This episode covers the life and career of J. Edgar Hoover, who, for half a century, helmed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His staunch anti-communism drove him to utilize his position as the leader of the nation's foremost law enforcement agency to root out radicals and quash any non-conformist efforts suspected of being connected with the Soviet Union.
For forty-eight years, American presidents came and went, but J. Edgar Hoover remained as the powerful director of the FBI. This conversation provides fascinating insights into the troubles that impinged on Hoover's childhood; his formative time in a white supremacist, Southern fraternity; his eventual rise to running what was then the Bureau of Investigation; Hoover's personal life and sexuality; and the transformation of the FBI across the 1930s and 1940s.
