To sum up, John Hoover was an odd man. He was also a scrupulously honest one who demanded total integrity from his Bureau—and he got it. Hoover’s agents had to be above reproach. The FBI, which is really several dozen field offices that function as semi-independent fiefdoms, is notoriously difficult to run. Arguably nobody has really been able to do so effectively since Hoover’s death.
Here his annoying attention to detail was a big help. It’s difficult to imagine many of the scandals that have beset the FBI over the last four decades happening on Hoover’s watch, while gross debacles such as the Whitey Bulger case, where Boston’s top mobster played the local FBI office for decades thanks to deep corruption, would have been unthinkable in the Hoover era. In a democracy, there’s much to be said for having a secret police chief who’s a micromanagerial jerk.
Even the things his enemies most loathed about Hoover turn out to reflect better on him than most Americans realize. Nothing gets the Left in a lather about Hoover more than his 1960s domestic counterintelligence program, the notorious COINTELPRO, which was employed against dissidents, activists and terrorists from the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers. To this day, COINTELPRO is castigated as illegitimate and undemocratic by left-of-center commentators.
However, the Left doesn’t seem to mind that COINTELPRO was incredibly successful at breaking the back of the Ku Klux Klan.
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