Hoover’s FBI

Richard Powers’s valuable and well-balanced biography of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover reminds us of the two foremost themes that any analysis of the FBI’s role in twentieth-century American politics must confront: how the Bureau’s biases generally reflected the opinions and preferences of many Americans, and how the Bureau regularly acted, even in its worst abuses of power, not as an independent “rogue elephant,” but as a direct agent ...