Volume 34, Number 7 · April 23, 1987
Dreams of a G-Man
By Alan Brinkley
Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover
by Richard Gid Powers
The Free Press, 624 pp., $27.95
J. Edgar Hoover, Tom Wicker once wrote, 'wielded more power, longer, than any man in American history.[1] That assessment would be difficult to dispute. When Hoover died in 1972, he had been director of the FBI for forty-eight years—three fourths of its life and two thirds of his own. He had transformed the bureau from a minor adjunct of the Justice Department into something very close to an independent national police force. He had remained for half a century the unchallenged master of his own bureaucratic world, so far beyond the reach of the eight presidents he served that (until an abortive effort by Richard Nixon only months before Hoover's death) no one seriously considered replacing him—although several would have liked to do so.
Review, 3779 words
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