Beverly Gage's Bizarre Apologia for J. Edgar Hoover
What’s going on here, and are we ever going to talk about it?
A lot of weird and bad things happened during the first Trump administration. One was that certain liberals, particularly MSNBC hosts and tenured historians, started pushing a distorted version of American history, in which everything before Trump was good, or at least not so bad. They learned to appreciate, if not love, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, the Cold War, even the Contras. They also decided that things Trump thought were bad must actually be good. In one conspicuous example, this enemy-of-my-enemy logic led many to conclude that the CIA, the FBI, and the rest of the “deep state” were now good—or, at least, better than liberals used to be willing to admit.
This phenomenon spanned all levels of intellectual seriousness. At one extreme, you had people like Heather Cox Richardson, who were completely intellectually unserious and apparently just out to make money (HCR succeeded, reportedly making over $1 million a year from her Substack). Then you have people like Yale historian Beverly Gage. Compared to HCR, Gage is a far more serious historian, a better writer, less of a profit-maximizer, more nuanced, harder to confuse with Rachel Maddow, etc.
It was a sign of how deep the rot went that even someone like Gage gave in to the spirit of the times. In 2022, she published G-Man, a biography of J. Edgar Hoover which is deeply researched, engagingly written, often informative, intermittently critical—but ultimately, an expression of newfound liberal sympathy for Hoover and the FBI. Gage was fairly self-conscious and forthcoming about this. In a New York Times op-ed, she described how “liberal-minded friends often came to me with a confession. They were, they whispered, cheering for the F.B.I.” These liberals now saw “the bureau as the last best hope of the Republic,” rather than “a bastion of political repression.” Gage made clear that she felt this way too:
[The FBI’s] history of professional federal service, of loyalty to the facts and the law, is still worth championing, especially in an era when suspicion of government, rather than faith in its possibilities, so often dominates our discourse. Whatever else we may think of Hoover’s legacy, that tradition is the best part of the institution he built.
Bafflingly, Gage did not confine her praise to the FBI as an institution. She made a point of saying that Hoover himself “promoted a vision of F.B.I. integrity and professionalism that still has resonance.” She was honest enough, or retained enough vestigial leftist antibodies, to add that “Hoover failed to live up to those principles.” But in the book, she puts the best possible face on many of his most flagrant crimes, often making a stronger case for the defense than the evidence will bear.1
I have been working intermittently on a critique of Gage’s book, which (unsurprisingly given Gage’s status, and the absurd culture of deference which now dominates the history profession) has not received anything like the criticism it deserves. I hope to get that into presentable form at some point. But in the meantime, Gage has published a piece in the New Yorker which exemplifies her bizarre and misleading approach, and allows me the opportunity for a shorter response.
This claim is false. The New Yorker’s famous fact checkers should have caught it. They might have started by looking at Gage’s own biography of Hoover.
Gage’s New Yorker piece expresses the opinion that Kash Patel, who Trump wants to lead the FBI, is bad and dangerous. That much I agree with. But the headline is “How Would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?” Though no one has forced her into such a choice, Gage feels compelled to say that Patel is worse than Hoover. To be sure, Gage admits, Hoover was not the best. Like Trump and Patel, he displayed a “toxic blend of megalomania and political ruthlessness.”2 But, in the end, Gage feels compelled to inform New Yorker readers that Patel and Trump are, of course, worse than J. Edgar Hoover. The difference? Writes Gage:
Hoover was never partisan in the ways that Trump and Patel are. He did not much care who won elections, as long as the winner promised to support the F.B.I.
This claim is false. The New Yorker’s famous fact checkers should have caught it. They might have started by looking at Gage’s own biography of Hoover. In there, one learns that in the 1948 election, Hoover “provided behind-the-scenes advice to Republican candidate Thomas Dewey…hoping to push Truman out of the White House.” In 1960, Hoover “set out to help Nixon,” including by “pass[ing] along rumors about Kennedy’s ill health.” In 1964, “Lyndon Johnson wanted [Hoover’s] help. Hoover could hardly say no.” During the 1968 campaign:
Nixon’s stance [on law and order] thrilled Hoover. Here was a major-party presidential candidate, a sincere friend and trusted ally, organizing an entire campaign around themes Hoover had been promoting for decades.
Gage explains how, throughout the 1968 campaign, Nixon and Hoover had regular covert meetings, through the offices of Lou Nichols, a Hoover protege openly working for the Nixon campaign. According to Gage, “everyone understood that Nichols formed a key part of the chain linking Nixon to Hoover.” She quotes Nixon henchman John Ehrlichman’s testimony that, during the ‘68 campaign, Hoover was “more than a source of information. He was a political adviser to whom Nixon listened.”
Between the death of FDR and the death of J. Edgar Hoover, there were six presidential elections. According to Gage’s book, Hoover abused his office to influence the outcome of at least four out of those six elections. So when she says “Hoover was never partisan…He did not much care who won elections,” she is at best talking about 1952 and 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower was elected and reelected. We learn from Gage’s book that Eisenhower:
championed Hoover as a symbol of the new Republican administration [and] also helped Hoover get a taste of revenge against Truman, who had so often resisted the FBI’s claims and methods. In Republican Washington, Hoover was the quintessential insider, trusted in the highest offices and empowered to do what he wanted to do.
So even in the two elections which (according to Gage’s book) Hoover did not interfere, Gage still provides evidence that Hoover was a highly partisan figure interested in the abuse of power and revenge against his political enemies. Moreover, Gage is at least intermittently clear in her book that Hoover’s nonpartisanship was a deliberately cultivated mirage:
much of [Hoover’s] public image and goodwill in Congress still rested on the idea that he was, in fact, beholden to no political faction. Even Nixon championed Hoover’s supposed independence. (emphases added)
But now Gage has published an article promoting exactly this falsehood. Think again how strange it is that she can now sign her name to the statement that “Hoover was never partisan in the ways that Trump and Patel are. He did not much care who won elections.” Gage’s motives for writing this way are narrowly political: she wants to say bad things about Trump appointees. Though I happen to share her dislike for Trump and his appointees, I also maintain critical distance from the increasingly nihilistic Democratic Party. Gage does not appear to feel any need for such distance: among those named in the acknowledgments to her Hoover biography are Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland. Gage was also part of a group of historians who met with Joe Biden in the White House on January 8, 2024. At that point, over the course of just three months, the Israeli military had already killed over 20,000 people, about one percent of the entire prewar population of Gaza. They did this with American bombs, and with all the encouragement that a flickering Biden could muster.
Whatever one thinks of Trump and Patel, and whatever one thinks of genocide, surely we can all agree that historians should try to tell the truth, not root-root-root for the home team. Why isn’t it possible to criticize Kash Patel without lying to make J. Edgar Hoover look better? What’s going on here, and are we ever going to talk about it?
My full discussion of the book will have to wait. But I feel the need to make one point now. Gage tries to anticipate criticism of her pro-Hoover intervention by saying she is merely trying to make him more than “a one-dimensional villain.” But no one would argue that a good portrait can be painted in one dimension. The question is how much Gage actually gains by adding the most banal imaginable “complexity”: in her revelatory new account, Hoover was good and bad. In fact, if you look at the earlier biographies which Gage dismisses as one-dimensional, you will have no trouble finding this level of trivial nuance. In Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993), Anthony Summers gives due praise to Hoover’s “efficiency,” his “brilliance as an organizer,” the way that he “brought modernity to law enforcement” and “made the Bureau unique and indispensable [in] an era when much of America had progressed little since the days of frontier justice.” These are precisely the positive achievements Gage claims to be revealing for the first time in 2022. But Summers concludes, quite reasonably: “That Edgar created an efficient law enforcement Bureau should not have been enough to secure him a position as an American hero for half a century. Someone else, more balanced and with more respect for the rights of citizens, could have set up the FBI. To take Edgar at face value was as perilous as tolerating a dictator simply because he ‘makes the trains run on time.’”
The question, again, is not whether any human being is one-dimensional, but what kind of portrait a biographer chooses to create within multidimensional space. Imagine taking a photograph of an elongated Brancusi statue, then resizing the photo so that the image becomes a square, symmetrical in length and height, but at the cost of altering the proportions of the original image. You have not restored balance, as if it were somehow unfair that the sculpture is longer than it is wide. You have created a distortion which does not represent the sculpture, and which (as anyone familiar with digital images knows) is squashed and painful to look at. Perhaps people think of Hoover as a villain because, even after looking at him from a several angles, his negative characteristics are still obviously the most important things about him. In a lucid interval, Gage herself admits that “Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking racial and social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.” If any person ever deserved a biography with a negative slant, surely it is the man of whom such a sentence can be written?
On balance, the article contains less strained special pleading than the book, though perhaps that is just because the book is longer.