8. The existence of Hoover’s personal files are disputed by some historians and researchers
The very existence of J. Edgar Hoover’s personal files, that is the files which were destroyed under the supervision of Helen Gandy in 1972, is disputed by some historians, who combine them with other files deemed extra sensitive by Hoover. The result has been conflicting assessments of the files and the information they contained. To some historians all of Hoover’s surreptitiously collected data was included in the files which were released by the FBI into the custody of the National Archives in the 1970s. These Official/Confidential files were kept under FBI control, within various offices, before being combined into the Confidential files which were purged by Gandy, with the surviving files being eventually released by the FBI. To these historians, the “personal” files which were marked for destruction by Helen Gandy were simply redundant copies of existing documents or matters of a purely personal nature.
Others argue that Gandy destroyed documents which were deemed to be too sensitive for the inquisitive eyes and delicate political sensitivities of congress, and thus were destroyed, with her conscience as her guide, so to speak. Still others, such as Curt Gentry and Ronald Kessler, present more sinister views as to the existence of the personal files and the information which they contained (their books, and other sources, are listed at the end of this article). The tangle over what Hoover kept in his files, where he kept it, and what he intended to do with it remains as difficult to unravel nearly fifty years after his death as it was in the summer months of 1972, the first time the opportunity to recover the long-rumored files, which had terrorized Washington for decades, was offered.