J. Edgar Hoover gave his name to the building that houses FBI headquarters and 55 years of his life to fighting crime. But a successor transformed his name into an unflattering adjective in Thursday’s hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“I was worried very much about being in kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,” former FBI director James Comey explained about salacious material compiled by a third party on Donald Trump that the FBI presented to the president. “I didn’t want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way.”
The disrespect did not sit well with some who served under the FBI’s first director.
“I worked for J. Edgar Hoover,” James Kallstrom told Breitbart News. “Everything that’s been said about J. Edgar Hoover is a total lie—talk about fake news.”
FBI agents killing John Dillinger and capturing George Machine Gun Kelly and Alvin Karpis, the bureau’s positive portrayal in such productions as G Men and I Was a Communist for the FBI, and his position as archnemesis of criminals, crackpots, and Communists made J. Edgar Hoover one of the most admired men in America during his life. Death proved deadly to his reputation. Revelations unearthed and allegations unleashed by the Church Committee in 1975 greatly catalyzed the deceased director’s fall from grace.
Hoover served in the Justice Department from the Woodrow Wilson to the Richard Nixon administrations. His involvement in the Wilson-era Palmer Raids and similar subsequent investigations that led to convictions of Soviet agents Earl Browder, William Remington, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and others during the 1940s and ’50s led large swaths of the Left to come to hate one of America’s most beloved figures. Writers of dubious repute posthumously labeled Hoover a homosexual and a crossdresser, and others feverishly imagined his involvement in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.
Comey came nowhere close to joining the ranks of the conspiracy theorists. But his dig at the man who held the same director title for 48 years in the FBI and predecessor outfits strikes as strange within the culture of a bureau that sees J. Edgar Hoover differently than Oliver Stone does.
Former FBI special agent Kenneth Maxwell, who joined the FBI seven years after Hoover’s death, regarded Comey’s comment as an offhand remark not much worth dissecting.
“I don’t think Comey was criticizing Hoover per se, only commenting upon one of Mr. Hoover’s now well-documented practices of keeping secret dossiers,” Maxwell told Breitbart News. “I believe Jim, like most agents, believes that J. Edgar Hoover created and led an incredible organization that has become the premier law enforcement agency in the world and for that he should be remembered and honored. Hoover probably hung around too long and became isolated in his later years. There’s a lot of myth out there about him. I believe most agents recognize Hoover’s accomplishments more than they dwell on any negative aspects of his past, including Jim Comey.”
Like Comey acceding to Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s edict that he call his “investigation” into Hillary Clinton a “matter,” Hoover acted under the direction of the president and attorney general. That subservient role does not prevent revisionists from fantasizing that Hoover bossed around his bosses rather than the reverse. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, for instance, ordered the bugging of Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms. But Hoover provides a convenient scapegoat to let Kennedy and his older brother off the hook for the invasion of the civil-rights leader’s privacy. In noting his investigation of a similar salacious dossier on Trump, Comey ironically highlighted the similarities between himself and the predecessor from whom he sought to separate. Times change. But bureaus of investigation still investigate—all sorts of stuff.
“That was just a cheap shot by a guy who doesn’t have a whole lot of depth, not much courage, and no common sense,” Kallstrom concludes of Comey’s comment.