J. Edgar Hoover

Biography

John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington, D.C., on 1 January 1895. He worked at the Library of Congress while studying law at night at George Washington University, earning a law degree in 1916 and a master of laws in 1917, and then joined the Justice Department's War Emergency Division to deal with enemy aliens.

In 1919 he was put in charge of the department's new Radical Division, where he compiled files on suspected radicals and helped organise the Palmer raids of 1919-1920, mass arrests and deportations of leftists. He became deputy head of the Bureau of Investigation in 1921 and its director in 1924, when he was charged with cleaning up a bureau tarnished by scandal. He professionalised it, introducing a centralised fingerprint file and a crime laboratory, and in 1935 it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Under Hoover the FBI gained fame in the 1930s for pursuing gangsters such as John Dillinger, and later concentrated on espionage and communist subversion. He used the bureau's files to accumulate influence over politicians, and from 1956 its COINTELPRO programme secretly surveilled, infiltrated and disrupted political groups, including civil rights organisations and Martin Luther King Jr.

Hoover led the FBI for 48 years, until his death in Washington on 2 May 1972. Revelations after his death about the bureau's surveillance and harassment of political opponents badly damaged his reputation.