Former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. He hated the American left. Demonized and investigated his critics. But what did the rest of America think about him?
"He is an almost pure creature of Washington. He's born there. He dies there. He never lives anywhere else. And he's, I think, a creature of the city in lots of other ways, as well. First of all, even in the late 19th century, he's born into a family with a tradition of federal government service, which was pretty unusual at the time, because the federal government wasn't very big. It didn't do very many things.
"And it turns out that Kappa Alpha was an explicitly Southern segregationist fraternity that had been created in 1865 to kind of carry on the lost cause of the white South in the aftermath of the Civil War.
"And then on the other hand, he's a really powerful and very outspoken social conservative on lots of issues, race and communism, but on religion as well. And it's kind of strange to think about the FBI director giving these kinds of stern moral lectures, which he loved to give ... to the nation at large, kind of admonishing people to go to Sunday school to return to their moral core. And some of that had to do with the struggle against atheistic communism.
"So if you happened to be at a dance or a cocktail party or hanging around Washington and you made a joke about a rumor that you had heard that the director's sexuality was in question, you might actually get an FBI agent showing up at your door, knocking on the door, saying, Hello, ma'am, we've heard that you had this to say about the director, and you should never say such a scurrilous, terrible thing about, you know, our wonderful director.
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