Acclaimed Bio Whitewashes J. Edgar Hoover on JFK

An epic book on the FBI’s longest-serving chief skates over his handling of Kennedy’s murder

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, listening to a speech by President Lyndon Johnson (Credit: Otto Bettmann)

At 732 pages of regular text in 58 chapters (not including intro and epilogue), “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” first published in 2022 by Yale University Professor Beverly Gage, will be recorded as a definitive – if not the definitive – biography of the man who occupied the director’s slot at the FBI for nearly half a century from 1924 to 1972. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Bancroft Prize, and L.A. Times Book Prize, “G-Man” certainly qualifies as a “page-turner.”

“This book does not treat Hoover as a rogue actor. Rather, it aims to situate him within broad currents of American political history – to move him from the margins to the center of our understanding about what the American Century was and how it worked.” ~ Beverly Gage, “G-Man” (pp. 789-790)

Two chapters cover the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the first official investigation in 1964. “The President is Dead (1963)” – is devoted to Hoover’s immediate reaction to the tragedy; the other – “The Commission (1963-1964)” – is about his interaction with the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (the “Warren Commission”), appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the crime.