G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner): J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

Written by Beverly Gage

Narrated by Gabra Zackman

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022


“Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”—The Washington Post

“A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”—The Wall Street Journal

A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape.

We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people--many of them communists or racial minorities or both-- did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history.  

Beverly Gage’s monumental work  explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her  nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats.  Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower   him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon.  Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party.

G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780593628942

Beverly Gage

Beverly Gage is professor of 20th-century American history at Yale. She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker, among other publications.

Reviews for G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An epic look at the life of J. Edgar Hoover a man synonymous with the birth, growth and importance of the F. B. I. A tremendous amount of research to bring this man to life. From his youth you see how he develops many of his attributes like self discipline, determination and a misogynistic and racist bent. .The book ranges over his seventy seven years from fighting gangsters in the twenties to fighting radical groups in the sixties. Many of his practices were unsavory but but he had a profound effect on American culture.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

**So pleased to see this win the 2023 Pulitzer for Biography!**

The damage one man can do is astounding. It comes as no surprise to me that J. Edgar Hoover was a terrible man. I am fully aware that he was given unchecked power for half a century by presidents Republican and Democrat, and that he used that power to orchestrate the ruin and murder of people who were unacceptable to him, mostly Black and Jewish Americans. I am reasonably well schooled in 20th-century US history, and no one, no one, is more central to 20th century US history than Hoover. But there were many things about Hoover I did not know, things that surprised me (and not in a good way) and that filled in the gaps in my knowledge. Gage writes like a prosecutor, a really good one, laying out her case and in the end it turns out most everything that is wrong with America today is connected to the beliefs and actions of J. Edgar Hoover. I don't mean to be hyperbolic, Hoover is by no means solely responsible for the devaluation of the lives of Black people, for the hubris of January 6th and Charlottesville idiots, for the back door dealing, for the villainization of anyone who seeks to be an honest broker, for wage compression, for absurd Congressional hearings about trumped up scare scenarios (HUAC, violent lyrics in rap/imagery in video games, the dangers of social media and tech in general) that absolutely do not matter but keep lazy people distracted while bad people fiddle about. But all these things and more have some connecting thread to Hoover. He nearly single handedly devised and maintained the Cold War. He literally ordered agents to not intervene to stop lynchings, and refused to participate meaningfully in investigating murders by judges and sheriffs and other powerful men, allowing them to police themselves to avoid federal overreach(this is still the way many in Congress and on talk radio think things should be.) If fact, he chose to not tell the Dallas police about credible assassination threats made against John Kennedy because he did not want to "interfere" is local law enforcement. He created the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare (this very very Gay man routed out and destroyed the careers and lives many many civil servants because they were Gay - unless they were his friends, in which case he covered for them), dividing people and creating identity politics. There is so much more. He was depraved.

It is easy to fall back on the excuse that as a Gay man the pressure to live a lie twisted him, but that is too simple. For one, he did not really live a lie. For 44 years he openly lived with his partner Clyde Tolson. They were invited everywhere as a couple including to the White House wedding of one of LBJ's daughters. There are letters between him and presidents (Johnson and Nixon) that speak of them as a couple. When Hoover died, the soldiers folded the flag placed over his coffin and handed it to Tolson. I mean I assume they did not hold hands or anything, but they were not in the shadows either. Under his rule he was in fact the only Gay man (well, also a few friends) who got to live comfortably with his partner. The truth is that he was a martinet and a despot. He was a man whose belief in White supremacy was the most foundational most central belief he possessed. Hoover belonged to a fraternity that had a pledge of a belief in White supremacy in its charter, required frat houses to hang a Confederate battle flag over their doors and held annual blackface parties. It is from this fraternity that Hoover hired for the FBI almost exclusively, and the fraternity was a primary source for his social and business relationships all through his life. Hoover was a bad man. Yes, I imagine he had some feelings of self-loathing stemming from his homosexuality and the social condemnation of LTBTQ+ people in the time he lived, but that does not erase the fact that he was a dimensional bad man, that there were a lot of reasons for his villainy, and yet none of them justify a bit of it.

There is more, to learn, and you should. One of the most illuminating bios I have ever read.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thorough book that is a bit bloodless because of its absolute refusal to speculate despite documenting in great detail Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson (and likewise, despite its cataloging of people who allegedly feared Hoover’s information collection/blackmail abilities, it doesn’t give a sense of what exactly Hoover might have been holding over most of them). Gage emphasizes that Hoover emerged from the Progressive era as a champion of rational government, using skills learned at the Library of Congress in organizing information. Nonetheless, he turned his focus on professionalism and expertise to highly conservative ends, especially when it came to race. She also suggests that what people later saw as a careful plan was often luck—Hoover didn’t always want the responsibilities added to the FBI’s plate, but exploited them to increase its authority and therefore his own. But his commitment to government professionalism did mean he didn’t like the KKK (or anyone else trying to substitute for formal law), and the FBI did carry out some successful operations to disrupt them, though never to the extent that it targeted leftists and civil rights activists.

[josephking6602 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great history of the J Edgar Hoover era