Word: hoovers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stanford Daily reporter Jock Friedly presented The Crimson with his theory of the outcome of the Kennedy School dean search: Jeane L. Kirkpatrick will be appointed dean, and outgoing Dean Graham T. Allison '62 will head the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank at Stanford. Kirkpatrick could not be reached for comment...
...alert to the shifting emotional weight and moral responsibilities in any relationship, especially in the quiet interplay of Hackman and McDormand, two ordinary middle-aged people searching awkwardly to be of use to each other. Hackman caps a brilliant career here as an FBI agent that both J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King Jr. could love. He takes the measure of this film: a watchmaker's craftsmanship, a marathoner's doggedness. With every confident frame, Mississippi Burning announces itself as a big, bold bolt of rabble- rousin', rebel-razin' movie journalism...
Only after the murders provoked a national outcry did the FBI enter Mississippi in force and begin a massive effort to undermine the Klan. Until then Director J. Edgar Hoover's insistence that the bureau was a strictly investigative agency forced FBI agents to invest far more energy in busting stolen car rings and foiling bank robberies than in probing even the most flagrant depredations against blacks. In 1961 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights suggested that since the bureau was often so closely linked to Southern law-enforcement officials, another group might take over the handling of civil rights...
...truth is that Hoover loathed blacks and detested their leaders, and so did many of his men. According to an agent quoted by Hoover's biographer Richard Gid Powers, during the early '60s "in about 90% of the situations in which bureau personnel referred to Negroes, the word 'nigger' was used." Until 1962 there were only five black FBI agents: Hoover's chauffeurs, houseboy and messenger. During the period dealt with in Burning, Hoover's bureau was indeed engaged in a lawless campaign against an enemy. But its target was Martin Luther King Jr. It began with wiretaps and buggings...
That power finally sweeps away one's resistance to the film's major improbability. It asks us to believe that the FBI, in those days still under J. Edgar Hoover's dictatorship, would have mounted an elaborate sting operation to bring the murderers at last to some rough justice under federal anticonspiracy statutes. That seems unlikely, especially given Hoover's hatred of Martin Luther King and his allies. Still, narrow historical criticism somehow seems irrelevant to a movie that so powerfully reanimates the past for the best of reasons: to inform the spirit of today and possibly tomorrow...