Word: hooverness
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...demoralizing it must be to work as an FBI agent, fighting for freedom under a dictator-Hoover...
...League Code. The constitutional and personal dilemma is as ageless as politics. But it makes a compelling contemporary theme. Navasky wishes, for instance, that Kennedy had applied the same determination to getting J. Edgar Hoover into retirement that he spent getting James Hoffa into jail. He would like Kennedy to have been as consistently intransigent toward foes of integration as he was toward the Mafia. Ideally, the Attorney General should have been as sensitive to individual rights when considering wiretapping and bugging as Candidate Kennedy later became on many other issues...
...Navasky's analysis, Kennedy's power sources were also disguised traps. The brother in the White House had to be protected; that meant trying to salvage some support from white Southerners and avoiding a showdown with Hoover. The classy subordinates whom Kennedy recruited compensated for his own lack of legal expertise. But Navasky, himself a Yale Law School graduate who taught legal research before becoming a journalist, argues that they represented "the code of Ivy League gentlemen." They revered genteel negotiation and the separation of powers even when the situation-as in dealing with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett...
...promoting the civil rights movement, there was no pro-gangster lobby to impede new methods of assault on big bad guys. His own experience as the investigator had given him a taste for gangbusting. To carry it out, Kennedy first had to persuade the FBI that organized crime existed (Hoover had been a doubter). The bureau, long a self-governed island within the department, reluctantly agreed to enlist -though on its own terms. The indictment rate soared, and Hoover was more firmly entrenched than ever...
...domestic intelligence agency of the American government, its economic role as an important aid to the corporate structures which control the nation's marketplace, its social role as a compelling role-model for the traditional American boy-have come about as the result of conscious decisions by J. Edgar Hoover and his superiors in government...