J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page A

room, reporters rushed to the phones.
    AP beat UPI with the first URGENT BULLETIN, at 11:55 A.M. , but both were scooped by radio and by ABC, CBS, and NBC TV, which had interrupted their regular programming with the announcement.
    Within an hour many of the larger newspapers had extras on the streets, with full-front-page headlines:
     
HOOVER DEAD!
    AMERICA’S TOP COP DIES IN SLEEP
    NATION MOURNS #1 G-MAN
     
    There was an end-of-an-era feeling in most of the press accounts, which were filled with such evocative names as Dillinger, Ma Barker, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Machine Gun Kelly, the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White, and Alger Hiss, and such memory-laden events as the Lindbergh kidnapping, the capture of the Nazi saboteurs, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
    Any obituary is, of necessity, a summing up, but this particular death seemed to call forth judgments. This was especially the case with the editorials of the large eastern dailies:
    The New York Times: “For nearly a half century J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were indistinguishable. That was at once his strength and its weakness…” 15
    The Washington Post: “Few, if any, men in the history of the United States have accumulated so much power and wielded it for so long as did J. Edgar Hoover…” 16
    The Washington Star: “Today, in Washington, a city that was built and populated by bureaucrats, they are mourning the man who was probably the most powerful of them all.” 17
    Yet it was the smaller papers, middle America extended coast to coast, which really mattered, and always had, as far as the FBI itself was concerned. For they, more than the metropolitan press, had accepted, supported, and helped foster the Hoover legend. For more than three decades they’d published the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s press releases, and been glad to have them; run congratulatory editorials each May 10, on his anniversary as director; and launched letter-writing campaigns whenever someone suggested replacing him.
    While in the urban papers the consensus seemed to be that Hoover was alegend who had long outlived his own time, their common theme was that, in a time when America most needed leaders, the country had lost one of the greatest of them all.
    The Enid (Okla.) Morning News: “Mr. Law Enforcement USA is dead.” 18 The Monroe (La.) Morning World: “His death Tuesday was like the fall of a main supporting pillar of the Republic.” 19
    The Las Vegas Sun: “Were there no J. Edgar Hoover with his dedication and stature, who knows but we might have awakened some morning and found we had no liberties left at all.” 20
    Not everyone was saddened. Nor were all the comments tributes.
    Coretta King, who felt her husband had been destroyed by this man, made no attempt to hide her bitterness in a long statement she released. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded his slain friend as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and who had once preached a sermon to Hoover via a “bug” secreted in the pulpit of his church) whimsically observed, “With the passing of J. Edgar Hoover, I am reminded that almighty God conducts the ultimate surveillance.” 21
    Several radicals commented on the ironic possibility that if Hoover had expired before midnight, his death had occurred on communism’s greatest holiday, May Day.
    Much less imaginative, but more than usually vitriolic, Gus Hall, general secretary of the Communist party USA—an organization which some felt only Hall and Hoover took seriously—called the late FBI director “a servant of racism, reaction and repression” and a “political pervert whose masochistic passion drove him to savage assaults upon the principles of the Bill of Rights.” 22
    Tass, by contrast, simply reported the death in a single sentence, without editorial comment: “J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation since