5. Hoover’s overriding goal was public and financial support for the FBI
Throughout his career as the Director of what became, under his leadership, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (it was a much smaller and less powerful Bureau when he took control in the 1920s) J. Edgar Hoover was driven to both expand and protect his turf. He exaggerated the Bureau’s role in combating the roving criminal gangs of the 1930s, the Dillingers, Pretty Boy Floyds, and Baby Face Nelsons of the day, and his personal role in their apprehension or elimination. Doing so led to public approbation of the Bureau as the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency, and made Hoover America’s best-known policeman, approval which was readily converted into increased operating budgets by congress.
The support of constituents wasn’t enough for Hoover though, and he used his agents and their increasingly effective means of surveillance to maintain reams of information on members of Congress, their families and friends, their professional associates and colleagues, and anyone else with whom they had contact. Hoover made sure that he had the means to embarrass those who opposed him in any way, either socially or politically, which in Washington was often more or less the same thing. As the bureau grew and the files it kept became more expansive, so did his veiled referrals to their increase, easily bringing intransigent controllers of the public wealth to heel. By the time World War II drew America onto the international stage, Hoover was one of the most feared men in Washington DC, a fear-based on what he might know, and how that information might weigh on the men and women who controlled the reins of power in the nation’s capital.