Since President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention of appointing his political loyalist Kash Patel as the director of the F.B.I., critics have warned that we’re heading back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. should be so lucky.
Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan independence. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he grew up imbued with the idea that career-long government service was one of life’s noblest aspirations. As a D.C. resident, Hoover could not vote, and though he was a staunch conservative, he never joined a political party. Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the F.B.I. as a partisan force to protect Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. If such naked politicization happens to undermine public faith in the F.B.I., so much the better. In Patel’s book “Government Gangsters,” published last year, he describes the Bureau’s top officials—along with other “Deep State” executives—as a group of “spiteful mandarins” hell-bent on destroying the country in service of their “uniformly left wing” desires. He warns, “Democrats and the Deep State are on the same team.”
The idea that people who work at the F.B.I. are closet leftists conspiring to bring down the Republic has to be one of the more bizarre takes in a political moment with no shortage of them. But such is the state of our politics, in which self-proclaimed protectors of “law and order” attack the national-security establishment, while reluctant liberals defend its professionalism and autonomy. Hoover would agree with Patel that what happens at the F.B.I. matters. However, the similarities mostly end there. Hoover used to describe the Bureau as the “one bulwark” against a hidden left-wing conspiracy that penetrated all corners of American life. In Patel’s world, the F.B.I. is the conspiracy.
Hoover became the director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation exactly a century ago, under Harlan Fiske Stone, who was then the Attorney General. Stone wanted to clean up a division of the department that had become infamous for spying on dissidents and deploying its agents as political enforcers for the corrupt Harding Administration. Hoover had started at the Justice Department right out of law school. He rose quickly, was promoted to head the department’s new Radical Division in 1919, at the age of twenty-four, then given the position of assistant director of the Bureau at twenty-six. Though Hoover was tainted by the department’s controversies, Stone believed that he was a reformer at heart. The appointment process was simple at the time; the Attorney General, not the President, chose the director, without any need for Senate confirmation. Nobody at the time imagined that the Bureau, staffed with just a few hundred ill-trained agents, would grow into a federal colossus—or that Hoover would want to stay in the job for the next forty-eight years.
On the surface, Patel shares some of that reformist energy. The son of Indian immigrants, he grew up in a household of “dispositional conservatism,” as he put it in “Government Gangsters,” with parents who believed in hard work and the American Dream. He became a lawyer more or less on a whim, after caddying for a group of defense lawyers at a Long Island golf course. With no lucrative offers from white-shoe firms, he went to work for the government—first as a public defender, then as a prosecutor in the D.O.J.’s national-security division. After Trump’s election, he took a job as an aide to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Devin Nunes (now the C.E.O. of Trump Media). That position and others he held in the Trump Administration gave Patel a front-row seat at what he describes as the “extended shitstorm” of the Administration’s tangles with the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. His book name-checks just about every far-right grievance of the era: Benghazi, the Steele dossier, the Russia investigation, “men” in “girls’ bathrooms,” Hunter Biden’s laptop, January 6th, and critical race theory. What it all amounted to, in Patel’s view, was a need to contain, reform, and discipline the Bureau and the other intelligence agencies. As he wrote in his book, nothing less than “the survival of the American Republic is at stake.”
Hoover spent his first decade as director focussed on internal reforms: firing patronage appointees, writing up a policy manual, and refining the Bureau’s hub-and-spoke system, with headquarters in Washington and field offices across the country. At Stone’s behest, he curtailed the most controversial forms of investigation, including the surveillance of elected officials, and promoted the Bureau’s nonpartisan reputation. To fill out his agent corps, he hired a new generation of college-educated lawyers and accountants, chosen for their professional bona fides but also for their ability to conform to Hoover’s preferred agent type: tall, trim, white, and male. He envisioned the Bureau as both a model and a helpmeet for local law enforcement, able to perform high-level scientific and analytical work beyond the capacities of local cops. He also established many of the programs that still define the F.B.I. in our cultural imagination, such as its cutting-edge forensics lab and its academy at Quantico.
Hoover emphasized internal reform partly because he didn’t have much else to do. At the time, federal law gave the Bureau a strange grab bag of investigative duties, ranging from interstate prostitution to antitrust violations. Its jurisdiction expanded in the mid-nineteen-thirties, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, when it got a new name: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Roosevelt was worried about crime; specifically, the wave of kidnappings and bank robberies that rocked Depression-era America. So he announced a war on crime, and backed new laws expanding the Bureau’s powers. Hoover made the most of that opportunity, creating a publicity unit to tout the F.B.I.’s crime-fighting triumphs.
A few years later, with an actual war on the horizon, Roosevelt turned to the Bureau again, putting Hoover in charge of the country’s nascent domestic-intelligence system, which included hunting spies and saboteurs as well as monitoring the political opinions and activities of American citizens. Thus was born the hybrid architecture of today’s F.B.I.: part law-enforcement agency, part domestic-intelligence agency, with a single powerful director at the top.
Since the announcement of Patel’s nomination, most concern has centered on the idea that, under his leadership, the F.B.I. would launch criminal investigations of Trump’s political opponents and media critics. That may well happen, producing a chill on speech and a major headache for everyone involved. But the worst abuses of F.B.I. power have usually come through its intelligence and surveillance operations. Making a criminal case in court is hard; there are laws and procedures and evidentiary standards. Intelligence investigations operate in a more nebulous realm. If Hoover had never moved into intelligence work, we might remember him as the scourge of John Dillinger and not much else. Instead, he became the chief of the nation’s political police, with an enormous secret bureaucracy at his disposal.
Hoover’s earliest targets, in the run-up to the Second World War, were alleged Nazis and communists. With the end of the war, the Nazis faded, but the communists remained. In public, Hoover still claimed to be the great avatar of the administrative state, devoted to law and professionalism and restraint. Behind the scenes, though, he defined his national-security authority in the broadest possible terms. The F.B.I. was defending an “American way of life,” as he conceived it, so almost anyone who sought, as he saw it, to upend the status quo became a legitimate intelligence target. Alongside the surveillance of dissidents, Hoover built up files on politicians, members of the press, and celebrities who criticized the F.B.I. or otherwise disagreed with him. His agents deployed bugs, wiretaps, informants, and disruptive operations on a scale unprecedented in the United States, but most of it was never revealed during Hoover’s lifetime. He maintained tight control over the Bureau’s files. When he chose to share details of operations—with Congress, the Attorney General, the White House, or anyone else—it was because the disclosure served his own purposes. During his tenure, there was no effective Freedom of Information Act, no FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court, no congressional committee with the right (or the courage) to demand information from the Bureau.
The F.B.I.’s investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr., provides a case study in how quickly such practices could spiral out of control. The inquiry began with a narrow claim that King’s inner circle included men with ties to the Communist Party. Within a few years, the Bureau was bugging King’s hotel rooms, recording his sexual encounters, and using what it found to threaten King and attempt to discredit him in the press. But at no time did anyone think, or even suggest, that King had committed any sort of serious crime.
The King investigation stands out for its sheer outrageousness, but a similar defense of the status quo drove the F.B.I.’s investigations of the Black Panthers, the antiwar movement, and the New Left. It also led the Bureau to conduct disruptive operations against the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups, who were thought to threaten the social order from the right. Hoover styled himself the great defender of the Washington consensus, and the last best hope of a republic under siege. To resist the F.B.I.—or to criticize Hoover—was to attack America itself.
