![]() ![]() ![]() Although Hoover unscrupulously exploited stories of homosexuality to discredit or silence political adversaries, Weiner begins his latest book, based in part on the freshly declassified documents, by dismissing the racy gossip that Hoover himself was "a tyrant in a tutu". Because deliberate cover-ups naturally excite scurrilous conjectures, suspicious students of the bureau have reacted to Hoover's well-oiled system for the undetectable destruction of government archives by mimicking his tendency to assume the worst, often on the basis of hearsay evidence, about the target of an investigation.Īuthor of a celebrated account of serial blundering and incompetence at the CIA, Tim Weiner is commendably impervious to this familiar temptation, refusing to replicate Hoover's paranoid style. ![]() D espite recently declassified materials, historians of the FBI remain painfully hostage to the fragmentary records that survived "the routine destruction of FBI files" typifying J Edgar Hoover's 48-year, secrecy-obsessed directorship and especially "the bonfire of his personal files after his death" in 1972. ![]()
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