Beverly Gage is John Lewis Gaddis professor of history of Yale University and the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.
As director of the FBI for several decades, J. Edgar Hoover helped build a massive, professionalized national security state and hounded leftists out of public life. In doing so, he profoundly shaped the course of US history.
J. Edgar Hoover is notorious for his decades-long campaign to stamp out the Left by surveilling and even killing radicals like Fred Hampton. What is less well known is that liberals played an important role in enabling Hoover’s antidemocratic crusade.