Word: hoover
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...enforcement organization during those years, assuming a self-appointed role as political and moral troubleshooters. Rather than restricting their efforts to the control of criminals and violent hate groups, the FBI chose to harass and even to "destroy" any political organizations which then-director J. Edgar Hoover considered "detrimental to this country...
Neither the Select Senate Committee nor any other investigative body has ever ascertained why the FBI placed King's SCLC in its list of black nationalist hate groups. The Senate Committee's report concluded that King's attacks of Hoover in the national press in part caused the director to overreact to King's presence on the national political scene...
...Hoover's master plan--in his own words--was to "prevent the rise of the messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist group. Martin Luther King...aspires to this position...
...Hoover hoped to "take King off his pedestal" and "reduce him completely in influence" and replace him with another, more impotent black leader. The plan didn't really work--or so we think...
...starters, Silberman points out that crime is "as American as Jesse James." Abraham Lincoln called internal violence America's biggest problem well over a century ago; Herbert Hoover anticipated Richard Nixon's law-and-order campaign by four decades; an 1872 guidebook to New York City warned tourists to avoid Central Park after sundown. What was abnormal was a quarter-century of stable or declining crime rates between the end of Prohibition and 1960, an era that ended when the baby boom produced a huge generation of 14-to 24-year-olds, the prime age for crime...