THE DIRECTOR

An admiring but not uncritical account of Letersky’s years in the FBI’s innermost circles.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) has long been supposed to have been a closeted gay man who was vigorous in suppressing other gay men out of shame. If not that, then he is alleged to have been seen wearing women’s clothing and calling himself “Mary.” As to the first charge, Letersky, Hoover’s former assistant, notes that all of American society seemed to be arrayed against gay people in Hoover’s day. “It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, but that was the tenor of the times, and you can’t single out Hoover for being part of it.” But what of Hoover’s apparently close relationship with assistant director Clyde Tolson? Just two bachelor friends, Letersky maintains. The author is right to insist that the question is no one’s business—unless, that is, it has any bearing on how Hoover conducted his criminal investigations. In this regard, Letersky allows that Hoover “could be vindictive, closed-mined, hypocritical, a man of intense hatred and eternal grudges” who just happened to keep private files that may or may not have contained blackmailworthy material. We won’t know because “Miss Gandy,” the author’s colleague, destroyed those private files after Hoover died. Letersky presents himself as a loyal member of the FBI who disagreed then—and now—with some initiatives, such as COINTELPRO, the campaign to discredit leftist and anti-war organizations. The author also sheds light on Hoover’s well-known antipathy for Martin Luther King Jr. “Much of what the Bureau did regarding King was unethical,” he writes, “some of it was only quasi-legal, and some of it was illegal as hell.” Elsewhere, Letersky calls W. Mark Felt, the “Deep Throat” of Watergate, “a notorious sycophant and an insatiable schemer” while William C. Sullivan, another senior executive, was “the source of many of the most vicious stories about the Director,” stories that are fascinating in their own right.

A fly-on-the-wall portrait of Hoover’s last years as America’s top cop, of interest to students of crime—and rumor.