Word: hooverizer
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Consider the FBI. In 1963 few dissented from the view that its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was a peerless, incorruptible leader, a gangbuster nonpareil. He said so himself. Now, we may not want to agree with the conclusion of the latest FBI-centered conspiracy-theory book Act of Treason: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy. The author, Texas attorney Mark North, accuses Hoover of deliberately withholding knowledge of a Mafia assassination plot against J.F.K. because he hated the Kennedy brothers and had enough dirt on L.B.J. to control him. But North's accumulation...
Much of this has been reported earlier: the way Hoover pressured the Kennedys into letting him bug the bedrooms of Martin Luther King Jr.; how he subtly blackmailed the Camelot kids over their bedroom sports, including J.F.K.'s romps with the girlfriend of godfather Sam Giancana and (probably) with Marilyn Monroe. We know that while Hoover was passing around tapes of ! creaking bedsprings, he was letting the Mob grow unchecked and was going easy on deep sewers of Washington corruption like the Bobby Baker case to protect patrons like L.B.J...
...Peninsula just east of Beijing to protect Japanese rail and shipping interests in Manchuria. After ultranationalist Kwantung officers murdered the Chinese overlord of Manchuria, Tokyo installed a puppet regime in 1932 and proclaimed the independence of what it called Manchukuo. Despite calls for sanctions against Japan, outgoing President Herbert Hoover had no enthusiasm for a crisis, and the incoming President Roosevelt was preoccupied with the onrushing Great Depression...
...RISE OF J. EDGAR HOOVER (PBS, Nov. 18, 9 p.m. on most stations). The controversial former FBI chief gets a grilling in this American Experience documentary...
Then there was Herbert Hoover. His name was associated with every stinking aspect of the Great Depression. Shantytowns where the unemployed lived were called "Hoovervilles." The newspapers people slept under were "Hoover blankets." The opposums and rabbits vagrants ate in city parks were "Hoover steaks...