J. Edgar Hoover is one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history. And the seeds he planted as the decades long founding director of the FBI continue to shape much of today’s conservative political landscape. Kash Patel, who now leads the FBI, has openly vowed to find ways to punish Trump’s political enemies. While that’s appalling, it’s not the first time an FBI director has used abused institutional power. There’s a lot of historical precedent that we can compare and contrast with the current moment. Beverly Gage is a historian at Yale University and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” She joins WITHpod to discuss Hoover’s influence, the politicization of the FBI, the abuse of its power, the FBI in Trump 2.0 and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Beverly Gage: Hoover created this playbook of how you could use an institution like the FBI to intimidate your enemies, to gather information. And then on the other hand, he’s actually nothing like Kash Patel because Kash Patel is so open about being loyal to Donald Trump. In particular, he calls him King Donald. And Hoover was a very different creature.
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Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
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Chris Hayes: You know, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out like what is happening, why is this happening, in the country in terms of the sort of ferocity, rapidity, recklessness, and chaos and destructiveness of the first several months of the second Trump administration. One of the things I think we’re all constantly reaching for is some kind of comparison point. Like we’re headed towards X, and there’s a bunch of different ways people think about that. One of them, you know, the most catastrophic obviously are comparisons with Weimar Germany and the Nazi takeover. “The Atlantic” wrote a piece about how Hitler undid the constitutional order. Obviously, people are using the Niemoller quote poem about “First They Came” for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist.
So, I think it’s fair to say like utter complete absolute worst case scenario is like the sort of deepest pit of human evil, the Nazi takeover.
And then there’s other comparisons people try to use the most common, I think in contemporary life is Hungary where what was a liberal democracy was kind of transformed by Viktor Orban into what scholars of comparative politics called competitive authoritarianism. We had Steve Levitsky on to talk about. So Hungary is one model. There’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia where a very, very delicate, weak and new democracy in terms of Russia post the fall of the Soviet state gets sort of converted into this Putinist autocracy. There’s Turkey.
But one of the things I try to think about is just looking to American history, because one of the things that happens in American history is A, we have a story of sort of progress that goes forward that I think smooths out a lot of back and forth in the degrees of freedom and equality and civil rights and civil liberties Americans have. There’s periods where there are quasi tyrannical crackdowns, the Alien Sedition Act, which happens almost immediately after the birth of the new Republic. The Red Scare in the 1920s. There’s periods of tremendous progress on racial equality, like the post reconstruction Constitution and the post reconstruction governments, and then retrenchment in the violent quote, unquote “redemption” of the old south by white supremacists who take power back for white supremacist one party rule.
And the reason I give this preamble is one of the things I’ve been thinking about is like abuse of executive power and state power and what are the best comparison sets, what are the best historical precedence. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the FBI and the Department of Justice, and specifically about the FBI under Kash Patel, a man who I think is wildly unqualified for the job also like anti-qualified for the job, I would say. He should have no business running the FBI.
And of course, the most notorious wielder of the power of the FBI was the founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Served in the government for nearly five decades. He basically started the bureau before it was the bureau. And Hoover’s an interesting character to turn to, because I think it’s both terrifying and comforting in these ways. Instead of thinking about Nazi Germany, if we think about Hoover’s America for the purposes of Hoover, and somehow, I weirdly find that that kind of tension, that middle space, not like everything’s great where everything’s normal and not Nazi Germany and not Hungary, but something in this complicated middle that we actually have reference to in our history. I don’t know why I find it weirdly a little comforting.
But it’s like to me, I keep going back to this place. We don’t have to look to other regimes. We can look to our own. And partly the reason I think it’s comforting is because the end Hoover died, and we reformed a lot of the things that led to the abuses that Hoover took advantage of. And so, I thought today I would speak a bit about the FBI and Hoover and the uses and abuses of state power in our own past with one of the foremost experts on this topic.
Beverly Gage is a historian at Yale, and she wrote this enormous acclaimed celebrated biography of J. Edgar Hoover “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” It won the Pulitzer. It has been celebrated, rave reviews. It’s an incredible piece of work and scholarship. And so I thought there’s no one better to talk to in this moment than Beverly Gage. So, Beverly thank you for coming on the podcast.
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Beverly Gage: Thanks for having me. I am sorry for the occasion.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, well it’s not great out there. I mean, can I just start with, I mean, this piece of work you produced is monumental. It’s one of those, I can’t imagine the amount of sheer labor hours though into this biography. How did you find your way into this topic, which first piqued your interest?
Beverly Gage: I wrote an earlier book that was about a terrorist attack on Wall Street in 1920. So it was sort of this unknown event. It took place in the middle of the Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare, which itself has lots of resonances with what’s going on today. But in that writing, I encountered Hoover as a very young man, so not yet FBI director, but already very involved in the surveillance of radical groups, already involved in sort of building the federal apparatus that was going to do that during those years. And so I got interested in him as a character who was going to go on to have all of this influence in American history and who was in this very interesting process of kind of learning how to do it during those years.
Chris Hayes: What do you mean learning how to do it?
Beverly Gage: Hoover grew up in D.C. and so he grew up in an early 20th Century world in which the federal government was pretty small but was expanding. And there was all of this progressive era energy around building the administrative state, figuring out how to use various forms of executive and bureaucratic power. And he kind of grew up in that world. And then he happened to graduate from law school in D.C. in the spring of 1917. And so his first job was in the Justice Department just as the United States was entering World War I. And that meant that they had to figure out all sorts of new things from surveillance of dissidents and political radicals, to draft enforcement, to what was actually Hoover’s first job in the Justice Department at the age of 22, which was detaining and registering Germans for internment in the United States.
Chris Hayes: Which are named after the attorney general at the time who sort of undertook this anti-radical purge essentially. And I talked about the Alien Sedition Act in the intro. You just said that there’s some similarities. I think about the period post 9/11 a little bit too. These periods in American history where there is kind of this sort of authoritarian push or this sort of dictatorial desire by the government to stamp out descent, to go after radicals, to push the edges of civil liberties and protections. Say a little bit more about that milieu in the 1920s for people that are not that familiar with that era.
Beverly Gage: World War I and then the period right after it, which became known as the first Red Scare were incredibly repressive periods and years of American history. During World War I, there was an Espionage Act and then a Sedition Act passed, and that gave the federal government the ability to do what it did, which was to imprison thousands of people who were critics of the war effort, were critics of the draft, many of them incredibly famous left wing radicals, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, all of these big figures. They all ended up in prison during World War I.
And then when the war ended, there was a lot of energy to figure out how to do something like that using peacetime powers and what Attorney General Mitchell Palmer hit upon along with his young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, was to use immigration and deportation law as ways to go after people whose opinions they didn’t like. And that’s what the Palmer Raids were. They were deportation raids aimed at anarchists at communists at people that the United States just didn’t want here anymore. But it really was about deporting people for their political opinions.
Chris Hayes: Wow. I mean, as I’m speaking to you right now, there’s a very famous case in front of us, Mahmoud Khalili, who is a graduate student at Columbia. He was detained by, essentially abducted, detained depending on how you want to characterize this by ICE agents. He’s in a detention facility in Louisiana, explicitly for his protected speech, basically. He has not been accused of a crime. He’s not been alleged to have committed a crime. In fact, the government isn’t even saying he did. Instead, they’re using this fairly obscure provision of federal law that allows the Secretary of State individually to deem someone a threat to us foreign policy and thus subject to deportation. Civil libertarians argue that there is citizen, non-citizen distinction in the First Amendment. And it sounds like there’s a lot in the Palmer Raids that echoes this.
Beverly Gage: There’s a reason that the ACLU was born out of this period in World War I and the Palmer Raids. And thinking about your introduction to our conversation and I think the Palmer Raids, the World War I repression, they are signs that this kind of repression has happened at a pretty mass scale in U.S. history before, but they are also a story about the ways that people organized through the law and through protest, creating organizations like the ACLU to actually push back against a lot of these things.
And it took a while and it was pretty intractable and a lot of people got deported and a lot of people had their lives damaged, but in the end, what came out of it was actually, a more expansive civil liberties community and I think a greater public awareness of these kinds of issues.
Chris Hayes: So Hoover sort of present at the birth. At this point, the FBI does not exist, right?
Beverly Gage: Correct. When he entered the Justice Department there was this little thing called the Bureau of Investigation that had been created in 1908, mostly because the DOJ was tired of borrowing Secret Service agents from the Treasury Department every time they wanted to investigate something. They were getting all sorts of new federal laws, antitrust laws, and a variety of other things. So they created their own little detective force and it really was in the war. And then the years after that, that it began to expand into a whole lot of different directions, political repression being one of them. Hoover went on in the aftermath of the Palmer Raids though they were very controversial. He sort of survived as a young man and he became assistant director of the bureau in 1921 and then became director in 1924 when he was all of 29 years old.
Chris Hayes: I want to just stay with this Palm Raid for a second when you say they’re controversial because I always think this is an important thing to remember, which is take any moment in American history where something happens that we now look back on and say, that was bad. The Trail of Tears, the Alien Sedition Act, Japanese internment, German interment in World War I, the Palmer Raids. There were people at the time being like, this is bad too. And in fact, the Palmer Raids were quite controversial. Like the overstepping the bounds of civil liberties does produce a kind of popular backlash, right, in both politics and the media.
Beverly Gage: The Palmer raids were extremely popular at first. The first big one, which was aimed at anarchists, which was in November of 1919, got big headlines. It was thrilling and exciting. There was a big mass deportation ceremony from the bottom of Manhattan piling a whole bunch of Russian nationals onto a boat to be sent back to Soviet Russia, right, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. But the second round of raids is exactly what you say.
Those were aimed at the new communist parties in the United States. They were bigger, they were worse. They were more spectacular and they really did produce a pretty serious backlash. And that happened within the federal bureaucracy. There’s an important character guy named Louis Post, who had a very important role in —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Beverly Gage: — immigration bureau. And so he played a role. There was mass protest and there was a lot of pushback in the newspapers as well.
Chris Hayes: So obviously there’s so much to say about who Hoover was and why he was able to achieve the level of power he had. But just explain to me how it was that this young, second generation civil servant creature of D.C. in many ways is able to basically be named the head of the bureau at the age of 29. What skills does he show? What ability does he display in that early period that gets him that level of power that young?
Beverly Gage: He was something of a go getter, even as a kid, a teacher’s pet. He was valedictorian of his high school. He was a champion debater. And I think he came to government work really as a true believer. One of the things that was most interesting to me about Hoover is that I do think he came in with this deep faith in professional civil service in the world of administration and bureaucracy. And he also came in with a set of deeply conservative ideas about religion and race and anti-communism and law and order.
And he really built the FBI sort of at the intersection of those two things. And they aren’t traditions that we see going together all that often in our own politics, but they were already there for him in the moment that he came in and he kind of had lots of energy to put them into effect.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, my takeaway from your book is that he’s a rare combination of someone who’s, I think, fundamentally right wing and fundamentally pro administrative state and federal bureaucracy.
Beverly Gage: That is exactly right. And it was an unusual combination even at the time. It is an even more unusual combination now, but I think it helps us to understand how the federal government grew, particularly the security state wing of the federal government that grew of course, alongside the social welfare state. And then the thing that really interested me about that combination as Hoover put it into effect was that here we had this deep ideological, conservative, even reactionary figure who was really at the heart of the project of building the American state throughout this whole period that we think of as kind of the heyday of American liberalism.
Chris Hayes: How would you describe Hoover’s FBI? When does the name change? When does it finally get its own sort of federal bureau of investigations?
Beverly Gage: It was a pretty little operation for his first decade there in the ‘20s and then into the early ‘30s. And it was really under the new deal that it became the FBI that we know today. It got its name in 1935. It got lots of new crime fighting powers. And then it also got kind of officially authorized to be America’s domestic intelligence force.
Chris Hayes: And how does he start to wield that power in the ‘30s, in the new deal, again, it’s part of this massive expansion of the federal government’s activities. How many people it’s hiring in the new deal. How does he begin to use that power? What’s his vision for it?
Beverly Gage: One of the advantages that I think that he had in that new deal moment when suddenly the size and power of the federal government expands so dramatically is that he had had a decade to work out his ideas, figure out his bureaucracy, get all the policies and hiring done that he wanted to get done so that when the new deal came along, he was really ready to go. And I’d say there are three really important things that happen in the ‘30s. One is that the FBI becomes this swashbuckling, federal crime fighting force going up against the likes of John Dillinger, bank robbers, gangsters, Pretty Boy, Floyd.
This is when Hoover becomes famous when the FBI becomes famous. And I think for someone like Franklin Roosevelt, he really saw the war on crime as, of course, part of the new deal state. You were going to use the state in all sorts of ways and crime fighting was one of them. So that’s a big piece of what Hoover was up to. It’s also during the new deal that he enters the world of publicity and public relations, which becomes a huge part of the FBI’s public presence. And I think it became really absurd under Hoover, and a lot of it was about glorifying him, but I do think there was a fundamental insight there that he held onto, which is that the work of government is not necessarily legible to ordinary people and that if you want them to support you and to believe in you, you have to be explaining yourself, advertising yourself, selling yourself all the time.
He believed in that. Franklin Roosevelt believed in that. And I think it’s something that we’ve lost a little bit of sight of. And then the third big thing that he did during those years was to begin to go back into the kind of political surveillance work that he had been doing as a young assistant director and DOJ operative, but that had really calmed down in the ‘20s and into the ‘30s. And again, it’s Franklin Roosevelt who really encourages him to do that, to start conducting surveillance of Nazi groups, of communist groups. And then once the war itself begins that all expands dramatically.
Chris Hayes: Let’s stay on the public relations front for just a second. I mean, he has a kind of obsession with the press. It’s very, Trump-like in many ways. He knows everything that’s being written about him. He’s constantly trying to massage his image. Why was this so central to him and how did it affect the bureau and the bureau’s operations?
Beverly Gage: I think some of it was just temperamental —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: — in the sense that he was always incredibly sensitive to criticism very much like Trump. You were either for him or against him. And that was from very, very early on before he was famous. Even as he’s just this relatively obscure bureaucrat in the ‘20s, you can see those pieces of his personality. He very much wanted to be in control all the time as well. And so the FBI’s bureaucracy was built around Hoover’s desire, need ambition for control. And he really didn’t like things in the world, including the press that were not under his control. And so he had very much a carrot and a stick relationship with the press and with Hollywood. He had his favored people and for his favored people, he would feed them all sorts of information.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Beverly Gage: He had a whole staff of people writing free columns to be given away to newspapers under J. Edgar Hoover’s bylines. He had his favorite directors in Hollywood. Ultimately, when T.V. came along, there was a whole ABC TV show. Many people still remember this today —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: — from being little boys and watching it. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as the crusading FBI agent. But that was all approved by the FBI that came out of the Bureau’s files. And so he had this, if you loved him, he treated you really well and you got all sorts of favors. And if you criticized him, you were going to get agents at your door. You were cut off from FBI information. You were probably going to have a permanent file at the FBI that was full of gossip and criticism. One of the fun things about being a Hoover biographer is that because he thought no one would ever see any of these files, he used to write these incredibly abusive things in the margins about particularly reporters and journals he didn’t like. One of his favorite phrases was that they suffered from mental halitosis, and he used to write that about journalists all the time.
Chris Hayes: I mean, when you say agents at the door, I mean, now we’re sort of getting into the territory that I think is Hoover is most infamous for, right, which is the use of the surveillance capabilities, the state power to amass secrets about people, use those secrets for blackmail, for building political power. Tell us a little bit about how this develops and how it actually ends up getting used.
Beverly Gage: Hoover kept files on almost anybody who was anybody in the United States. That means all members of Congress, certainly presidents, members of the press, celebrities, a whole host of people. A lot of those were passive files in the sense that they were not the subject of an investigation, but people would write into the FBI and say, oh, you know, I hear so is having an affair or I was out at a party and I saw Congressman X drunk out of his mind. And so as the FBI got that information, one of Hoover’s favorite techniques was to send an agent to the office of senator whoever and say, Senator, we’ve found out this terrible rumor about your affair or your alcoholism or your delinquent child and we just want you to know that your secret is safe with us.
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God.
Beverly Gage: So, it’s not blackmail, I mean, it’s certainly intimidation and threatening, but it was a very careful form of blackmail.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Beverly Gage: Hoover would do, of course, much more aggressive things than that too for people that he deemed to be the FBI’s enemy, national security threats, very broad category for him. He would of course conduct much more overt investigations that involved surveillance, that involved asking around town to find out about people’s personal lives, a whole host of techniques that of course, are not very hard to carry out and that are not things the FBI is supposed to be doing, but would be pretty easy to do even today.
Chris Hayes: And of course, as time goes on and we move into the Cold War, where sort of we come back to a kind of moment of paranoia about communist infiltration, which is what happens in the Palmer Raids and now here we are back in the 1950s era McCarthyism. I mean, Hoover is a very much absolute true believer in the evils of communism and communist aversion and obsessed at a cellular ideological and personal level with that, right?
Beverly Gage: Absolutely. He thought of that as the great cause of his life from very early on. And he thought of the FBI as what he called the one bulwark against the tide of communism. And he defined that really, really broadly and I think that’s part of what makes him interesting. So, there was Soviet espionage going on and you would want and expect an FBI director to be interested in finding spies and doing that sort of national security work. But for Hoover, there were many, many other layers beyond that from going after the communist party itself in the United States, its members and its leaders, to writing about the threat of communism to going after anyone on the left who seemed to ever have spoken with a communist to launching what was really a cultural crusade against communism, against the left that was all about telling people how to bring their kids to church, how to raise their children, all of these things. And it was all one big stew for Hoover.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, he hates the left. I mean, he hates people with long hair. He hates people with like subversive secular ideas. He hates the civil rights movement. I mean, he views himself as an opposition to the left. And I guess there’s a question of like, did Hoover understand he was abusing his own power? Maybe that’s a strange question, but did he understand that? Did people around him understand it? Did people in the culture understand? I mean, obviously when the Church Committee happens and all these things come out about COINTELPRO and all that stuff. But even while it’s happening, are there people in the bureau, are there people in government, Hoover himself, were aware that sending an audio recording and a message to kill yourself to Martin Luther King, Jr. is like a wildly unlawful criminal enterprise?
Beverly Gage: They were aware of that. In fact, in their own memos to each other, during Hoover’s day, there was no Freedom of Information Act and so —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Beverly Gage: — the FBI was very confident that whatever they wrote down, they would have control over, and they would be the only ones that would ever see these documents. And so they wrote down all sorts of stuff, including on many occasions, the idea that, well, we’re doing this, we know it is illegal. Something like breaking and entering the headquarters of the communist party to photograph membership lists. They knew that breaking and entering without a warrant was in fact illegal. They wrote it down. They agreed. So there was certainly acknowledgement of that. Did they think that they were therefore in the wrong? I don’t think so. And —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Beverly Gage: — part of Hoover’s story is that he was so convinced of his own righteousness, that he believed that whatever they did was to protect America and to protect the bureau itself.
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Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You wrote an op-ed around Kash Patel’s nomination before he was confirmed and which you made this sort of really interesting and I thought an important point about, you know, Hoover was an ideological zealot. He was a sort of narcissist in many ways, incredibly self-aggrandizing, but he was not a partisan figure. And he certainly didn’t have a kind of slavish loyalty to a president or political figure above him. In fact, if there was a problem with Hoover is that he was totally unaccountable, right. And this is very different than what we might think about in terms of a Bureau under say, Donald Trump loyalist like Kash Patel.
Beverly Gage: That’s exactly right. That was an essay I wrote in the “New Yorker” and that was the point that I wanted to make, that on the one hand, Hoover created this playbook of how you could use an institution like the FBI to intimidate your enemies, to gather information. And then on the other hand, he’s actually nothing like Kash Patel because Kash Patel is so open about being loyal to Donald Trump in particular, he calls him King Donald. And Hoover was a very different creature. He was sort of the ultimate autonomous bureaucrat. Whatever his flaws, he believed in the FBI as an institution and he believed in its independence. He served under Republicans. He served under Democrats. And he was sort of the ultimate unaccountable bureaucrat, which is not something that Kash Patel has any respect for or —
Chris Hayes: No.
Beverly Gage: — sees himself as being any part of.
Chris Hayes: Right. It’s his nightmare. I mean, in some ways that that’s the irony here, right? That the idea of like this idea of unaccountable bureaucrats, which I think is very overstated, but in the case of Hoover really was true. Like he was truly the most powerful unaccountable bureaucrat in American history. I don’t think there’s even a very, very close second. Right?
Beverly Gage: Yeah. He’s not a great argument for the virtues of independent government bureaucrats. Though even Hoover —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Beverly Gage: — had moments where that in fact was a virtue
Chris Hayes: Well, what do you mean?
Beverly Gage: Well, there were several moments that I came across in my book where Hoover’s sense of the FBI’s own interests, his understanding of the law and above all, his desire to protect his own autonomy and the Bureau’s autonomy led him to say no to some pretty egregious things that presidents wanted to do. So one example is that he was quite opposed to mass Japanese internment in World War II. He was one of the few high officials who was, and that was partly because the FBI was conducting its own different internment program that he just thought was much, much better, but it wasn’t mass internment.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Beverly Gage: It was much more individualized. Another is his showdowns with Richard Nixon in the ‘70s. There’s a moment where Nixon gathers a lot of intelligence officials together and says we really, really have to go after the left. We really have to crush the anti-war movement. I want much more aggressive action. And it is Hoover who says, no, I’m not going to do these things. I think they’re illegal. I think they are inadvisable, and I’m not going to use the FBI this way. Now he was doing already many terrible and scurrilous things, but he both wanted to keep those secrets and he, in some ways didn’t want to go, as far as Nixon went.
Chris Hayes: It seems to me that there’s a period of sort of federal power and construction of the kind of post new deal administrative state that culminates in Watergate essentially, where you’ve built this entire apparatus, much of it built in the shadow of either World War or then the Cold War. And Hoover is the kind of mascot for its abuse, Hoover and Nixon in many ways. And Watergate precipitates this kind of national reckoning with all of the different powers and abuses of the secret state, the famous COINTELPRO stuff comes out, the Church Committee, the CIA attempting to assassinate leftist leaders around the world, the spying on enemies of Nixon, the FBI’s attempts to get Martin Luther King, Jr. to kill himself and on and on and on.
And there’s like a set of reforms that happen. How do you understand that moment and how much that moment represents some kind of structural shift in the American constitutional Republic?
Beverly Gage: I think that period in the mid-1970s, Watergate, the Church Committee, the Pentagon Papers, is an incredibly important moment for how Americans relate to their government. And I think we’ve always had competing narratives about what that moment was and how we want to understand it. There is a kind of look. We can reform, right? And in fact, there were a lot of really important reforms that came out of that period, particularly constraints on the intelligence agencies that I think really did matter if they didn’t solve every single problem.
There is also a story that says, oh, actually we’ve never recovered from the loss of public trust that happened in those years, that between Watergate, the Vietnam war, the things the intelligence agencies were doing, from that moment on, we’ve just seen this decline in institutional faith and faith in government and that that’s been a really important watershed. And that I think we are seeing today, the outcome of a story that remained really popular among conservatives, people on the right, which was that actually what happened in the 70’s was a tragedy and it was unjust and the intelligence agencies never should have been constrained like that and executive power never should have been held back like that. And in fact, Nixon never should have resigned.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Beverly Gage: He just should have toughed it out, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: And I think we’re seeing the consequences of actually all three of those stories, which —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: — are shaping politics today.
Chris Hayes: Well, how much do you think in the year 2025, which is what, 50 years after Hoover basically right. More or less.
Beverly Gage: Right.
Chris Hayes: That the FBI still shaped at a sort of day to day level in terms of character structurally by Hoover.
Beverly Gage: I think it’s fundamental internal culture is still very similar to the culture that Hoover put in place, which is to say that the FBI on the one hand, I think is filled with people who believe in the autonomy of their own agency, believe in kind of professional career government service. These were Hoover’s watch words. He became ultimately a pretty bad example of that, but he really instilled the FBI with a sense of its own mission, its own independence, its own loyalty to the American public and not to any particular politician or agenda.
And then his conservatism, I think has always been a big part of the FBI. It’s very strange to see people like Kash Patel or Donald Trump describe the FBI as like a viper’s nest of Marxists and secret leftists because of all the things the FBI may be, I’m pretty sure that that’s not what it is. It has always had a pretty conservative internal culture. And I think that comes from Hoover too. I do think many of the abuses of the Hoover era in terms of political surveillance have been much more curtailed. They haven’t disappeared. Their potential for coming back was always there. But I do think that they’ve been much more constrained and much more law bound than they were during the Hoover years. Partly because we have some much better ability to tell at least some of what’s actually going on because of the reforms of the ‘70s.
Chris Hayes: I mean, one of the sort of central tensions that I think about many times a day in our current situation is that lack of accountability is just the other side of the coin from independence. So when you want there to be independent entities with power that are not dependent on the centralized authority or fearful of a centralized authority, like the courts, for instance, which are independent. But then that independence also means that it’s hard to hold them to account. So if you have a 6-3 Robert score and they do a lot of terrible things, well, go kick rocks. And this sort of trade-off between lack of accountability independence, it’s sort of everywhere you look. Like the “New York Times” is independent and thank goodness it is, but sometimes you get mad at the “New York Times” and there’s not a lot of ways enforce any accountability on it.
And any mechanism you would have to enforce accountability on the “New York Times” or the courts would also be a mechanism of corruption, independence, and Hoover to me is the, basically the ultimate apotheosis of this like —
Beverly Gage: That seems, yeah. If you look at the things that reformers tried to do in the 1970s, they were trying to get it exactly this question. So we want some independence, but not too much independence. We’re going to need some level of secrecy for certain things, but we don’t want too much secrecy. And it’s all this kind of elaborate dance and I don’t know that we’ve ever gotten the balance exactly right, but I think what we’re seeing right now with Trump and with Kash Patel is a really pernicious combination of lack of accountability and abuse of power in an incredibly political and partisan way, at least potentially.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, we already have some examples. We have one today of the FBI signing letters to Citibank to freeze funds for climate groups that had the money distributed already were sitting in their city bank accounts through the Inflation Reduction Act and special agents signing letters saying we suspect there’s fraud here. Even though when they tried to get a warrant for this, it was rejected. The case was so terrible that it was rejected by a judge to get the warrant. There was a frontline prosecutor who was ordered to try to write up this warrant and they resigned rather than do it. So, it’s the flimsiest of evidence.
But in that respect, I think you’re starting to see like the worst nightmare, right? The worst nightmare is a version of Hoover, but instead of them being accountable to Hoover, it’s the president and it’s his agenda. And it means that if you speak up against Donald Trump, you get a visit from agents to the door. And I just wonder how given that you’ve devoted more than a decade, your life just to studying Hoover, like how plausible does that seem to you?
Beverly Gage: It seems pretty plausible. And I have stopped thinking that things that I thought were impossible are in fact impossible. I think the example that you brought up is really an interesting one because during the campaign, and even since then, a lot of the talk about concern has been, they’re going to bring criminal cases against the Bidens, against their political enemies, against a whole host of people. But I think that the real danger is in precisely the kind of secret intelligence operations that you just mentioned, right? Not about the courts at all, but about forms of surveillance and disruption and harassment and discrediting that go on entirely outside of the courts in the intelligence realm.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Beverly Gage: That’s what COINTELPRO was, right. It was a program not only of surveillance, but of active, disruptive measures, aimed at a whole host of groups and individuals that Hoover in particular didn’t like. And often they were never brought before court, but people understood that their phones might be tapped, that their best friend and comrade might be an informant, that their personal lives might be under investigation. A lot of us know the Martin Luther King story. That’s an extreme story in some ways, but those kinds of techniques were being used against lots of people. Doesn’t take very many people to do that. And if you keep it secret enough, you’re not supposed to do it obviously, but I don’t think it would be hard to start that kind of campaign again.
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Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: What do you think about the culture of the Bureau as inoculation against that? I mean, that’s one of the questions here too, that I think is so interesting is. For Hoover, the Bureau was his life’s work and he has fife them, and he had total ownership of it. Kash Patel said he wants to get rid of the Hoover headquarters, turn it into a museum of the deep state, send all the agents there out into the field to stop crime, I think is what he said and basically views the bureau that he is now tasked with leading as kind of the enemy, which is 180 degrees from Hoover. And I wonder what you think that does to his ability to operate it, given how strong the institutional culture is there.
Beverly Gage: I think it’s going to be one of the most interesting and important issues in the days, weeks, months, years ahead, because I think that you are right, that the FBI internally has a very powerful culture that is about its own integrity, its own dignity, its own apolitical nonpartisan identity. And you can put a couple of people at the top who don’t support that and don’t want that. But that’s pretty different from getting the thousands and thousands of people who work in that Bureau to do what you want them to do.
So we saw early on as Kash Patel came in, lots of resistance within the Bureau. I think that the great example that I look to is what happened to Richard Nixon when he tried to politicize the bureaucracy, right? One of the things, that J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972 in May. Nixon put an outsider in charge of the Bureau in order to make it more responsive to his priorities, more responsive to the White House and career FBI agents got really mad about that. One of them became deep throat and, you know, yada, yada, yada Nixon resigned two and a half years later. So it’s not that simple a story, but I do think there are possibilities for that sort of thing. And in fact, both Trump and Kash Patel would expect that because that’s what’s at the heart of their analysis of the deep state and why it’s so terrible.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. Mark Felt being “Deep Throat” and bringing down Nixon is right in line with basically their theory of the case about the deep state. And again, they’re wrong in some ways, but there’s a curl of a true story here, right? Which goes back to this sort of independence, lack of accountability issue. And there’s a reason they view that they’re waging such war on in some ways the most dangerous parts of the state because those are the ones they recognize as the most important to bring under your total control and dominion.
Beverly Gage: Well, they seem to be going to war at almost every part of the state.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s true.
Beverly Gage: So, I’m not sure this is a super discriminating thing.
Chris Hayes: That’s true. It’s on the —
Beverly Gage: But obviously —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: — there is an analysis that is about the deep state in particular. And one of the things that I think is a little bit confusing and maybe interesting about a figure like Patel is that he can sound very much like a 1970s leftist.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Beverly Gage: I want to bring transparency.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Beverly Gage: I want to decentralize this operation. The FBI spends too much time protecting itself and doing things we don’t want it to do. And I want the agents out there, you know, following the law and enforcing the law and a whole host of positions that he’s taking rhetorically, which seem to come out of a kind of civil, libertarian tradition. And then on the other hand, is saying, hey, we’re going to use this thing to go after our enemies and is being totally unapologetic about that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right, exactly. The enemy’s list and it’s, yes. It’s all the rhetoric of sort of, yes, ‘70s leftist skepticism of the FBI married to a kind of authoritarian vision of these loyalist henchmen working for king, I mean, King Trump. This is the way that he talks about him in his children’s book. Let’s sort of end on the note that I sort of started on, which is, the book he wrote, it really is a masterpiece. It’s incredible work that sort of chronicles the construction of the administrative state over decades and sort of a history of the U.S. as much as it’s about Hoover. But given that, and given what I was saying before about these finding these moments where things get bad and American liberty really is threatened, and then they’re sort of wrench back, like, how are you seeing this moment on your internal one to 10 with one being like everything’s great and 10 is like, I need to make sure my passport is current and might have to leave the country?
Beverly Gage: Well, everything’s great. Obviously so what is there to worry about? I guess I am somewhat in the vein that was the way that you were talking about this in your introduction, which is to say, I think there are lots of dangerous things going on in this moment and they are in many ways worse than one might have expected, though I think we’re still in the range of the imaginable even as of a few months ago, but I’m not sure that we need examples from other parts of the world to understand where a lot of this is coming from. I think there’s lots in American history that would help us to see some of these themes and dangers and precedents.
And I also think that the United States is an interesting place because it does have a very powerful, very longstanding tradition of civil society, of protest, of descent. And there are scary moments, and I have been spending a lot of time thinking, oh, I’ve been reading about this for a long time, but oh, this is what it felt like, right? This is what the Red Scare felt like.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: Or if you were a businessman, this is what the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt’s —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: — presidency felt like right, just this incredibly radical change, the whole order being upended, your expectations being thrown out the window. And I guess looking to the Red Scare example, it was really hard for a really long time and people’s lives got damaged. And we also came out the other side with a new understanding, actually a rejuvenated left by the 1960s in some way. So —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: — as a historian, I’m very attuned to how quickly things can actually change and how powerful these longstanding institutions in American life, the press, the universities, right? All of these institutions that are under incredible stress at the moment and are going to come through damaged and changed, but have been through these —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Beverly Gage: — sorts of moments before.
Chris Hayes: Beverly Gage is a historian at Yale, author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” won the Pulitzer for biography. Professor, thank you so much. That was fantastic.
Beverly Gage: All right. Thanks so much, Chris.
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Chris Hayes: Once again. Great thanks for Beverly Gage. E-mail us at withpod@gmail.com. We’d love to hear your feedback. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod. You can follow us on TikTok searching for #withpod. You can follow me on Threads, Bluesky and the app formerly known as Twitter at #chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday. “Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSBC and NBC News. Produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.