FBI DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER

CHARACTER SKETCH DETAIL

59, dominating, imperious Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Hoover sees Harvey Matusow as a threat to his beloved Bureau’s reputation and scrambles his agents to prevent Harvey from tarnishing the Bureau’s name.  When Harvey goes rogue, Hoover declares that "there is nothing of more importance now than to locate Matusow," and that "every resource should be devoted to it."  His anger over his agents' mishandling of Matusow pales in comparison to his disdain for how the Justice Department and Congress haphazardly cultivated Harvey as a trial witness and poster child for anti-communism…a crusade in which Hoover, more than most, is a true believer.  

What does J. Edgar believe? We shall defend ourselves from evil. Communism is as real a threat to the American way of life as anything it’s encountered before and Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation is the nation’s last best hope. No other organization is as well funded, has the operational directive to spy within the borders of the United States, and is as unfettered by the distracting and petty skirmishes of the political world. The rooting out of communism is a task of war and Hoover will bring every resource available to bear. He believes that the Bureau will always protect America, so long as Hoover can protect the Bureau.

Hoover can't admit it, but his cherished agency bears its share of the blame for Harvey's notoriety. After all, the FBI knew him first. Before becoming a household name, Harvey had been an undercover mole for the Bureau. But agents had deemed Harvey unstable at best and unreliable at worst. They cut him loose, all but delivering him into the arms of a ravenous community of anti-communists hungry to get rich on Harvey's cloak-and-dagger stories of "Red" intrigue.

As Harvey's stature as a paid "expert" witness and McCarthy campaigner expanded along with his increasingly ludicrous tales, the FBI failed to sound the alarm. With the Bureau's silent blessing, the Justice Department and Congress turned Harvey into a poster child for anticommunism, and into a ticking time bomb of political embarrassment.

Now, Hoover's anger over the danger Harvey poses to the Bureau pales only in comparison to his determination to lay the blame for Harvey's infamy somewhere else, maybe at the feet of the Justice Department, maybe with Joe McCarthy. To preserve the Bureau's integrity, he engineers a paper trail cover-up and assigns a potential scapegoat to handle the Matusow case: the unsuspecting FBI Inspector Spengler.

BIO NOTES

Volumes upon volumes have been written about J. Edgar Hoover, whose reign as the first Director of the FBI spanned thirty-seven years and the administrations of six U.S. Presidents.  Under his leadership, the FBI grew into a formidable force in American political and civic life, lauded for its professionalism and discipline and feared for its command and deployment of sensitive information about enemies of the state, real and otherwise.  

During the 1950s, Hoover's Bureau acted as the principal machinery of McCarthyism, amassing mountains of information about the political activities and beliefs of ordinary Americans.  Hoover, a fervent anti-communist and skilled political tactician, led from the top down, famously interviewing and passing judgment on each and every new FBI agent, and meting out severe, and sometimes arbitrary, punishments to those agents who failed to meet his high standards of decorum and record-keeping.  In many respects, the discipline of his Bureau came to resemble and mirror the legendary (or mythical) discipline of the communist machine he spent his life combating.  Never married, Hoover was long rumored to have had a decades long relationship with his second-in-command, Clyde Tolson.