal government.

What was the job that he originally got?

GAGE: So he happened to graduate in the spring of 1917 just as the US was entering World War I and he went straight into the Justice Department.

RUBENSTEIN: And what was his job?

GAGE: He was working on kind of wartime stuff, the Justice Department was exploding in that moment, had so many new duties.

Um, so his first job was helping to manage German internment and registration, uh, which we don't tend to think about a lot but, but was a pretty extensive program at the time.

RUBENSTEIN: And later, he was asked to head up something called the Radical Division, what was the Radical Division?

GAGE: Right, it turned out that he was so good at, uh, kind of managing these big file systems.

He enjoyed the work of figuring out, uh, you know, who was dangerous, uh, that at the age of 24 he got this key promotion to the Radical Division, which was a kind of small, but the first real peacetime surveillance experiment in the federal government mainly aimed at, at left wing radicals, anarchists and communists.

RUBENSTEIN: So when World War I was declared, the US government went after people who were seen as against the war or they were, um, immigrants, in some cases, their loyalties were not clear or they were, um, let's say anarchists.

And so his job was to kind of round these people up or at least identify them, not round them up himself, but identify them, is that what he did?

GAGE: That is what he did and he was very instrumental.

Kind of his first big moment on, on the national stage or having national influence was helping to orchestrate the Palmer Raids, um, which were these kinds of controversial deportation raids, specifically aimed at non-citizens who held, uh, revolutionary views.

Uh, so the first round was aimed at anarchists and that resulted in a very famous deportation in December of 1919 that included Emma Goldman who was the most famous, uh, anarchist in the United States, uh, deportation to Soviet Russia.

Uh, and then there was a round, it was much bigger, uh, a few months later aimed at the new communist parties and that became much more controversial.

RUBENSTEIN: And they had the, uh, Sedition Act then so that if you were against the war, you could be rounded up and put in jail.

In fact, Eugene Victor Debs, the socialist candidate, was put in jail for several years because he was against the war.

Um, and I guess Hoover's job was to f-find these people and round them up.

GAGE: Right.

And during the war, you have the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act.

It wasn't quite clear once the war ended, what the status of those laws was going to be, but they knew they could go after people who weren't citizens.

Uh, and so that's part of why the Palmer Raids were, were deportation raids.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so when the Wilson administration ends, the war is over.

And then, uh, the next president of the United States is Harding and what does, Hoover do during the Harding administration?

GAGE: Well, uh, despite the fact that the Palmer Raids became controversial in many ways, uh, Hoover got a promotion and he became the assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation at the age of 26.

RUBENSTEIN: And the Bureau of Investigation was small at that time, right?

GAGE: Right.

It was a pretty small and, uh, relatively, uh, disorganized enterprise.

RUBENSTEIN: So, Harding didn't finish his term, he was succeeded after he died in office by Coolidge.

And what happened when Coolidge was president?

GAGE: Well, he promoted Hoover again and, uh, it was the age of 29 that Hoover became the Director of the Bureau.

Uh, and that's the job he held till the day he died.

RUBENSTEIN: And after Coolidge, Hoover became president, uh, different Hoover.

GAGE: Right, no relation.

RUBENSTEIN: Herbert Hoover, no relation.

Um, and how did he survive in that administration?

Did he do well then?

GAGE: He did.

You know, he, um, in many ways, I think, those were some of his happiest years because he spent a lot of the 20s sort of remaking the Bureau in his own image, uh, hiring many of his friends from GW and from his fraternity and, uh, they didn't have that much to do yet.

Uh, so it was, uh, it was kind of a, a, a happy period.

RUBENSTEIN: President Roosevelt comes in, and Roosevelt dealt with Hoover directly, is that right?

He would call him up and say, "Let's do this.

Let's do that."

He didn't go through the Attorney General.

GAGE: Sometimes he went through the Attorney General, Homer Cummings in the '30s, was very close with Roosevelt, also close with Hoover.

Um, but as time went on, they developed a much more direct relationship.

RUBENSTEIN: So in the 1930s, uh, the heyday of the, of the popularity FBI in certain circles came when they started going after criminals that were well known, Pretty Boy Floyd and, um, Alvin Karpis and John Dillinger.

Why was the Dillinger, killing, uh, so, uh, important to Americans at the time?

GAGE: Yeah, the FBI had to go through a very dramatic transformation during these years from this white-collar force to, uh, G-Men, gun-toting, right, the, the people who killed John Dillinger.

Um, and there was a lot of concern about crime in the 1930s, was a big part of Depression Era anxieties, particularly, uh, bank robberies and kidnappings.

Um, and those became federal crimes because they tended to cross state lines.

Uh, so that's how Hoover ended up in that position.

But, uh, John Dillinger, in particular, had defied police forces.

He had broken out of jail.

He seemed to be, you know, the criminal that no one could capture.

And so when the FBI finally shot him in Chicago, uh, it made headlines everywhere.

I mean he's just became legend almost immediately.

RUBENSTEIN: So as Roosevelt, uh, got into World War II, uh, did the power that Hoover have expand as we worried about espionage and we worried about counterintelligence kinds of things?

GAGE: Yeah, it's in the '30s that the FBI gets the two main duties that it has today.

One is the criminal law enforcement piece we were just talking about, um, and the other is a massive expansion, uh, during the war in the areas of domestic intelligence, espionage, counter-subversion, uh, counter-sabotage.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so when Roosevelt dies, uh, in 1940, uh, 5, um, then Harry Truman becomes president.

What kind of relationship did he have with Hoover?

GAGE: Well, Roosevelt had really liked Hoover, had expanded his power dramatically.

And Hoover kind of assumed that that would continue under Truman, but it, for the most part, did not, and certainly, early on, Truman expressed a lot more skepticism about the FBI and about its growing power.

RUBENSTEIN: So one of the things that Hoover wanted to do was he wanted to be in charge of all espionage outside the United States as well as in the United States.

And, uh, what did Truman think about that?

GAGE: Yeah, that was Hoover's great vision as the war came to an end, that we were gonna need a global intelligence service after the war and that it should be the FBI.

He had pitched that to Roosevelt.

He pitched it to Truman, um, and Truman said no.

It was one of the great defeats of Hoover's career, and instead, we ended up with the CIA.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So Truman, uh, leaves office and Eisenhower comes in, and that seems to be a golden era for Hoover because Eisenhower had many of the qualities that Hoover admired and vice versa.

Is that right?

GAGE: That's right.

The 50s are the period when Hoover has kind of the most in common ideologically, culturally, sympathetically with, uh, the administration in power.

And it's also the period when Hoover himself is the most popular, the most influential.

You know, he became one of the country's great, um, anticommunist spokesman and, uh, Eisenhower supported that.

RUBENSTEIN: Now in your book, you pointed out that Eisenhower became a Presbyterian more than he had been before perhaps and got involved with the same Presbyterian Church that I think, uh, Hoover was attending and Hoover became a religious hero.

How did he become a religious hero, not only to Protestants, but even the Catholics?

GAGE: Yeah, he was very outspoken in the '50s, which was a moment of kind of public religiosity in national politics, but Hoover was at the leading edge of that.

Uh, he liked to make, uh, speeches, telling everyone to send their kids to Sunday school.

Um, and he himself was a Presbyterian.

He brought a lot of the Eisenhower administration into the National Presbyterian Church including, you know, Richard Nixon and John Foster Dulles.

They, they all showed up.

Um, and it was a key part of Hoover's image.

I think one of the things that's interesting about him is he wasn't just, you know, a kind of national security figure.

He was this big influential cultural figure as well and, and religion was one of his, his areas.

RUBENSTEIN: So Eisenhower is succeeded by Kennedy.

And Kennedy is the president that I guess Hoover liked the least.

Is that fair?

GAGE: I think that's fair and I think it was mutual.

(laughs).

RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, the reason he didn't like Kennedy was Kennedy was very young, uh, probably more liberal than Hoover was, but he also had a brother who became the Attorney General at the age of 35.

And why didn't Hoover like his young Attorney General superior?

GAGE: Right.

If he didn't like John Kennedy, he really didn't like Robert Kennedy.

And, uh, that was even more mutual.

Um, I think there were a couple of reasons.

One, uh, Robert Kennedy came in and he was so young, he was relatively inexperienced.

Uh, there were some personality conflicts.

Hoover was a very buttoned down guy and he did not like that Robert Kennedy did things like take off his suit jacket and roll up his shirt sleeves and sometimes even take off his tie, right?

RUBENSTEIN: One of the most important, uh, relationships that Kennedy had, uh, obviously with Hoover dealt with, um, Martin Luther King.

Hoover complained about Martin Luther King, said he had communists around him and so forth.

And why did Kennedy ultimately agree to a, allow the wiretapping of Martin Luther King?

GAGE: It is Robert Kennedy who signs off on the King wiretaps and, you know, that had been part of a kind of escalating investigation that started off, uh, really concerned about a couple of people who have been involved in the Communist Party who were around King and then by 1963 escalates to wiretaps on King himself.

Um, I think the main reason that Robert Kennedy wanted to do that and agreed to do it is that the Kennedy administration had gone to King repeatedly, had asked him to separate himself from two people in particular that they were, uh, concerned about.

King had sort of said he would do it and then he didn't really do it.

And so, uh, I think Kennedy felt sort of pushed into, into a corner and kind of wanted to figure out what was, what was really going on.

RUBENSTEIN: So what was the result of the wiretap and what did Hoover do with that information?

GAGE: Well, it started out as, as wiretaps, and through those wiretaps, they began to be able to track, uh, not only King's personal life, but also his travel schedule and the wiretaps then became, uh, bugs in his hotel rooms, uh, which Robert Kennedy did not necessarily sign off on, um, and they began, uh, recording King's extramarital sex life and wanting to use that to discredit and intimidate... RUBENSTEIN: And they did use it because they sent it to, uh, Mrs. King and they sent it to other people, journalists and did anything ever come with that publicly or has anybody ever used that information at that time?

GAGE: Well, to some degree, it was an open secret within, uh, certain parts of the civil rights movement, certain parts of, of Washington, um, but the press really resisted, uh, even though the FBI was pushing for them to publish it.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, um, President Kennedy had some, um, extramarital relations himself, it is reported.

GAGE: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And, um, did, did Hoover spend any time talking to Robert Kennedy about that?

GAGE: Uh, it seems that he did.

He certainly knew about this and knew about, uh, you know, Kennedy's, uh, sex life going back to the '40s when he had had an affair as a young man with this woman named Inga Arvad, uh, who was, uh, suspected of being a, a Nazi spy.

Uh, but yeah, Hoover has, has files on, on Kennedy's many, um, affairs and activities.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, Lyndon Johnson becomes president.

Um, did Hoover like Lyndon Johnson?

GAGE: Hoover loved Lyndon Johnson.

Yeah, they loved each other.

RUBENSTEIN: Why, why was that?

They'd been neighbors.

GAGE: Well, they had been neighbors, right?

RUBENSTEIN: Yeah.

GAGE: They lived on the same block of 30th Place in Washington.

And so they, they walked their dogs together.

The Johnson girls used to apparently run up and steal flowers from Hoover's, uh, garden.

Um, so they had been close for a couple of decades by that point.

They shared some common enemies, namely the Kennedys.

Um, and they actually saw the world, uh, similarly, though they had different ideologies in, in other ways.

RUBENSTEIN: So you have a, a picture of the ad for the house that Hoover bought in your book and it has a phrase in it about how it was, uh, appropriately uh, protected against, uh, in effect, uh, Blacks moving in, is that right because that was very common?

GAGE: Right, that was very common in American cities.

It was especially common in Washington, so yeah, Hoover's house was under a racial covenant.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so Johnson lets Hoover do pretty much what he wants, but he gets even a better friend as president, his all-time best friend he thinks is Richard Nixon.

But, in the end, uh, Nixon tries to figure out how to kind of get rid of Hoover, is that right?

GAGE: Yeah, they ran into conflicts though they had this longstanding friendship, and in many ways, Nixon ran in 1968 on a kind of law-and-order platform that, that had come straight out of, of Hoover.

But once Nixon's president, they get into some conflicts.

Nixon wants the FBI to do some things that even J. Edgar Hoover does not want to do.

Um, and Hoover says no to Nixon on a few occasions and Nixon begins to strategize about how to, how to get him to, uh, to, to leave office.

Fails to do so we should note.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so he's now under Nixon.

Nixon doesn't fire him, uh, but then ultimately, in the end, everybody probably goes to their great reward and so that happened to Hoover when?

GAGE: He died in May of 1972.

RUBENSTEIN: At the age of 77?

GAGE: Correct.

RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, did people rush to his office to get his files and see what secrets he had in him or what happened?

GAGE: Yes, they did actually.

(laughs).

Uh, one of the great tragedies for me as a, as a biographer is that Hoover had told his secretary, uh, to burn his personal files and to destroy them and she set about immediately doing that, uh, but the other files, uh, were, were there and, uh, you know, we got our hands on them.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's go into, uh, who Clyde Tolson was.

Was he an FBI agent himself?

GAGE: He was.

Uh, he had, uh, gone to George Washington University, he had worked in the government, and then in 1928, uh, he entered the Bureau as an agent under Hoover.

RUBENSTEIN: And so they had this relationship where, um, it's hard to envision it today, where the head of the FBI, our major law enforcement agency, is spending lots of nights in New York nightclubs.

GAGE: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: Not that New York nightclubs aren't wonderful but, but, uh, sometimes there were said that uh, some of the people that own them may not have been, uh, the most law-abiding citizens.

And so he would go to those and nobody seemed to say it's a problem?

GAGE: Right.

Uh, if you look at the gossip columns of the 1930s, Hoover and Tolson together are all over the place.

Um, they particularly loved The Stork Club and they were very close with Walter Winchell, um, who was, uh, you know, kind of the great gossip columnist of the era.

RUBENSTEIN: And Tolson and Hoover, would go to La Jolla for the West Coast, uh, trips, which were paid for by the owners of the, of the, of the hotel out there, I guess?

GAGE: No, they really traveled as a couple.

They were very widely accepted as a couple.

I mean, if you were in Washington, you knew if you were inviting Hoover to dinner, uh, you were gonna invite Clyde with him.

Um, and it's one of the fascinating things about their story is that they traveled together.

You know, they went to family funerals together.

They went to dinner parties and nightclubs and Broadway shows and, uh, they functioned together, uh, really as spouses in a, in a quite open and quite widely accepted way without, of course, stating that they were in a relationship.

RUBENSTEIN: But, Hoover never commented on his sexuality, and the only relevance really for this purpose is that he, for part of his time, was in charge of trying to out people who were homosexual.

There was a law or executive order in the United States that said, "If you are homosexual, you can't work in the federal government."

You're, in other words, you weren't doing anything that would break any laws, but just being homosexual, you were, you were fired.

And so his job was to oversee that and get people fired.

And that was kind of some people thought the anomaly that he was maybe living a gay life, but he was also outing people from their jobs.

GAGE: Right.

For the '40s, '50s, and '60s, that was federal policy and he enforced it.

And he also enforced, uh, rumors about his own sexuality.

So if he heard that at a dinner party somewhere, someone had said something about, you know, uh, his sexuality, that person might actually get an FBI agent showing up at their door and saying, "Don't say things like that about our fine esteemed director."

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so one of the greatest failings some people would say was his inability to deal with, um, lynching's in the South of the United States.

Uh, throughout his entire time, thousands of Black people were lynched in the South, but he never seemed to really, um, conquer that problem.

Is that fair?

GAGE: Yeah, I mean there's a period in the 1940s, when the FBI does try to go pretty aggressively into lynching investigations under pressure from the Roosevelt and then the Truman administration.

And I think that when they're doing it, they're pretty serious about it, um, and they put a lot of resources into it, uh, but there were problems of federal jurisdiction.

There were problems of, of Hoover's own commitment to the work.

Um, and then they always had problems getting convictions because you were still dealing with, with Southern White juries, and at a certain point, Hoover got frustrated at doing these big investigations and then, uh, not really being able to bring them in court.

RUBENSTEIN: So, go for a moment through the Rosenberg situation.

What was the FBI's role in identifying Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as spies who had sold or given nuclear secrets to the Soviets?

GAGE: The Rosenberg case is really fascinating partly because it was so important and so controversial at the time and partly because it's now clear that the FBI had, uh, some very, very solid evidence, particularly of Julius Rosenberg's, um, involvement in espionage that it never shared with the public.

So there's a big public debate, um, about guilt and innocence, but the FBI was, uh, 100% sure because they had decrypted some Soviet cables, um, that Julius had been involved in this.

Ethel, it's a little clear, less clear how directly involved in, in these activities she was.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, what you were referring to was that the FBI had figured out how to de-encrypt, uh, I guess Soviet, uh, communications and this project.

What was the name of it, the Venoma?

GAGE: Venona.

RUBENSTEIN: The Venona project, was something that Hoover never wanted to testify about, because he didn't want the Soviets to know that we were de-encrypting their, their, their encrypted messages.

Did we get a lot of intelligence from that and how did Hoover protect that from ever becoming public?

GAGE: Yeah, Venona is, is a great story.

So these were, um, cables that had been intercepted during the war, um, and then after the war began to be decrypted and they discovered that some of these cables had i-intelligence information.

Um, and so they're really key in, uh, a couple of cases, the Rosenbergs most notably.

Uh, they lead the FBI to a lot of figures that it would not have found otherwise.

Uh, but Venona also had two problems.

One was that you couldn't talk about it in public, so you had this evidence, uh, but because you wanted to protect the program, you couldn't make it public.

So there were lots of people that the FBI knew had been committing espionage, but they kind of let them walk free rather than expose the program.

And then the second problem was that it turned out that the program, uh, had been, you know, infiltrated that the Soviets knew a lot about, uh, the, this decryption process from many people, but, uh, primarily Kim Philby, um, who was a, a famous British-Soviet agent and, uh, and was the liaison to the, uh, FBI and the CIA in the '40s & 50's.

RUBENSTEIN: Yes, Kim Philby was a British, uh, citizen who was put in charge of intelligence, uh, for the British, but in deal-, dealing with it in Washington, he was, his job was to be the liaison with our intelligence agencies in Washington during, I guess, World War II and subsequent to that and it turned out he was actually a Soviet agent.

GAGE: Right.

He, uh, had been a very high-ranking, uh, counterintelligence officer in Britain, and then in 1949, uh, through about '51, he was, he was here in the United States as, uh, the British liaison to the FBI and the CIA.

RUBENSTEIN: W-what was Hoover's reaction when he realized that Philby had been a Soviet agent all these years and he was telling him secrets?

GAGE: Uh, they were not thrilled about it.

(laughs) He said, he said the CIA was in much deeper with Philby than the FBI ever was, so, uh, that was his, that was his line.

RUBENSTEIN: Now let's talk about, uh, Senator McCarthy.

Um, Senator McCarthy accused many people in the State Department of being communists and so forth.

Then McCarthy was a very big anticommunist, he would say he was.

What was his relation with Hoover?

GAGE: They had a very funny relationship.

I think most people today would think they're basically the same guy, right?

Very similar, these kinds of outspoken anticommunists and they were friends, um, and they obviously shared certain parts of a political outlook, but Hoover was pretty critical of McCarthy.

He thought McCarthy was a loose cannon, and in funny ways, Hoover really benefited from the reaction against McCarthy, because in the politics of that moment, McCarthy was seen as the dangerous demagogue and Hoover as the much more responsible, um, state-based institutionalist, uh, anticommunist.

RUBENSTEIN: In the end, um, your summary of Hoover is that he had many good features, built, uh, an interesting organization, but had its challenges.

But in the end, you would say he's more of a plus slightly than a negative for what he did for the country or not?

GAGE: No, I'd say he was more of a negative than than a, a positive.

I mean I think I came to recognize his talents, his political talents, his bureaucratic talents, uh, recognize the moments that, that he took stands that I think are really admirable, his opposition to Japanese internment during the war, um, his efforts to contain Joseph McCarthy, right?

I think there are a lot of moments, um, that humanize him and make him a more complicated figure.

Um, but, you know, in the end, uh, I think the, the ferocity of his, uh, animosity toward a lot of people who were perfectly law abiding citizens, um, and the fact that he concentrated so much power in himself, um, I think, uh, kind of push it to the, to the negative side.

RUBENSTEIN: It's, uh, rare to read an 800-page book and can't keep, you can't put it down, and I congratulate you on it and on the Bancroft Prize and no doubt other prizes you will get.

Thank you very much for our conversation.

(applause) (music plays through credits)