Word: hooverness
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...last week L. Patrick Gray III, the embattled acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was summoned to the White House to discuss the status of President Nixon's controversial move to make him the permanent successor to the late J. Edgar Hoover. After the meeting, Gray returned to FBI headquarters and dispatched a Teletype message to his top officials throughout the nation. Marked "Personal and Confidential," it read in part...
...dogged pursuit of the facts upon which evenhanded justice must be based. On a more fundamental level, the struggle raises difficult questions about the role of a national police force in a democracy and just who should be entrusted with policing the police. The FBI after J. Edgar Hoover is at a crossroads, and the national interest is clear: a balance must be found between a police power that is largely unchecked and one that swings prejudicially with each political shift in the White House...
...many legitimate questions about Gray's stewardship of the FBI have been raised that the image of the bureau would be seriously impaired by his confirmation. That image, under Hoover, was always overburnished by excessive pressagentry. Americans grew up in the 1930s listening to radio's Gangbusters, and kids eagerly wrote in to get tin badges as "Junior G-Men." Hoover used his headquarters flacks to ghostwrite hundreds of magazine articles glorifying the FBI under his byline. Then came a succession of movies (The House on 92nd Street, I Was a Communist for the FBI). In its prime...
Gray defended this practice on the grounds that he was just "part of the chain of command" that leads to the White House. That is an appallingly limited vision of the role of the FBI, which under Hoover had proudly maintained its independence from eight Presidents and served as a nonpartisan investigative agency to aid evenhanded justice. Indeed, the Gray nomination has led some liberals to yearn almost nostalgically for the days of Hoover, despite all their previous complaints about the cantankerous FBI chief...
...certain that if he is approved, any future Democratic Administration would replace him. That would turn the FBI directorship into the kind of political-patronage post that would seriously damage its reputation for impartial law enforcement. The politicization of the FBI is something that J. Edgar Hoover -to his lasting credit-never permitted...