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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, G-Man edition. Oh, yeah. G-Man. That's right. That's exactly what I meant. G-Man. What a crummy person J. Edgar Hoover was. Yeah, I got a couple of things to say at the beginning, if I may.
Yes. About J. Edgar Hoover. Yeah, let's hear it. Firstly, if you want to feel old, just realize that you were alive when J. Edgar Hoover was still running the FBI like I am. OK. I was like, oh, my God. 1972. Is that real? Yeah. Yeah. So it makes me feel old, but also a testament to his staying power.
No, I think it's more just you being old. Okay. Number two, just quickly want to point out that J. Edgar is not related to Herbert Hoover. Okay. Hadn't even crossed my mind. What about the Hoover vacuum clamp? I don't know about that, but it crossed a lot of people's minds about Herbert because he was, each of them were constantly having to sort of deflect that answer or whatever. Say that answer is not correct. Are you two twins? Yeah. And third, just like,
It's fascinating to study this guy that I knew I feel like a little bit about just from all the various things over the years. But like what an enigma this guy was. Yeah, I think because he he operated in such secrecy. It's kind of impossible to know a lot of stuff about him privately because he held such power and sway in.
Over people as far as like fear of blackmail and stuff like that. Yeah. That it's really interesting to like, you know, you read books.
Five different historians, and they may have five different takes on aspects of his of who he was in his private life and stuff like that. Right. It's really interesting. Right. And for those of us who were born into a world where J. Edgar Hoover wasn't running the FBI. Lucky you. We came along at a really different period in how people looked at him.
Like essentially from his death onward, he's been looked at as like an American villain. Before that, basically all the way up to his death from essentially the day he started at the FBI, America looked at him as a hero, essentially. As a competent, nonpartisan, above the boards, not in any way, shape or form corrupt person.
head of the FBI, a technocrat who believed in applying science and detection over things like hitting a guy with a rubber hose to get answers out of him. He was a sea change and helped America fight off the Red Menace more than once. And like you said, he was
Like, it was really difficult to kind of discern, like, who he was, even at the time when he was in the news all the time. He served eight presidents, four Democrats, four Republicans, three Green Party. And he was the head of the FBI for like 48 straight years. I also saw him described as the most powerful civil servant America has ever seen. Oh, easily. Yeah.
I think by a long shot. And the reason he was able to serve those eight presidents without getting fired. We'll talk a little bit about the fact that part of that has to do with people were legit sort of afraid of what this guy had on them, as in everybody, including presidents.
But a lot of it was because of that popularity. I mean, I've seen most people say, oh, it's because he had dirt on all the presidents. And that's part of it for sure. But I also saw that a lot of it was because he was so popular that firing J. Edgar Hoover would have been very bad for you politically because people loved him so much. That was part of it. He also seemed to prove to be too great a temptation for.
For presidents to not use and ultimately get into cahoots with them. Yeah. Even left-leaning progressives. Yeah. Even FDR. That's the guy I was talking about. Even LBJ. Yeah. Even JFK. Yeah. Yeah.
So, yeah, there's a lot to talk about with this guy. And a lot of it, like you said, is unsubstantiated because he did the smart thing and had all of his personal records destroyed upon his death. He had a very dedicated secretary. And so we'll just never know a lot of it. But there is stuff that's so...
close to being confirmed that it's like you can essentially say this is true. Then there's other stuff. It's like, what? Where are you coming up with that? Yeah, it seems totally false. And then in the middle, there's the stuff where it's like,
Really? Is it? It's entirely possible it's true, but we just don't know. And it's great for speculation. Either way, the stuff we do know about turned him into a reviled figure for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And as you'll see during a lot of this, the guy was also sort of a walking conundrum in a lot of ways by –
Doing things on one hand that would seemingly fly in the face of things he's doing on the other hand. And that'll all kind of come out as we go. But big shout out to Livia, who did a bang up job on this one. Yeah, agreed. And also to a writer in this. Livia got some information from this this great book, a historian named Beverly Gage from Yale University, wrote a book in 2022 called G Man, colon.
Mm-hmm. J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century. Yeah, pretty great stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, Beverly Gage is essentially like the definitive source of J. Edgar Hoover information right now. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of Hoover bios, and they all—
Some of them fly in the face of each other with what they claim. It's pretty interesting. For sure. So let's start at the beginning. Let's start when he was born, back in 1895. That's right. That's a long time ago. And one thing to know about J. Edgar Hoover is he was a D.C. boy born and bred his entire life. He was born in that city and he died in that city. Yeah, he was born Capitol Hill in Seward Square and came from a long line of family that worked for the government.
His dad in particular, one Dickerson Naylor Hoover. Great name. Worked for something called the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was a scientific organization. And, you know, he had siblings. He had a sister that died when he was three. It seems like his father suffered from some mental illness and depression, which would ultimately be the cause of his death in 1921.
And, you know, we can get into some sort of armchair speculation on Hoover's mental condition maybe at the end. Sure. Can't wait. But when he was a kid, he was pretty shy. He was known as a mama's boy, had a very sort of overbearing, doting mother. He had a stutter. Apparently the stutter was so bad that he he went.
Went about correcting it by just talking really fast. And that kind of ran through his life. I think there were court stenographer just stenographers period that couldn't keep up with him on the job. He was so fast. Yeah, no, he had that very quick delivery. If you've ever seen like a newsreel or any news footage of him speaking or reading a speech or something.
But yeah, he kind of took that on. He joined the debate team. He forced himself to do public speaking engagements. And he did not like that kind of stuff. But he did it anyway because, as we'll see, he was a master of PR, which served him quite well. One of the other things about him is that his mother impressed upon him a moral uprightness that actually kind of converted into a moral righteousness where –
There was a there was a specific way to be an American in J. Edgar Hoover's mind. And anybody who ran afoul of that thought otherwise was an enemy of America and should be treated accordingly. And unfortunately, there's plenty of people walking around. That's the that's the definition of a fascist. So he was a total fascist if you hadn't figured that out by now.
But he he had the power to actually make enemies out of the people he considered un-American who were still Americans. They just didn't see America exactly the same way J. Edgar Hoover did. Yeah, exactly. His mom's name was Annie. And Judi Dench played her in the Clint Eastwood movie that starred Leo DiCaprio. Did you see it?
I never saw it. It got pretty bad reviews, so it just didn't draw me in. But yeah, Leo played Hoover. Dench played his mom. And as we'll see, Armie Hammer played his, well, let's just save that one, I guess. Okay. Even though it's no big secret, we'll just save it. Okay. His coworker. Let's just say that. Yeah. His close associate. Yeah.
So, yeah, so he had this view of America that he carried with him his whole way and what it meant to be an upright American. He also was really, really good at organizing. So the way you think of like a government bureaucracy today where there's tons of files and all sorts of like people whose job it is to access those files and they do it to varying degrees of success.
J. Edgar Hoover actually kind of built that, what's called the administrative state. You can actually thank him for that. He not only built the FBI, he made the federal government this kind of administrative power like it is. Oh, yeah, absolutely. He –
Learned a lot of that at one of his first jobs after high school, I got a job at the Library of Congress. And that's where he really got into just sort of categorizing stuff, collecting information. He got a master of law degree from GW, from George Washington University. Right. In 1917.
And the only reason we mention this is because it sort of plays into his massive amount of cronyism. He was a K.A., joined the K.A. fraternity there, which is a very southern, you know, it was like they celebrate the Confederacy. It was like a Robert E. Lee thing. I remember even at Georgia, the K.A.'s were and I imagine still are just very Confederate. Yeah, that's a great word for it.
They just like Confederate pride, that whole thing. Those are the KAs. And as we'll see, a lot of those KAs and people that he he knew ended up getting jobs from him directly. So lots of cronyism happening.
Yes, for sure. So also he became a clerk in World War One, which at the DOJ, and that kept him out of the draft. Yeah. But also was his true first step into his government service. Library of Congress. Yeah, that was essentially the beginning. But this was the true beginning because very quickly he was assigned frigidly.
pretty substantial duties, including overseeing what was called the General Intelligence Division. This was a part of the Department of Justice. If those three words, the General Intelligence Division, don't run a chill down your spine, you're not listening closely. It's like something out of Brazil. Exactly, right? So he was the head of this. And this guy at the time, he was, let's see, 24 years old, and he's running the General Intelligence Division for the DOJ.
And the whole point of the G.I.D. was to investigate radicals, leftists, anarchists, communists. There was a big red scare from 1919 to 1920. And his whole jam was to apply his everything he'd learned and developed at the Library of Congress to everything he wanted to do in law enforcement. And he created massive files of.
on immigrants to America. And basically it was like, this is an immigrant. They are loyal or disloyal. They like communism or like capitalism. And just amassed all of these files and they eventually turned them into what were known as the Palmer Raids, where they just went into these people's homes and said, J. Edgar Hoover and the G.I.D. thinks you're disloyal. Come with us. We're deporting you. Forget your civil liberties. Forget the fact that you're a naturalized American citizen now. Doesn't matter.
Yeah, this was a big deal. Maybe we can do something on the Palmer raids in full at some point. But just kind of in a nutshell, the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, had his house was bombed. There was a guy named an anarchist named Carlo Valdanochi.
who the bomb went off early. So it kind of blew up the front of his house along with the bomber himself. There were other bombs mailed to mayors and senators and business leaders. So there was a real sort of anarchist, you know, mail bombing cookbook thing happening. Yeah. Cookbook going on. But the response was the Palmer raids, which was just a
A nightmare of an operation. It was really kind of an unconstitutional disaster. Right. Where, like you said, a lot of these high profile deportations like straight to Russia when many of these people just like didn't even know what they were talking about. Right. I make bagels. Leave me alone kind of thing. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think his list was four hundred and fifty thousand long.
And like how many how many real leftist radicals were there? Exactly right. And there were also tons of cases of mistaken identity. Like it was a catastrophe. They the Palmer Raids so ran afoul of civil liberties. They actually created things like the ACLU and other civil liberties groups to defend against stuff like that ever happening again. But what's miraculous is that the head of all this, the guy who was in charge of actually executing the Palmer Raids,
Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah.
I was about to say that's a good cliffhanger, but you made it an even better cliffhanger. Oh, thanks. With that last line. So let's come back, A, and we'll talk about where the FBI comes into play. Yeah? I can add some more lines if you want me to make it even better. No, I think you made it just perfect. Okay. Thank you.
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With seating for up to eight passengers and an available panoramic moonroof, you can sit back and enjoy the wide open views with the whole family. Check out more national sales event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. All right. So we promised talk at the FBI initially, and we've said this on other episodes. It was called the Bureau Investigations at first.
It was formed in 1908, basically to say, hey, U.S. Attorney General, you need some teeth. Here's your own law enforcement organization. Became the FBI in 1935. And early on was kind of interested in like corporate criminals, radicalism, and a real kind of from the beginning, a real crackdown and obsession with sex work. Yeah, the Mann Act, right? Yeah, big deal. And-
It was also very corrupt and didn't have the best reputation until Coolidge came along in 1924 and hired a guy named Harlan Fisk Stone to reform the DOJ and kind of just clean house and get the FBI in good standing. Yeah, which is amazing that they're like, Hoover, why don't you take over?
But that's exactly what they did. They made him acting director of the Bureau of Investigation starting in, I think, the same year Harlan Stone came in, 1924, right? Yeah, and they got rid of that GID, by the way. They did, but it just went away essentially in name, not spirit by any measure. Right.
And again, just like at the GID, J. Edgar Hoover set about applying the principles of bureaucracy, of organization, and of science, too. He was a true believer in science to this nascent Bureau of Investigation. And one of the stunning statistics I ran across that really gets across his –
Just how much of an impact he had on the FBI when he took it over. Over the course of 10 years, I think, up to 1936, they amassed a huge collection of fingerprints, something like 100,000 fingerprints. And they had people whose entire job it was to go look up the fingerprints and bring them for analysis, right? Yeah.
Ten years later, in 1946, they had 100 million sets of fingerprints. And there was only 140 million people who lived in America at the time. That's crazy, man. Yeah. Wow. He also created like a forensic lab. He created the FBI Academy. Like he really...
not only kind of brought their reputation back, but like you said, he organized them in a way that where they operated like a, like a, like a humming machine. Right. And people, people respected it. They admired it. Like it was,
You know, it really fit in with FDR's New Deal thing of like, hey, your government is big and for a reason. Like we can do all sorts of amazing, competent, capable stuff to make the life of the average person greater. Look at all these fingerprints. Exactly. I don't know if it necessarily fit in with the New Deal. But one of the other things that J. Edgar Hoover did was he instituted this
These policies that when you put them all together basically made – it required every FBI agent to be Ned Flanders essentially. Right.
And he did that because he wanted his people to seem above reproach. Because at the time, the idea of law enforcement was that if they weren't incompetent, then they were crooked or maybe they were both. Like there was not like a lot of public regard for law enforcement. So he wanted to make sure that his particular agency was
separated itself from that, like put itself head and shoulders. You know, like the way that in any movie the FBI agents come in and just completely take control of like the investigation or the crime scene or whatever. Oh, yeah. That was essentially...
That came from Hoover. Like, he created this image of the FBI agents as so uber-competent that no one would challenge them if they did walk into a crime scene and take over. Yeah. And if you remember seeing a lot of movies that had FBI agents portrayed as, like, tall, handsome white guys, it's because FBI agents were –
largely almost roundly tall, handsome white guys. He hired a lot of his, again, with the cronyism, a lot of his alums from GW, a lot of KAs. He, he kept the FBI from bringing a class of civil service. So he didn't have, you know, he could basically flout any rules that would have forced him to have like a, to look at any kind of diverse applicant. So he wanted white men that were good looking and,
Again, as a PR move, it was it was a popular thing at the time. Ironically, in the 40s, Ebony magazine did a feature on like black employees of the FBI. And then Hoover even helped them with this because it was a PR thing. But they were all valets. None of them were agents because there were no black agents. Right. Yeah. And like you said, the way it got around that was to accept people.
The FBI from civil service. And I was like, how did he do that? And how did he get away with that? And there's something called accepted service. And it's where you don't you're not that agency is not subject to the same laws and requirements as a civil service agency is. But the reason he was doing is he was saying, like, some of these laws are letting people in government who are just really slack.
keep their jobs. And I can't have that in the FBI. I have to have top-notch crack people who I'm able to fire if they don't meet our standards. I think that's how he was able to get the FBI out of civil service classification. Yeah. And you mentioned Ned Flanders. He wanted them to be
Like you said, sort of beyond reproach and morally upright. So he he insisted that they not drink alcohol, at least sort of on the job, like, you know, have the martinis at lunch kind of thing. Apparently he was a big martini guy. But as the story goes, only after work.
Only two martinis. And then later in life, when he was in, you know, sort of older and not in the best of health, his doctor said he can't drink martinis anymore. And he was like, well, that's not going to happen. And he said, all right, cut down to one martini then. And he said, sure. And as legend has it, he had his staff buy larger martini glasses and then dropped it down to one.
Yeah, that was something I saw. There was a Frontline episode from years and years ago called The File on J. Edgar Hoover. And a lot of it seems totally off the rails and unbelievable for good reason. But some of the stuff that he had the FBI staff do for him was so above and beyond what any agency staff should be doing for the director. Like, basically,
They replaced his grass once because he didn't like the color green. Reggie Sodd.
Just stuff like that. So I totally believe that he had his FBI staff buy bigger martini glasses for his home. That was totally in line with how he treated the Bureau. It was his own kingdom. And little by little, he made it so. It's not like he came into it and somebody handed him the keys and said, good luck, go make this agency that's so powerful. It is essentially a fourth branch of government. Right.
He built it little by little, bit by bit, dirt by dirt, favor by favor. And it became the it got to the point fairly quickly where he could do stuff like that and no one would say anything about it. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So let's go to the 1930s. This was, as Livia called it, we love our golden ages.
And this this may have been the golden age of the FBI. This is when through PR and as we'll see through movies and television and through sort of him helping to control the news machine, the FBI were were heroes. They had fans like people love these G-men. And we'll get to that. Well, you might as well say I think G-men was supposedly coined by Machine Gun Kelly.
The good one. Who in 19th. Is either one of them good? All right.
In 1933, he yelled, don't shoot G-men like government men. But he sort of formed in the 1930s this image that actually like, you know, there were little boys and maybe some girls, but definitely little boys running around the schoolyard like playing G-men. They wanted to be G-men. They were sort of superstars because they would bust high-profile bank robbers.
And he just, you know, he jumped in on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, which, you know, horrified a nation. He apparently didn't have any legal jurisdiction. But like you said, J. Edgar Hoover walks onto the scene. It's like we're taking over now and no one's going to stand in his way.
No, not at all. But in doing those kind of things, he just built the reputation for the FBI by leaps and bounds. One of the things that he did that was so masterful in taking on the gangsters was to not try to dissuade the public from glorifying them. Yeah. So the gangsters were just amazing folk heroes and.
But the FBI was even greater because they're the ones taking down these amazing folk heroes. Like the gangsters are here, but man, your average FBI agent is head and shoulders above them because he's going to get them sooner or later and probably kill them in a shootout in front of a house or a theater or something like that. And so he was able to play off of the public's fascination with gangsters and use that to kind of parlay the FBI's reputation above it.
Yeah, this was kind of called the public enemy era as well because he would use that term for people like John Dillinger. I mean, this guy –
Dillinger was robbing banks. He was a bank robber. But to call someone a public enemy, like it almost elevated them in his own way to folk hero status, but also like folk villain status, I guess, is a better way to say it. Sure. Yeah, for sure. Like, is a bank robber really a public enemy? I mean, it's not a great thing to do.
Well, supposedly in 1933, 34, there was a massive crime wave and there were a lot of murders going on. People were like gangsters were shooting each other in the streets over turf like it was. Yeah. So, yeah, there I mean, yeah, just a straight up bank robber, probably not. But these guys were doing any and all crime. They were like criminals of all trades from what I could tell. OK.
Public enemies, in other words. So, yeah. But at the same time, yes, there was a huge publicity thing, too. This public enemy number one, you know? Yeah, number one was Dillinger. Right. But there were other public enemies number one, but he was the first public enemy number one, I think. Oh, so there was never a two? He just kept moving the number one mantle around? Well, he'd just kill off the number one, and whoever was below them would come up and become number one, I guess. I guess that makes sense.
So one of the ways that he shaped public opinion, too, was directly by working with journalists, by working with film and TV producers and writers. And he actually created a branch in the FBI called the Crime Records Division, which sounds very innocuous. But it turns out that they were the ones who were in charge of generating pro-FBI propaganda and making sure it got out there in the media. Yeah. I mean, this is where it gets truly sort of nutso. He had...
at one point, sort of de facto final cut on movies that were being produced. So,
He had approval or denial of casting choices. Like literally he approved Jimmy Stewart, you know, as I can't remember what movie it was even in a movie as like the lead in the movie after like interviewing him. He interviewed Jimmy Stewart, gave him the job or, you know, gave him the stamp of approval. It apparently didn't like that Jimmy Cagney was portraying gangsters. So he said, you can do it as long as you, quote, get killed.
in the end and make sure that you're dead because no gangsters were supposed to live in any of the movies or TV shows. And he even has three writer credits and one, um, one acting credit. I think the writing credits were generally stuff based on cases that he was involved in. So they gave him, he may have insisted on a credit. I don't know, but he does have one actor credit. Uh, he was a narrator on a film called the next of kin. Wow.
So he was deep in. Yeah. Oh, he was deep into everything and anything that was going on in American life above or below the boards from what I can tell. Yeah. Or the line. So the gangster era kind of went away in the mid to late 30s.
I mean, there are plenty of gangsters still, but there was a there was a changeover. It went from like bank robbing, cow murdering bandits like John Dillinger and started to become organized crime, the mafia, the mob. And at that point is it started to kind of branch out and become gangsters.
Well, as legitimate, as legitimized as the mafia can be and organized, J. Edgar Hoover stopped paying attention to the gangsters and instead turned his attention to political surveillance again instead. Yeah, I think his whole deal did a little more research into the mafia thing. The mafia was a problem, but he didn't see the mafia as a threat to the American way of life as he defined it.
Communism for sure.
rabble rousing civil rights leaders for sure as we'll see the gay and lesbian community for sure all of that threatened this sort of idyllic old fashioned way of American life as he saw it the mafia didn't necessarily so he was never as concerned with him as he probably should have been he was like let the cops handle that so okay that totally makes sense and because it's the simplest explanation is probably correct
But there is such a thread of thought that J. Edgar Hoover was either compromised and the mafia had him in a compromising position and or he was...
Friends with, if not actual mobsters, friends of mobsters. He was in their world. Him personally. Publicly, he was the head of the FBI and he carried out all of the crime fighting and leftist rousting and all that stuff.
But privately, if these even half of these stories are to be believed, he was a crook, a total crook with a gambling problem and who was in the pocket of the mafia because they had dirt on him. So another explanation that said, yes, he actually purposely ignored the mafia.
Not because they had like compromising pictures of him, but because they were in cahoots with a lot of elected officials and he didn't want to lose his position going after the mafia and having them get all of their elected official friends turning on him because he didn't know if he could survive that kind of thing. That was another explanation I saw. But whatever the interpretation is,
And historically speaking, he ignored the mafia and actually denied for a decade after it was clear there was such a thing as a national syndicate of mafioso.
Mafiosi? Yeah. Mafiosi. Yeah. He kept denying it, like actively denying it and apparently moved to kind of thwart some of the federal and congressional investigations into the existence of the mafia. Like he personally was trying to not at least not help, if not actively disrupt that. So there's something weird going on. Exactly what was behind it, though, we'll probably never know.
Yeah. What's interesting is that when I was reading through interviews with different biographers and you would see two that were just so diametrically opposed in what they thought. Yeah. Like, oh, and they're all very convinced that they're right. But it almost seems like some of these biographies are either written by literal fans of his still. Right. Or then or people that hated him.
Yeah. Like if you start looking into like some of the more salacious charges about him and like why the mafia...
like was allowed to just operate. You mostly have to take the word of old mafia guys. Right. Who were like there for sure. Like this guy really was the right hand man to Meyer Lansky. But can you believe him when he sits for an interview talking about how Meyer Lansky had pictures that he used to show his friends for fun of J. Edgar Hoover, you know, having sex with his partner, you know, like it's, it's, you really kind of have to stop and say, where's this, where's this, um,
source coming from and what all what acts do they have to grind so here's what I say this is this is going so good and it's going long so why don't we take another break come back and do a little more but let's let's make this a two-parter you should we you just totally sprung this on me out of the blue let me think about it okay we'll think about it over the break and we'll be right back
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Okay, Chuck, I've decided that is a fine idea. So should we chat a little bit? I think you sort of teased and then I got us off topic about the mafia. You teased a little bit about going into sort of the beginnings of the surveillance and working tightly with presidents, right?
Yeah, I think I said something like that. But at the end of the gangster era, he kind of swapped over from continuing on with gangsters, which would make total sense for the FBI to do this, to instead turning his attention back to gangsters.
political stuff. Yeah. To disrupting any kind of political thought that goes against the American way as envisioned by J. Edgar Hoover. Yeah. And one of the ways he did this was by allying himself closely with different presidents. You know, you said at the beginning, work for eight different presidents. And I think as it's generally thought that he was
Super tight and kind of close to two of them. Two of them didn't like him. And four just sort of played ball because they felt like they had to. So I can guess Kennedy definitely didn't like him, and that was reciprocal. Who was the other one who didn't like him? I think it was Kennedy and Johnson. I thought Johnson loved the guy.
Well, I know Nixon did. Yeah, he was personally friends with Nixon. And I know they were actual friends. FDR, I don't know how much he liked him, but the fact that they ended up, you know, working closely with one another is maybe one of the bigger surprises of the episode because they were pretty diametrically opposed as humans go.
Yeah, but this is kind of like touching on what I was saying before that there were presidents who saw him and what he could do as too useful to resist. Exactly. And FDR was like he had this vision for America, too, and it was much more inclusive and it cared much more about the average person who didn't necessarily think exactly the same way as everybody else.
But he also didn't want it disrupted by communists or at the time Nazis either. Yeah. So he saw it as a useful thing to do, like to to kind of keep tabs on it. And I guess from from, you know, this idea of J. Edgar Hoover and presidents.
Working in cahoots, it seems like FDR is the first one that this really begins with. Yeah, I think in 1936, in August that year, they met together at the White House and they ginned up a plan for surveillance, kind of the first big surveillance launch of, like you said, people who they thought might be communists, people who they thought might be fascists.
A few years later, Roosevelt was like, hey, turns out you're pretty good at this surveillance thing and keeping secret files. So why don't you why don't we resurrect that general intelligence intelligence division that was scuttled? And Hoover probably laughed and was like, you know, we've still been doing it this whole time. We just didn't have a formal name. Oh, I don't know if I'll be able to get the gang back. But they they secretly reformalized at least the G.I.D.,
And Hoover said, all right, I appreciate that. And you know what I'm going to do for you? I'll just not even at your direction. I'll just keep an eye on your political enemies. And just if I need to let you know anything, I'll let you know. Yeah. So supposedly that is one of the ways that he kept power. He never blackmailed anybody. But if one of his agents came across some juicy tidbit,
He would he would send them to, you know, say the senator's office and be like, Senator, we were investigating this other thing. And this tidbit about you came up and we really thought it was the kind of thing you'd want to know. We're keeping a lid on it. Don't worry about it. But we thought you'd want to know. And now the senator's like, oh, my God, this guy knows these. The FBI knows that I have this.
I'm on this committee that funds them. I should probably give them whatever they want whenever they ask for it. That's apparently how he operated. It's very passive aggressive, strong arming. Right. Yeah. He did have a, we should mention though, since we're talking about FDR, he had a very famously had a file on Eleanor Roosevelt, which supposedly had nude pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt that were given to J. Edgar Hoover by W.C. Fields.
What? That's he had a tremendous collection of pornography. Right. Was well known for it. And to J. Edgar Hoover, he would say, well, I've got I got to know what's out there in order to fight this stuff. Everyone else is like, OK, sure, whatever. Yeah. But he supposedly had a very large collection of of.
of famous people. Marilyn Monroe is among them, but apparently Eleanor Roosevelt was one, and old W.C. Fields gave it to him. Wow. I don't know how he got it. I don't either. Ha ha ha.
So, okay, Chuck, do you want to put part two here and come back and pick up at the beginning of the Cold War? Because now J. Edgar Hoover's fighting, you know, communists, but more often Nazis. America's entering World War II, and America's really cool with the idea of the FBI rooting out Nazis. But World War II came to an end, believe it or not. The Nazis went away. Now they needed a new enemy to investigate.
That's right. The commies. And that seems like a great place to stop. Yes. So, yeah, we'll see you guys in part two. And if you want to send us an email in the meantime, send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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