J. Edgar Hoover

If Trump’s pick to lead the F.B.I. gets confirmed, the Bureau could be politicized in ways that even its notorious first director would have rejected.

As director of the FBI for decades, J. Edgar Hoover helped build a massive, professionalized national security state and hounded leftists out of public life.

On the white Christian legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

J. Edgar Hoover’s ascent within the FBI reveals the birth of an unprecedented surveillance apparatus that would survey US citizens for decades to come.

A zealot through and through, he ran the FBI like a religious sect.

The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

The author of a new biography explains how liberals played an important role in enabling Hoover’s antidemocratic crusade.

Before his abuses of power were exposed, he was celebrated as a scourge of Nazis, Communists, and subversives.

The FBI’s successful campaign against white supremacists is also a cautionary tale.

The F.B.I. director promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within.

Behind his tough image, the longtime FBI director was a man of profound contradictions.

Newly declassified records reveal how paranoia about subversion in conservative states resulted in major constitutional violations.

The same Christian ideology that inspired J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to surveil MLK is alive and well in the Trump administration.

What’s going on here, and are we ever going to talk about it?

A new study of the national security apparatus finds the existing Bureau incompatible with republican government.

Even if today's anti-war protestors couldn’t tell you who the Berrigan brothers were, the Catholic Left’s shadow looms large.

A new book calls white evangelicals to reckon with the fact that the groundwork for their movement was laid, in part, by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.

A history of the bureau and its place in the federal government.

J. Edgar Hoover had both of them in his sights. Yet neither one was ever arrested. The untold story of how the Hall brothers beat the FBI.