50 Fun Facts About J. Edgar Hoover

Alvin Karpis, the gangster Hoover helped arrest in 1936, went on to serve 26 years in which prison?

Alcatraz. Hoover flew to New Orleans to join the raid after a senator taunted him for never making an arrest, and with no handcuffs to hand, an agent bound Karpis with his necktie.

Who was 'Deep Throat', the Watergate source passed over to succeed Hoover as FBI director?

Mark Felt. The senior FBI man wanted Hoover's chair and was angry when the White House gave it to an outsider with no FBI experience; he kept his Watergate role secret until 2005.

Under which president did Hoover become director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924?

Calvin Coolidge. His new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, sacked the Bureau's chief in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal and handed the job to the 29-year-old deputy.

Which three-word motto did Hoover's Bureau adopt in 1935?

Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity. It was coined the year the Bureau was renamed the FBI so that the motto would spell out the new initials, which a Bureau magazine welcomed as its first dignified abbreviation.

In which city was Hoover born on New Year's Day 1895 and did he live his entire life?

He was born on Capitol Hill, on the site of a church that now has a stained-glass window dedicated to him.

Until he was 43, Hoover lived with which relative?

His mother. He was closer to Annie Hoover, the family's disciplinarian, than to anyone else in it, and the FBI director stayed in the Seward Square house where he was born until she died in 1938.

How did the young Hoover overcome a boyhood stutter?

He taught himself to talk very fast. The rapid-fire delivery stayed with him for life, and as a schoolboy he took it straight onto his high school's debating team.

Where did the 18-year-old Hoover take his first job, as a messenger?

The Library of Congress. He clerked there by day while studying law at night, and later turned its lessons in indexing on the suspects and radicals in the Bureau's files.

Where did Hoover earn his law degrees in 1916 and 1917?

George Washington University. He went straight from high school and took its law classes at night after a day's paid work, adding a master's the year after his first degree.

Which 1919-20 crackdown on radicals during the First Red Scare did the 24-year-old Hoover help carry out?

The Palmer Raids. Named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose own house anarchists had bombed in 1919, they swept up thousands of suspects, yet only 556 were ever deported.

Which policy for FBI special agents, in force for more than 40 years, was dropped ten days after Hoover died?

Men only. Hoover inherited two women agents in 1924 and appointed a third himself, but after she resigned in 1928 no woman carried the badge again until July 1972.

Which gangster was ambushed and killed by Bureau agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater in July 1934?

John Dillinger. He was betrayed by a brothel madam hoping to avoid deportation, remembered as the 'lady in red' although the dress she wore so agents could spot her was orange.

Which Wisconsin lodge saw a botched 1934 Bureau raid on a bank-robbing gang kill an agent and a bystander?

Little Bohemia. While agents traded fire with the front of the lodge, every one of the gangsters slipped out through its unguarded back and got clean away.

Whose kidnapping led Congress to make the crime a federal one, handing Hoover's Bureau a new field of work?

The Lindbergh baby. The aviator's 20-month-old son was taken in 1932; Congress let federal agents chase kidnappers across state lines, and Bureau handwriting analysis of the ransom notes helped convict Bruno Hauptmann.

Which group did Hoover single out in the late 1960s as the greatest threat to America's internal security?

The Black Panther Party. Hoover vowed that 1969 would be its last year, and his agents set out to break it, even working to undermine its free breakfasts for schoolchildren.

Which Attorney General forced Hoover into a reluctant campaign against the Mafia?

Robert F. Kennedy. For years Hoover had insisted there was no national crime syndicate; only under pressure from the president's own brother did the FBI go after the mob in earnest.

Which film star, watched by Hoover's FBI as a suspected communist, had his US re-entry permit revoked in 1952?

Charlie Chaplin. The news reached the British-born star at sea, on his way to the London premiere of Limelight; rather than fight to return, he settled in Switzerland.

How were the Nazi saboteurs landed by U-boat in Florida and on Long Island caught?

One of them turned himself in. George Dasch phoned the FBI within days of landing and then confessed in person; all eight were in custody in about two weeks, and six went to the electric chair.

Which president first gave Hoover permission to wiretap people suspected of subversive activities?

Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wanted fascists and communists watched as war loomed, but Hoover stretched the mandate until his lists of suspect Americans included the president's own wife, Eleanor.

Hoover's 1950 emergency plan listed 12,000 people and sought to suspend which legal safeguard?

Habeas corpus. With the writ suspended, the 12,000, some 97 per cent of them US citizens, were to be rounded up and held in federal prisons and military bases; no president is known to have approved the plan.

What was the name of the covert 'dirty tricks' programme Hoover formalised in 1956?

COINTELPRO. Short for Counterintelligence Program, it began against the Communist Party and spread to civil rights and antiwar groups, using burglaries, illegal wiretaps and planted rumours.

How was Hoover's covert dirty-tricks programme exposed in 1971?

Activists burgled an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The eight struck while the country was tuned to the Ali-Frazier title fight and posted the files to newspapers; the Bureau never caught them.

Which senator chaired the 1975 committee that declared Hoover's dirty-tricks programme illegal?

Frank Church. The Idaho senator's inquiry into the FBI, CIA and NSA led the Senate to create its permanent Select Committee on Intelligence the following year.

To which civil rights leader did Hoover's FBI send an anonymous 1964 letter he read as urging suicide?

Martin Luther King Jr. The package also held a tape from FBI bugs in his hotel rooms, and although it was unsigned he guessed at once who had sent it.

Before the CIA existed, Hoover's FBI ran the nation's wartime foreign intelligence in which part of the world?

Latin America. From 1940 his Special Intelligence Service sent undercover agents across Central and South America, where German spies were busiest, while other agencies took the rest of the globe.

Which president waived the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1964 so Hoover could stay on indefinitely?

Lyndon B. Johnson. Hoover was due to retire on his 70th birthday, New Year's Day 1965; the waiver from his friend in the White House kept him in office for seven more years, until his death.

Which president was recorded in 1971 saying he would not fire Hoover because he feared his reprisals?

Richard Nixon. He feared Hoover knew enough to bring the government down with him, so he backed away from forcing him out, and the director died in office a few months later.

How did Hoover die on 2 May 1972?

A heart attack at home. He died in his sleep at 77, still in the post he had held for 48 years; no president of either party had been willing to remove him.

Which honour did Congress grant Hoover's body the day after his death?

Lying in state in the Capitol. His coffin rested in the Rotunda where Abraham Lincoln's once had, an honour that before him had gone almost entirely to presidents, generals and members of Congress.

Where is Hoover buried, next to his parents and a sister who died in infancy?

Congressional Cemetery. He lies in the family plot there, and three years later the companion who inherited his estate was buried a few yards away.

Which FBI associate director, Hoover's daily dining companion for over 40 years, inherited his estate?

Clyde Tolson. From the late 1920s the two bachelors lunched and dined together six days a week and took their holidays together, Florida at Christmas and California in July.

What limit did Congress place on FBI directors in 1976, after Hoover's 48 years in charge?

A single ten-year term. It was first stretched in 2011, when the Senate voted to let Robert Mueller stay on for two more years.

Which president wrote 'we want no Gestapo or secret police' and accused Hoover's FBI of 'plain blackmail'?

Harry S. Truman. He set it down in a private note a month after taking office, complaining that the Bureau was dabbling in sex scandals when it should have been catching criminals.

What popular nickname for FBI agents did Hoover's publicity turn into a brand?

G-Men. Short for 'government men', the name spread with the tale that Machine Gun Kelly cried 'Don't shoot, G-Men!' at his arrest in 1933, words the FBI now says he probably never uttered.

Which Hollywood star played the agent hero of The FBI Story, the 1959 film Hoover advised on and appeared in?

James Stewart. Hoover had scenes he disliked shot again, took a hand in the casting and turns up himself in a brief cameo.

Which pastime was Hoover's great passion outside work, taking him to California's Del Mar each summer?

Horse racing. The FBI chief was a regular at the betting windows of tracks back east and at Gulfstream Park in Miami, and spent each July beside the course in California.

Which British monarch made Hoover an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire?

George VI. As a foreigner Hoover could put KBE after his name but could never be called 'Sir'; the citation thanked him for 25 years of cooperation with Britain.

What happened in 1994 to an Illinois grade school named after J. Edgar Hoover?

It was renamed for Herbert Hoover. Staff and parents wanted a better role model than the FBI chief, and swapping him for the president meant the building could stay plain 'Hoover School'.

Who played Hoover in Clint Eastwood's 2011 biopic J. Edgar?

Leonardo DiCaprio. He reportedly cut his fee from $20 million to $2 million for the part, and sat for up to six hours in the make-up chair to play the director in old age.

What was the title of Hoover's 1958 book on communism in America?

Masters of Deceit. It sold some two and a half million copies, though Hoover is widely believed to have left the writing to FBI staff while keeping the byline and the royalties.

Which fraternal organisation initiated the 25-year-old Hoover in 1920?

The Freemasons. He joined Federal Lodge No. 1, and six years later he and Justice Department colleagues chartered a new lodge of their own, named Justice.

What did the teenage Hoover argue against as a school debater?

Women's suffrage and ending the death penalty. He argued 'The Fallacies of Women Suffrage' with gusto and success, but lost to history: women won the vote in 1920, seven years after he left school.

Hoover's 1917 Justice Department clerkship came with which wartime benefit?

Exemption from the draft. He started that July, with the country newly at war, and sat out the fighting behind a government desk.

Which future Supreme Court justice did Hoover call 'the most dangerous man in the United States'?

Marcus Garvey and Emma Goldman were among the Radical Division's other targets.

Which list did Hoover launch in 1950 after a news story on the 'toughest guys' the FBI was hunting?

The Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. A wire-service reporter had asked the Bureau who its toughest quarry were, and the story drew so much attention that Hoover made the list a fixture.

Which two scientific innovations is Hoover credited with bringing to American policing?

A central fingerprint file and crime labs. The file opened in his first months as director and held over 200 million prints by his death; the laboratory began in 1932 with a single scientist.

Who destroyed Hoover's confidential 'Personal File' after his death, as he had instructed?

His secretary. Helen Gandy had run his office for 54 years; the papers she destroyed were thought to hold the secrets that had kept the country's most powerful figures wary of him.

Where did gunmen kill four lawmen outside Union Station in 1933, the 'massacre' that spurred Hoover's war on gangsters?

Kansas City. Gunmen trying to free the bank robber Frank Nash killed four of his escorts and Nash himself, and an enraged Hoover turned the whole Bureau on the gangsters.

In 1917 the 22-year-old Hoover became head of which wartime Justice Department unit?

The Alien Enemy Bureau. It could have allegedly disloyal foreigners arrested and held without trial, and within two years its young chief was running the department's hunt for radicals.

What did Hoover call the FBI drive he launched against Mafia bosses across the country?

The Top Hoodlum Program. It took off in 1957, after state police rounded up some sixty mobsters at Apalachin, New York, and put the mob's leaders in newspapers across the country.