Word: hooverness
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ROOSEVELT. After giving a speech on national defense in 1940, F.D.R. had his press secretary, Stephen Early, send Hoover the names of 128 people who had sent telegrams to the White House criticizing the address. "The President thought you might like to look them over," Early's note gently instructed Hoover. The FBI director had each name checked out in the FBI'S Washington files and the appropriate field office. This "name check" process retrieved any material, no matter how flimsy, that the FBI had on a person. If there was none, a file was opened on each...
TRUMAN. When Truman's military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, picked up transcripts of some of the Roosevelt wiretaps from the FBI in 1945 and showed them to Truman, the President snapped: "I don't have time for that foolishness!" But Hoover kept sending unsolicited "personal and confidential" memos to the Truman White House on political matters, such as the claim that a Communist sympathizer was helping a certain Senator write a speech, that a sugar scandal might break and embarrass Democratic officials, that Newsweek was planning a foreign espionage story. There was no evidence that Truman...
EISENHOWER. Responding to an invitation from Ike to brief his Cabinet on racial tensions early in 1956, Hoover rambled on about the lobbying efforts of the N.A.A.C.P. and some Communist groups to influence civil rights legislation, and about the anti-integration activities of Southern politicians...
...only such FBI incident of meddling in political affairs cited in the Eisenhower years, this was no more than an un solicited digression by Hoover...
JOHNSON. Sharply stepping up political intrigue via the FBI, Johnson got Hoover to assign a 31 -member "special squad" to the 1964 Democratic Nation al Convention in Atlantic City, ostensibly to detect any violent agitators. The squad, dispatched without Robert Kennedy's knowledge, supplied "hot line" reports to Johnson's political aides on intraparty battles at the convention...