Shocking grim, and at times, darkly comic, this devastatingly detailed biography chronicles the rise of the nation's legendary top policeman--and the reign of terror that made the FBI the closest thing America had to a gestapo. Curt Gentry reveals Hoover as a paranoid man who intimidated every president from FDR to Nixon, yet shrank from human contact. And he describes in riveting detail how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, influenced the Supreme Court, and sabotaged the Warren Commission's investigation of the assassination of JFK. A hypochondriac who became a national hero, a bachelor prude obsessed with sexual slander, J. Edgar Hoover literally changed the course of history with the files known in the Justice Department as "twelve drawers full of political cancer."
- ISBN10 0393024040
- ISBN13 9780393024043
- Publish Date 17 September 1991
- Publish Status Inactive
- Out of Print 10 February 1994
- Publish Country US
- Imprint WW Norton & Co
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 846
- Language English