J. Edgar Hoover: Man Behind the Mask

J. Edgar Hoover was born in Washington D.C. in 1895 and never left. A lawyer by training he joined the Justice Department during World War I and by age 29 was running the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the F.B.I. He served as its director until his 1972 death, amassing a personal power base that led many to claim he was the most powerful man in America. Though lauded for building the FBI into a world-class crime-fighting agency, after his death there were multiple revelations of his controversial and illegal actions that led to intimidation and coercion of some of the United States’ most noteworthy public figures, indiscretions that led to a change in the law limiting the Director of the agency to a maximum ten year term.