What Was J. Edgar Hoover Biggest Secret that Could Have Destroyed Him?


John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI’s predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover is also credited with establishing and expanding a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List, renamed in 2001 as the Terrorist Screening Database which the FBI still compiles and manages. … At this time he formalized a covert ‘dirty tricks’ program under the name COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was first used to disrupt the Communist Party USA, where Hoover ordered observation and pursuit of targets that ranged from suspected citizen spies to larger celebrity figures, such as Charlie Chaplin, whom he saw as spreading Communist Party propaganda. … In the 1960s, Hoover’s FBI monitored John Lennon, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. The COINTELPRO tactics were later extended to organizations such as the Nation of Islam, Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others. Hoover’s moves against people who maintained contacts with subversive elements, some of whom were members of the civil rights movement, also led to accusations of trying to undermine their reputations. The treatment of Martin Luther King Jr. and actress Jean Seberg are two examples: Jacqueline Kennedy recalled that Hoover told President John F. Kennedy that King had tried to arrange a sex party while in the capital for the March on Washington and that Hoover told Robert F. Kennedy that King had made derogatory comments during the President’s funeral. Under Hoover’s leadership, the FBI sent an anonymous blackmail letter to King in 1964, urging him to commit suicide. …”
Wikipedia
How J. Edgar Hoover Used the Power of Libraries for Evil
Jacobin: The FBI’s Secret War
YouTube: What Was J. Edgar Hoover Biggest Secret that Could Have Destroyed Him? 13:16

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This entry was posted in Black Power, Civil Rights Mov., John Kennedy, Lyn. Johnson, Malcolm X, MLKJr., Rob. Kennedy, Sports, The Beatles, Vietnam War and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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