Word: hooverness
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...newest Kennedy myth is even further from reality than the first two. Devastated baby boomers and conspiracy peddlers seem to have put young Americans in a mysterious, alluring haze. The question I heard most often at universities was this: "What was it that J. Edgar Hoover had on Kennedy, so that he could never be fired...
Then what? Well . . . not all that much, if one is to judge from the precedents set by the two Hoover commissions under Truman and Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter's zero-based budgeting plan, and the Grace Commission, which reported to Ronald Reagan. Some of these efforts did produce worthwhile reforms. But all were frustrated by the realities of the Washington power game. The savvy and iron-bottomed persistence of bureaucrats in protecting their turf is nothing short of awe inspiring. So is the jealousy with which Congress guards its power to spell out for government agencies, in the most niggling detail...
Pigs in Heaven picks up five years later. Taylor and the baby, whom she has adopted and named Turtle, are admiring the WPA sculpture at Hoover Dam, when the child spots a man tumbling into a spillway. In keeping with Kingsolver's fictional line of determined women, the tot convinces the authorities that she did not imagine the incident. A search turns up a man with only an ankle injury. Turtle becomes a hero and a participant on an Oprah Winfrey show about kids who save people's lives. She is seen by millions, including Annawake Fourkiller, an Oklahoma lawyer...
Hoffa isn't the only one monitoring the affair. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (whose phone is answered in the middle of the night by the fellow sharing his bed) blackmails Bobby with damaging photos. That forces Kennedy to break off the affair, which leaves Marilyn so distraught that she takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. The suicide scene is the film's lunatic climax: so many people scurry in and out of Marilyn's house as the actress lies dying (among them Peter Lawford, Bobby himself and an ambulance team that rushes her to the hospital and then...
Later in the day, Khalilah shows me her report and poster on J. Edgar Hoover. "It was like college," she says, telling me how she borrowed four thick books from the library for research. "I learned about someone who made it," she says. "I think every class should have a fair...