UNIT 39

► Ex. I. Scan through the text. Work in pairs to question the text and to give answers.

Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) - public official who, as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in 1972, built that agency into a highly effective arm of federal law enforcement. Hoover studied law at night at George Washington University, where he received degrees as bachelor of laws in 1916 and as master of laws in the following year. He reorganized and rebuilt the FBI on a professional basis, recruiting agents on merit and instituting rigorous methods of selecting and training personnel. He established a fingerprint file,

which became the world's largest; a scientific crime-detection laboratory; and the FBI National Academy. In the early 1930s the exploits of gangsters in the United States were receiving worldwide publicity. Hoover publicized the achievements of the FBI in tracking down and capturing well-known criminals. Both the FBI's size and its responsibilities grew steadily under his management. In the late 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave him the task of investigating both foreign espionage in the United States and the activities of communists and fascists. When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the FBI undertook the intensive surveillance of communists and other left-wing activists in the United States. Hoover's animus toward radicals of every kind led him to aggressively investigate both the Ku Klux Klan and black activists in the 1960s. [Ku Klux Klan is a secret American political organization of Protestant white men who oppose people of other races or religions.] At the same time, he maintained a hands-off policy toward the Mafia, which was allowed to conduct its operations practically free of FBI interference. Hoover used the FBI's surveillance to collect damaging information on politicians throughout the country, and he kept the most scurrilous facts under his own personal control. He used his possession of these secret files to maintain himself as the FBI's director and was able to intimidate even sitting presidents by threatening to leak this damaging information about them. By the early 1970s he had come under public criticism for his authoritarian administration of the FBI and for his persecution of those he regarded as radicals. He retained his post, however, until his death at age 77, by which time he had been the FBI's chief for 48 years and had served 8 presidents.