Young J Edgar

Author : Kenneth Ackerman
Publisher : Kenneth Ackerman
ISBN 13 : 9781619450011
Total Pages : 467 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Young J. Edgar written by Kenneth Ackerman and published by Kenneth Ackerman. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 2, 1919, bombs exploded simultaneously in nine American cities. One destroyed the home of the Attorney General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer. In the aftermath of World War I, America faced a new enemy-radical communism. Palmer vowed a crackdown, and, to lead it, he chose his youngest assistant, twenty-four year-old J. Edgar Hoover. Under Palmer's wing, Hoover helped execute a series of brutal nationwide raids, bursting into homes without warning, arresting over 10,000 Americans and assembling secret files on hundreds of thousands of suspects and political enemies. A handful of lawyers like Clarence Darrow and future Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Harlan Fisk Stone dared to defend accused radicals in the name of free speech and civil liberties. YOUNG J. EDGAR brings to life Palmer's raids and Hoover 's coming of age, a metaphor on post-9/11 America. It reaches the heart of our current debate on personal freedoms in a time of war and fear. Editorial Reviews "[F]eatures demagogues; terrorists; a gullible, xenophobic public; rogue law enforcement officials; and good guys, both in and out of government, who discredit the raids. Ackerman captures well the pathological character of the young Hoover.... " -Publishers Weekly "[A] history to savor." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch Ackerman ("Boss Tweed") does an outstanding job portraying the Teflon quality of Hoover.... 'Young J. Edgar' is a book that demonstrates forcefully the corrupting nature of power in the hands of flawed government officials. It's panoramic, detailed and extremely timely. -- Huntington News As hard as Mr. Ackerman is on Hoover, he does not demonize him.... [A] chilling account of how the rule of law in a war on terror can be subverted into a war of terror. --New York Sun "Ackerman's extremely well-written and thoroughly researched history ... convincingly refuted Hoover's dishonest effort to minimize his own central role in promoting the first Red Scare of the World War I and early 1920s era." -- Athan Theoharis, Emeritus Professor at Marquette University and author of The FBI and American Democracy, and The Quest for Absolute Security.

Author : Kenneth D. Ackerman
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 9780306816277
Total Pages : 536 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Young J. Edgar written by Kenneth D. Ackerman and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 2, 1919, bombs exploded simultaneously in nine American cities, and the nation suddenly found itself facing a new threat-radical terrorism. Then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer vowed a crackdown to be led by his youngest assistant, J. Edgar Hoover. Under Palmer's wing, Hoover helped execute a series of brutal nationwide raids-bursting into homes without warrants, arresting over ten thousand Americans-and assembled secret files on thousands of political enemies. Despite public backlash against the abuses, these were the first steps in Hoover's remarkable rise to power. Young J. Edgar is the “compelling” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY) and “fast-paced” (KIRKUS REVIEWS) story of Hoover's early career-one that reaches to the heart of our modern debate over personal freedom in a time of war and fear.

Author : Paul Letersky
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1982164719
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Director written by Paul Letersky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book ever written about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by a member of his personal staff—his former assistant, Paul Letersky—offers unprecedented, “clear-eyed and compelling” (Mark Olshaker, coauthor of Mindhunter) insight into an American legend. The 1960s and 1970s were arguably among America’s most turbulent post-Civil War decades. While the Vietnam War continued seemingly without end, protests and riots ravaged most cities, the Kennedys and MLK were assassinated, and corruption found its way to the highest levels of politics, culminating in Watergate. In 1965, at the beginning of the chaos, twenty-two-year-old Paul Letersky was assigned to assist the legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who’d just turned seventy and had, by then, led the Bureau for an incredible forty-one years. Hoover was a rare and complex man who walked confidently among the most powerful. His personal privacy was more tightly guarded than the secret “files” he carefully collected—and that were so feared by politicians and celebrities. Through Letersky’s close working relationship with Hoover, and the trust and confidence he gained from Hoover’s most loyal senior assistant, Helen Gandy, Paul became one of the few able to enter the Director’s secretive—and sometimes perilous—world. Since Hoover’s death half a century ago, millions of words have been written about the man and hundreds of hours of TV dramas and A-list Hollywood films produced. But until now, there has been virtually no account from someone who, for a period of years, spent hours with the Director on a daily basis. Balanced, honest, and keenly observed, this “vivid, foibles-and-all portrait of the fabled scourge of gangsters, Klansmen, and communists” (The Wall Street Journal) sheds new light on one of the most powerful law enforcement figures in American history.

Author : Beverly Gage
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593492617
Total Pages : 897 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner) written by Beverly Gage and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022 “Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”—The Washington Post “A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”—The Wall Street Journal A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape. We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people--many of them communists or racial minorities or both-- did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history. Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

Author : Anthony Summers
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1453241183
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Official and Confidential written by Anthony Summers and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling author’s revealing, “important” biography of the longtime FBI director (The Philadelphia Inquirer). No one exemplified paranoia and secrecy at the heart of American power better than J. Edgar Hoover, the original director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For this consummate biography, renowned investigative journalist Anthony Summers interviewed more than eight hundred witnesses and pored through thousands of documents to get at the truth about the man who headed the FBI for fifty years, persecuted political enemies, blackmailed politicians, and lived his own surprising secret life. Ultimately, Summers paints a portrait of a fatally flawed individual who should never have held such power, and for so long.

Author : Millie McGhee
Publisher : Inland Empire Services
ISBN 13 : 9780970182203
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Secrets Uncovered written by Millie McGhee and published by Inland Empire Services. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Betty Medsger
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307962962
Total Pages : 789 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Burglary written by Betty Medsger and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 789 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The never-before-told full story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists—quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans—that made clear the shocking truth and confirmed what some had long suspected, that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation. It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists—eight men and women—the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, inspired by Daniel Berrigan’s rebellious Catholic peace movement, set out to use a more active, but nonviolent, method of civil disobedience to provide hard evidence once and for all that the government was operating outside the laws of the land. The would-be burglars—nonpro’s—were ordinary people leading lives of purpose: a professor of religion and former freedom rider; a day-care director; a physicist; a cab driver; an antiwar activist, a lock picker; a graduate student haunted by members of her family lost to the Holocaust and the passivity of German civilians under Nazi rule. Betty Medsger's extraordinary book re-creates in resonant detail how this group of unknowing thieves, in their meticulous planning of the burglary, scouted out the low-security FBI building in a small town just west of Philadelphia, taking into consideration every possible factor, and how they planned the break-in for the night of the long-anticipated boxing match between Joe Frazier (war supporter and friend to President Nixon) and Muhammad Ali (convicted for refusing to serve in the military), knowing that all would be fixated on their televisions and radios. Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and, with the utmost deliberation, released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public’s perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. At the heart of the heist—and the book—the contents of the FBI files revealing J. Edgar Hoover’s “secret counterintelligence program” COINTELPRO, set up in 1956 to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States in order “to enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles,” to make clear to all Americans that an FBI agent was “behind every mailbox,” a plan that would discredit, destabilize, and demoralize groups, many of them legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups that Hoover found offensive—as well as black power groups, student activists, antidraft protestors, conscientious objectors. The author, the first reporter to receive the FBI files, began to cover this story during the three years she worked for The Washington Post and continued her investigation long after she'd left the paper, figuring out who the burglars were, and convincing them, after decades of silence, to come forward and tell their extraordinary story. The Burglary is an important and riveting book, a portrait of the potential power of non­violent resistance and the destructive power of excessive government secrecy and spying.

Author : Millie L. McGhee
Publisher : Inland Empire Services
ISBN 13 : 9780970182227
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Secrets Uncovered written by Millie L. McGhee and published by Inland Empire Services. This book was released on 2000 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two people a universe apart yet linked by a secret that would change both their lives -- and the course of a nation -- forever.Imagine being 10 years old, and told that if you repeat a family secret to any one, your entire family would be killed as they slept.Now imagine being born and raised a while man, then told as a young adult that you are black, in a society where the color of your skin can make the difference between unbounded sucess and complete obscurity...

Author : Curt Gentry
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393343502
Total Pages : 852 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets written by Curt Gentry and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-02-17 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Eleanor Roosevelt was right: Hoover’s FBI was an American gestapo." —Newsweek Shocking, grim, frightening, Curt Gentry’s masterful portrait of America’s top policeman is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how a paranoid director created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone who opposed him. The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; as well as insight into the Watergate scandal and what part he played in the investigations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Author : Gil Reavill
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1250021103
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Mafia Summit written by Gil Reavill and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mafia Summit is the true story of how a small-town lawman in upstate New York busted a Cosa Nostra conference in 1957, exposing the Mafia to America In a small village in upstate New York, mob bosses from all over the country—Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Cuba boss Santo Trafficante, and future Gambino boss Paul Castellano—were nabbed by Sergeant Edgar D. Croswell as they gathered to sort out a bloody war of succession. For years, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had adamantly denied the existence of the Mafia, but young Robert Kennedy immediately recognized the shattering importance of the Appalachian summit. As attorney general when his brother JFK became president, Bobby embarked on a campaign to break the spine of the mob, engaging in a furious turf battle with the powerful Hoover. Detailing mob killings, the early days of the heroin trade, and the crusade to loosen the hold of organized crime, fans of Gus Russo and Luc Sante will find themselves captured by this momentous story. Reavill scintillatingly recounts the beginning of the end for the Mafia in America and how it began with a good man in the right place at the right time.