Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener, and later in the show we’ll have Twenty Minutes without Trump.  Today:  J. Edgar Hoover: We know a lot about the bad things he did, but it turns out there’s a lot we didn’t know. in this episode from the archives, Historian Beverly Gage will explain. Her award-winning book is “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover & the Making of the American Century.”  

But first: last November Kamala Harris got 36% of the rural vote.Democrats have got to do better with rural voters — We’ll talk about how they can do that, in a minute.
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Jon Wiener: Rural America is Trump country. Last November, Trump carried 93% of rural counties. That’s the highest share any Republican president has gotten this century. Also an improvement on his own performance in 2016 and 2020 when he got 92% of rural counties. A lot of Democratic campaigns have conceded rural districts to Republicans and focused on campaigning in cities and suburbs, but if Democrats could get more rural votes, especially in swing states and swing districts, they could reclaim the house next year and maybe the White House in 2028. How can they do that?
For some answers, we turn to Anthony Flaccavento and Erica Etelson, co-founders of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, R-U-B-I, RUBI. They’re also contributors to The Nation Magazine. Anthony is an organic farmer, former Democratic congressional candidate and community organizer in southern Virginia. He’s author of the book, Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up. Anthony Flaccavento, welcome back.

Anthony Flaccavento: Glad to be back, Jon. Thank you.

JW: And Erica Etelson is a political writer and former public interest attorney based in California, author of the book Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide. Her articles have appeared in The LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, High Country News and The Nation. Erica Etelson, welcome.

Erica Etelson: Thank you, Jon.

JW: Once upon a time, Democrats didn’t do so badly with rural voters in 1992, bill Clinton won 47% of the rural vote. Obama got 43%. Kamala Harris last November got 36%. Why did Kamala Harris do so poorly in rural America? Some people say it’s because rural America is racist and sexist. Some people say it’s because the Democrats are coastal elitists. What do you guys say?

AF: This is kind of RUBI’s raison d’être — trying to figure this very thing out, and then do something about it. It comes down in our thinking to economic betrayal, a kind of bipartisan economic betrayal that really started with Ronald Reagan, but for the most part and in most ways was continued during both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Everything from investor friendly, free trade policy that hollowed out factory towns to a laissez-faire attitude about antitrust enforcement, which allowed the big boys to get bigger and bigger, particularly damaging rural economies. So many different factors created a sense among millions of rural people that the system doesn’t work for ’em, that it’s been rigged against them by people very different from them who don’t care about ’em. And so that very real loss that they’ve experienced kind of created a foundation for the right to step in and stoke a lot of anger, a lot of outrage, a lot of grievance, but it’s all grounded in some real-world experience for millions of folks.

JW: Erica?

EE: Well, one thing I want to clarify because you mentioned that Harris didn’t do well in rural, but really that deficit Democrats deficit in rural goes back to Hillary Clinton. Obama was the last one who did at all reasonably well in rural and Hillary Clinton, Biden and Harris all have done about the same. So yeah, I agree with everything Anthony said about those economic drivers and that feeling of economic betrayal and that really goes hand-in-hand I think with another sense of betrayal of feeling that Democrats and really liberals more broadly really look down on rural people. You mentioned in your introduction the tendency to just toss off rural as ‘well, they’re just all a bunch of racists and sexists and they’re irredeemable deplorables, nothing you can do about it. We should just give up. Why do they just keep voting against their own interests? They’re such idiots, such losers’ — and that sense is really strong. People in rural feel that really strongly and they resent it understandably. It’s that sting of contempt. It really packs a punch.

JW: It seems now with Trump’s latest initiatives that we have an opportunity to try to change that because what Trump is doing right now hurts rural America. You’ve written about this recently in your column for The Nation. What’s at the top of that list right now?

EE: I’ll start with Medicaid. Huge issue for rural. One in five people in rural America are on Medicaid. Half of all births are paid for by Medicaid. 90% of drug addiction treatment is paid for by Medicaid. Medicaid payments really keep rural hospitals alive and for people who don’t know, we’re in a rural hospital closure crisis right now where 193 rural hospitals have closed in the past 20 years, and it’s predicted that quite a few more are going to close if those Medicaid payments dry up. I don’t think we can absolutely bank on that being political suicide as Josh Hawley called it in The New York Times, and I was really glad to see him say that and warn his fellow Republicans about that. I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that the Medicaid cuts will cause so much pain so quickly that it’s going to turn the tide for the midterms, and I certainly hope they still don’t go through. But yeah, Medicaid is definitely at the top of my list.

AF: The others are kind of death by a thousand cuts. They haven’t gotten anywhere near the coverage in the public debate as Medicaid.  Three categories: one is they reneged on billions of dollars of investments in planned American manufacturing that had started under Biden — things like batteries for storing renewable energy. Billions of dollars were committed to places like South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and now you have projects that were just getting off the ground or half-finished and have lost this federal investment that’s going to have huge job impacts. Second thing, Trump just recently came out against Biden’s broadband equity bill because it had the word ‘equity’ in it.  And, incredibly, the analysis says that the vast majority of the people who were benefiting from that broadband investment are beginning to, as the money was getting out, were the elderly veterans poor and working-class of vast majority white in rural areas.
Trump has now canceled that, and you have just in southwest Virginia where I am, dozens of projects that we’re bringing Wi-Fi to remote rural areas that are now like, how are we going to finish? We just got cut. Third thing is what they’ve done to farmers. Of course, there’s been a lot of talk about tariffs and how that’s hurt farmers, and that’s for sure, but there’s some lesser-known ones, two of them. One is that there were two programs that were incredibly useful to small farmers. One was called the Farm to School program, and another was called the Farm to Food Bank Program. Both of them paid farmers for produce and other healthy food and then put it in food boxes for low-income families or put it in kids’ school lunches. They have been eliminated completely those programs, and that was about a 2 billion market for farmers. So you not only have hungry people not getting that food, but you have farmers losing that. Then you have the fact that the Trump administration reneged on something like 30,000 contracts with farmers who had invested in things like protecting their water quality with fencing, renewable energy, soil building, all really good stuff, contracts with the USDA written and signed, and then they stopped them. These are the things that have gotten much less attention than Medicaid, and yet they’re critically important to rural.

JW: I noticed that the opinion polls show that rural voters are paying attention to these policies. Trump’s approval rating after his first a hundred days declined with rural voters. He started his term with 60% approval with rural after his first a hundred days, it was down to 46%. That’s a little higher than the nation as a whole, but it’s still a big drop. The question, of course, is the one Erica raised, whether that will change people’s votes starting with the midterm. I know your most prominent recent effort with the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, RUBI has been a campaign to convince the Democratic National Committee and the broader fundraising network of the left to devote substantially more resources to rural voters. The DNC is headed now, of course by Ken Martin, formerly chair of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party. How did things go with you and Ken Martin at the DNC?

AF: Well, they were very, very promising, and it’s true that Trump’s approval among rural people has fallen significantly. That’s really something, but here’s what hasn’t happened. Those voters have not gone to Democrats in the sense that Democrat’s approval remains incredibly abysmal somewhere in the mid to upper 20%. So as bad as Trump’s rating has gotten with rural, it isn’t helping Democrats, and that’s why RUBI thinks that the DNC and Democrats generally have got to do more than just complain about how bad Trump is. Of course, he’s bad. He’s insane, he’s horrible, but we have to win those folks. Trump could lose him, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to win. So what Ken and I discussed before, I said a word that he understood why people had left the Democratic Party in rural areas and in factory towns, working class communities. He said, ‘why wouldn’t they? We have bad policy that hurt their communities and then we’ve pulled out and now we only show up a few months before an election. It’s no wonder we’ve lost them.’
So he clearly understands that this is more than just an image problem the Democrats have. It’s a substance problem. And so the number one thing we discussed among several really exciting things is we are going to host, this is RUBI and several of our rural political allies with Ken, a meeting of donors from across the country sometime in August in which we present an opportunity for donors to put funds into rural and working class communities into their local Democratic committees, into candidates who are running in those districts and into grassroots organizations that are helping to either restore trust like we do through community works or doing rural organizing. And our hope is it will be the beginning of a major fund. I mean tens of millions of dollars that would be invested long-term in these rural places in order to start to win voters back through not just words, but through real action.

EE: Democrats or Independents like Dan Osborne, great example of an independent, they have to make the case. It’s just been too many years of sitting around mudslinging toward Trump, which is so easy to do and so tempting and the base loves it and rewards it, and the dollars flow in that direction. We’ve done more than enough of that, and it’s time to be making an affirmative case and not just by telling, but by showing. I mean we can tell and we have the Rural New Deal and other policy ideas that I think are really, really important and that’s the telling part. But I think there’s also the showing, which is showing up, being respectful, talking to people about what’s most important to them instead of coming in and telling them, well, this is what’s the most important thing to us and here’s why you should agree and get on board. One of RUBI’s other programs is our community works program where we partner with local Democratic committees to offer community services that are totally nonpolitical, but it’s in the name of the Democratic Party. So it’ll be like for example, the Page County Virginia Community Works program, but they’re just out there doing basic community service and showing that they can show up and be good neighbors and they care and they’re there to help the community not to tell people what to believe.

JW: You mentioned the Rural New Deal. This is a major proposal from RUBI co-authored by Progressive Democrats of America. Just briefly, it has 10 pillars, some of them we’ve talked about already. It starts with rebuild farm economies, ensure livable wages, dismantle monopolies, support local main street business, invest in infrastructure, starting with rural broadband, rebuild small towns centers, invest in rural healthcare. We’ve talked about Medicare and rural hospitals. One we didn’t talk about was fund rural public schools, keeping public schools going is something Trump has repeatedly threatened by promising this nationwide federal voucher program that would fund private schools. I think you guys have emphasized the way rural communities actually are very committed to keeping their public schools strong. Maybe we should talk about that for a minute.

AF: People love their public schools. There’s not this drive in rural areas the way there is in some of the wealthy places in the cities, rural people don’t start grooming their kids at two and three for high performance in prep schools. They accept and believe that public schools will give you a good education, and so there is a real strong commitment even when schools close, which is usually a matter of population decline. More often than not, those old public schools become community centers. So this whole play towards vouchers for alternatives is not playing well in rural, and I don’t see that it ever would.

JW: And I believe the Rural New Deal also includes an emphasis on pre-kindergarten and on free community college.

AF: Yes, community college. We don’t come out flat for all tuition free, which of course definitely some progressives do. We’re not opposed to discussion of it, but it’s more relevant and we believe it would be more useful to rural if community college and technical vocational training was expanded and strengthened because so many people there are really not going to go off and get a four-year degree because they don’t have a lot of options once they have that, but community college is extremely important and that’s why we recommended that it be made free.

EE: Yeah, the vocational colleges was one of the big things that Marie Gluesenkamp Perez ran on in her district. She really recognized that, ‘yeah, student loan forgiveness and four-year colleges higher ed, that’s great,’ but some of the people in my district are going to see that as, ‘well, that’s elitist. That’s not for me, so what are you going to do for me?’ So she really emphasized more the trade schools.

JW: You mentioned Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat in Washington state, just across the border from Portland, is the way I think of her district. Who else among the Democrats do you think is doing a good job at winning rural voters, for instance? What about Andy Beshear in Kentucky? Is he providing some examples to us?

EE: I think so for sure. In terms of nationally recognized Democrats, he would be at the top of my list. He framed the Medicaid cuts as an attack on rural America, and I think that’s exactly the way to go in a state like Kentucky. But I want to mention someone who I really love who’s not on the national radar. Her name is Sarah Keyeski, and she is a Wisconsin State Senator. She won in a very rural red district, and she grew up on a dairy farm. And I’m going to just actually read to you something from her website because going back to, I was talking before about how important it is to run depolarizing campaigns. So this is what she said, “are you tired of the politics of endless rage, toxic division, and demeaning personal attacks that don’t do a thing to help you live better? Well, I am too.” And then she goes on from there to describe her campaign, which focused on education, healthcare, and the economies of rural communities. And so, I think she’s a great example, and I think every Democrat should take a page from her campaign.

AF: Absolutely. The other one I’d mention is Chris Deluzio who’s representing a district in western Pennsylvania in the US Congress, and I really like his style. I like he’s relatively plainspoken, which is so, so critical. And by the way, not just for rural people, most people prefer plain, plain speaking. It’s just they’re so tired of all the cumbersome involved language. But the other thing about Deluzio that he has really kind of carved out as one of his focal areas is antitrust is really going after monopolies. And that’s something that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, when people talk about what happened to working class jobs and what happened to rural communities. It’s just so important to understand how 40 years of letting the big get bigger and more powerful has been so devastating. So you have people like Deluzio leading the charge. You have some state attorney generals who are leading the charge, Keith Ellison in Minnesota, and we don’t know what Trump’s going to do on antitrust.
Their justice Department dropped the case that the Biden Justice Department had brought to prohibit, I guess you would call it price favoring that was offered to the big corporate grocery chains at the expense of small businesses. Walmart, and these major players not only have economies of scale, but they get much lower prices for the things they buy and put on their shelves than small to midsize grocers do much lower prices, and this is clearly against the law going back to the, I think it’s called the Robinson-Patman Act, and yet it’s been allowed to happen. Now the Trump Justice Department has dropped that case, and that’s going to harm a lot of small businesses and could also be one of those turning points.

JW: Obviously, this is a long-term project to restore support for progressive Democratic candidates in rural America, but we do have elections in Virginia coming up in a couple months, and we have midterms in a year and a half. What’s on the immediate agenda of RUBI? Where should we focus and what might we win?

AF: Imagine that Trump has lost pretty steadily support among all Americans, but even among working folks in rural, there’s plenty to hate about Trump, even for people who voted. But what is there to love about the opposition? What is there that the opposition is offering that’s so different? This is where something like the Rural New Deal is a platform going beyond the resistance to make an affirmative case for rural communities, for working-class. This is central because we can get people to stop loving Trump, but if they don’t choose another political option, then the results will be mixed at best. And so this is where we’re focused, put forward a clear and compelling vision for how we’re going to make this economy and this political system actually function for everyday people.

JW: Anthony Flaccavento and Erica Etelson, co-founders of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and contributors to The Nation Magazine. Anthony and Erica, thanks for your work — and thanks for talking with us today.

EE: Thanks So much.

AF: Thank you, Jon.
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JW: Now it’s time for 20 minutes Without Trump, a special feature of this broadcast. The Left has hated J. Edgar Hoover for a hundred years, ever since the Palmer raids of 1919, the attacks on radicals that began his career. Now, there’s a terrific new biography of Hoover that puts it all together, from beginning to end, with a lot of stunning new information. It’s called G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. The author is Beverly Gage. She teaches history at Yale. She writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker. Beverly Gage, welcome to the program.

BG: It’s great to be here, Jon.

JW: We know a lot about the bad things Hoover did: wiretapping Martin Luther King and then trying to blackmail him into committing suicide right before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize; and Co-intel Pro, the Secret campaign to disrupt the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement. But your book reminds us that Hoover also did some things that were not bad. So let’s be fair and remind us what’s on your list.

BG: Well, it is true that the book tries to take a pretty balanced view of Hoover, which actually isn’t that hard to do when you have someone who has been so villainized for so long. Even acknowledging a handful of good things puts you somewhere in the revisionist camp. But I would say that most of the good things that Hoover did in his life came out of a tradition of professional government service that he learned during the progressive era when he was a young man, he believed in the power of the state. He believed in the power of expertise. And so there are lots of moments where he is actually acting as almost a civil libertarian, and he opposed Japanese mass incarceration and internment during the Second World War, which was not a popular view in even the Roosevelt administration. There are some great moments in the book where he stands up to Richard Nixon and Richard Nixon thinks that Hoover has become some sort of civil libertarian, and then there are just some moments where the FBI actually delivers on what it’s supposed to deliver on — which is solving crimes and enforcing the law.

JW: Yeah, for example, in 1964, he helped prosecute the Klan killers of the Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers, Mickey Sch Werner, James Goodman, and Andrew Cheney. I want to talk for a minute more about Hoover and Nixon. One of the good things that he did was refuse Nixon’s request to go after Daniel Ellsberg after the release of the Pentagon Papers. What exactly did Nixon want? This is 1969, 1970. And why did Hoover refuse?

BG: The FBI didn’t refuse altogether to investigate. They were kind of looking into things, but Nixon wanted a much more aggressive campaign, and Hoover held back for a couple of reasons. One is that in 1969 and 70, Nixon and Henry Kissinger had already asked Hoover to wiretap White House staffers members of the press who were suspected of leaking. And Hoover went along with it. He did it, but he wasn’t sure it was going to be a very good idea, and he was really worried about what would happen if it came out, particularly the wiretapping of members of the press. So he’s already cautious about those things. He often said that he was friendly with Daniel as well. So there was a personal side to this story, and Hoover was just growing a little bit more cautious in his old age, and I think a little bit more aware of just how combustible and controversial it would be in the end. And rightly so. He says, we got to really hold back. They’re going to make Ellsberg into a martyr. And Nixon, of course, didn’t listen to him.

JW: What did Nixon do when Hoover refused to go after Ellsberg the way Nixon wanted him to?

BG:   Yeah, it’s one of the moments where Nixon says, okay, if the FBI isn’t going to do exactly what I want, I’m going to have my own team. And this is one of the origins of the plumbers and the plumbers themselves who were sort of Nixon’s dirty trick squad. They had members of the FBI, former agents and others who had been trained by Hoover, but who were now willing to do Nixon’s bidding a little bit more directly.

JW: And that plumber’s thing, as I recall, didn’t work out that well for Nixon.

BG: Yeah, he might’ve seen that this, he had listened to Edgar. Maybe it would’ve all been different. It’s actually funny when you listen to the Nixon tapes. Watergate happens right after Hoover’s death, and a few years in, you hear Nixon saying, if my old friend Edgar were still around, it wouldn’t all be collapsing around me like this.

JW: But before Hoover dies, just a year before he died, came the event that damaged him more than anything else in his lifetime. The breaking at the FBI Office in Media, Pennsylvania, March, 1971 — remind us what happened there.

BG: This is really a fantastic story, and it’s been told tremendously well in a book by Betty Medsker called The Burglary, as well as a terrific documentary film called 1971 by Johanna Hamilton. And it’s an incredible story, first of all, because it’s just a small band of activists in the Philadelphia area who in 1971 decide that they want to expose what the FBI has been doing to the new left. And so they break into a very small regional office in media, Pennsylvania, which actually happens to be right next to my hometown. So I felt a kind of hometown connection to this story. And they go in and they steal all of Hoover’s files, all of the files that are in there. And this really becomes the moment that we get some documentation of what almost everyone in the new left understood was happening, which was FBI infiltration surveillance of a wide range of activists. But the really great part of the story is that the FBI fails to catch them. And so they actually really got away with it and came out and revealed themselves about 10 years ago. Turns out the bunch of good anti-war activists from the Philadelphia area,

JW: Later that year, after the media FBI burglary in the fall of 1971, Nixon decided it was time for Hoover to go. You say Nixon’s advisors suggested various inducements he could offer Hoover.

BG: They do a lot of very funny brainstorming about it. They’re like, maybe we can bump him up to the Supreme Court.

JW: Yeah, that that’s the one that really got to me.

BG: Exactly. You kidding? But the beautiful thing about that story is that Nixon actually brings Hoover in, tries to have this conversation, tries to make the case that the moment has come to step down, and Hoover more or less refuses. He says, well, Dick, if you insist and you order me to step down, you are the President. Obviously I would have to do it, but I don’t want to do it. And Nixon says, oh, okay, well if you don’t want to do it, nobody’s, nobody’s insisting on this.

JW: And why didn’t Nixon fire him when he decided it was time for Hoover to go?

BG: This is one of the great questions of Hoover’s career, and it’s not just Nixon, right? Hoover was director of the FBI for 48 years. So he started under Calvin Coolidge, and he lasts under eight presidents, four of them Democrats, four of them Republicans. And so that’s one of the big questions. How did he do it? And I think there are a combination of factors. So one that we wouldn’t tend to think about today is the fact that even very late in life, Hoover was pretty popular. And for most of his career, he was incredibly popular. He was one of the most popular, best respected public servants in America, certainly in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time we get to the Nixon years, I think Nixon sees a couple of things going on. One is that he really based a lot of his 1968 campaign and that a lot of his domestic politics around a kind of Hoover esque law and order message.
And so he’s been celebrating Hoover, and he’s nervous that law and order conservatives are going to be upset with him if he forces Hoover out. Hoover knows a lot of things about the Nixon administration as well from the secret wiretaps that he had planted for them. And there are great quotes from kind of the end of the first Nixon term in which Nixon says that he fears if they really try to ease Hoover out, that Hoover is this man who’s going to bring down the temple around him, that he knows everything and it’s just too dangerous.

JW: Hoover died in office May, 1972. What did Nixon say when he heard the news?

BG: Nixon said, “that old cocksucker!”  It’s an interesting moment because Nixon, I think he’s very relieved when Hoover dies because it solves a problem that he’s been trying to solve for a while, or at least he thinks it will solve his problem. But there also seems to be some real grief there. I mean, this is someone who had been in his life for 25 years. They had socialized together. They had been political allies

JW: That phrase, “that old cocksucker” — you could take it to be an expression of admiration, which you do in the book; but you could also take it as a reference to Hoover’s homosexuality. So we need to talk about Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson. That relationship was not a secret, right? What did people know about Hoover and Tolson during his lifetime?

BG: This was the key relationship of Hoover’s life. And Clyde Tolson was his second in command at the FBI for most of his career, really, from the 1930s onward. Tolson became an agent in 1928, and it is a funny combination of a very open and very public relationship, and then very inaccessible and in some ways quite secretive relationship. The open part of it is that they worked very closely together at the FBI for four decades. And so their private and public lives were really fused. Neither one of them married, and they were obviously each other’s primary social partner. So they traveled together, they doubled dated together, they went to nightclubs together and the racetrack together. And everyone in Washington, in New York, in la, the places they hung out knew to treat them as a couple, and they were a very widely accepted social couple. Now, whether you could then describe them as a gay couple is a slightly different question. So certainly they pushed back against that.

JW: Your evidence on this relationship includes Hoover’s private vacation photos. These are remarkable document,s and we salute you for publishing these in the book. Tell us about them, and what you make of them.

BG: Yeah. Hoover left behind these amazing photo albums, and they are his personal photo albums. And certainly in the thirties and forties especially, a lot of what’s, there are very, very intimate photos of his vacations with Tulsa. The ones that I published are my favorites, but there are dozens and dozens of these that you could choose from. And a lot of them are really very intimate shots in bathrobes, in bathing, suits out on the beach, kind of private moments of gazing at each other, them with their arms thrown around each other in a sort of friendly way, more than a romantic way necessarily. But what really struck me about those is, on the one hand, just their genuine intimacy, which you can really see and feel in them. And then the sheer number of them. 

JW: What did Bobby Kennedy call Hoover and Tolson?

BG: Bobby Kennedy was not super nice to them or big fans of them, and he used to refer to them as “J. Edna and Clyde.”

JW: I also was amazed to see that starting in 1962, the Mattachine Society, the first gay organization, started inviting him to their events.

BG: That was a great file to come across. So the local Mattachine Society in Washington DC is clearly having some fun with the FBI and at a moment when it required actually a lot of bravery and confidence to do that. But they start putting Hoover on their mailing list, inviting him to such events as the homosexual in America, a lecture for those who might want to be informed. And Hoover gets very worked up about this. He gets them called into the FBI, and they say, well, we’ll take you off our list if you’ll take us off of yours. Great.

JW: Great story. So now back to the beginning, young J. Edgar Hoover went to college at George Washington University in Washington DC and joined a fraternity called Kappa Alpha. This is one of my favorite parts of your book. Tell us about Kappa Alpha.

BG: Kappa Alpha is really a fascinating institution, and one that I didn’t know much about when I started writing about Hoover. The National Kappa Alpha had been formed in 1865 key year end of the Civil War to honor the memory and the lost cause of Robert E. Lee. And so throughout the late 19th and into the earliest 20th century, they’re a really key institution for white southern men, particularly very prominent white southern political men. And two of the biggest figures in the fraternity at the moment that Hoover joined were John Temple Graves, who was a segregationist, pro lynching southern editor, very famous figure, a great champion of the Atlanta Race riot, and not in the ways one might want. And the other was Thomas Dixon, who was the author of the Klansman, which is the film that became the Birth of a Nation. And they’re really the two standard bearers of the fraternity on a cultural level. And then you’ve got all these southern Democrats who were actively engaged in creating segregation in the early 20th century. They’re all kind of in the alumni chapters around dc and I think this is a lot of where Hoover gets both his racial, and to some degree, his political education is in his fraternity.

JW: And Kappa Alpha, I learned from Google, is still going strong. They have chapters at 122 schools. We record our program in Los Angeles, and there’s a chapter of Kappa Alpha at USC, and it was in the news just last year. It was one of six fraternities that refused to accept the university’s new rules on preventing sexual assault at frat parties. Kappa Alpha still going strong.
We have to talk about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Their execution in 1953 for stealing the secret of the atom bomb and giving it to the Russians was one of Hoover’s highest profile projects. But now we know that the FBI basically went after the wrong guy. The Russians did get American atomic secrets, but not from Julius and Ethel. They got them from real nuclear scientists –first of all, from Klaus Fuchs, who was caught by the Brits, and then from a brilliant young American physicist named Ted Hall.
Ted Hall was identified in the Venona decrypts that the FBI had as a key Soviet spy at Los Alamos.  The FBI investigated Ted Hall for spying, but they never arrested him. And he went on to live a long and happy life as a scientist. There’s a book about his life. It’s called Bombshell, the Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel. And at the same time we learned about Ted Hall, we also learned that David Greenglass, who was the FBI’s key witness against the Rosenbergs, the brother of Ethel, admitted that he had lied about her in the trial, that she had not typed the documents Julius gave to the Soviets. And so his lies sent her to the electric chair. That story was told in an interview by Sam Roberts at the New York Times in 1996, and he later wrote a book about it called The Brother.
That book had one unforgettable sentence: William P. Rogers, who was Deputy Attorney General at the time of the execution, and later Secretary of State under Nixon, admitted to Sam Roberts of the New York Times, that the government’s objective was never to kill the Rosenbergs, but to get them to confess. And he said, of Ethel, “she called our bluff.”
“She called our bluff.” So Julius was a spy, but he didn’t give the secret of the a-bomn to the Russians. Ethel was framed by the FBI and her brother. The real spy was never prosecuted. My question for you is: why did Hoover decide to go after the Rosenbergs instead of Ted Hall?

BG: Well, the Venona project is a really interesting and somewhat complicated story. On the one hand, these are decrypt that the Army gets during the war. They begin after the war to collaborate with the FBI in trying to sort out what is in these Soviet communications. And they find that a lot of them have to do with intelligence and espionage. And so beginning in the late forties, they worked together. Vona leads them, in fact, to a pretty substantial number of people, including Julius Rosenberg. It leads them to far more people, as you suggest, than they’re actually able to prosecute. That’s partly because their number one goal with Vona is to keep its existence secret. They’re able to go after Julius Rosenberg because they have a witness who is willing to testify because you have David and then Ruth Greenglass, you are able to actually do something in court.
And during the entire Rosenberg case, the existence of Venona is not known. Though people do have a sense that there’s something that the FBI knows that they’re holding back. And in fact, they’re right about that. But on the other hand, because you want to keep this secret, if you can’t find a witness and you can’t find material evidence, you can know to a great degree of certainty that someone like Ted Hall has been engaged in atomic espionage. But if you’re prioritizing secrecy, you’re not going to go after him. And that was the decision that the FBI, the Justice Department and the Army made together when they went after the Rosenbergs. As you say, the hope really was that the Rosenbergs would then flip and talk about other people, and they would kind of keep following this chain down the line and be able to go further. But the Rosenbergs do in some sense, really, really stop it.

JW: And while Hoover was failing to get Julius and Ethel to cooperate, he was giving those top secret counter-espionage documents, the Venona decrypts, to the top British intelligence official in the United States, Kim Philby, who was soon shown to be a Soviet spy. How devastating was that for Hoover?

BG: It was pretty bad. That wasn’t a great moment, right? So Kim Philby is this kind of illustrious British counterintelligence person who gets sent over to be the liaison to the FBI and the CIA in the very late 1940s. But of course, turns out to have been a Soviet spy, the entire time he’s working for the British. So that was pretty devastating to American intelligence, the FBI and the CIA both.

JW: And what did the CIA conclude about this whole episode with giving the Venona secrets to Kim Philby?

BG: One CIA official says something pretty devastating, which is that the FBI and the CIA would’ve been better off doing nothing about Soviet espionage in the forties and fifties, rather than engaging in what they did and handing it all over, in essence, to Kim Philby and the Soviets.

JW: So you’ve said how popular J. Edgar Hoover was at the peak of his career. You have this startling opinion poll in 1964 ,after Hoover denounced Martin Luther King as “America’s most notorious liar.” How did that go over with the public?

BG: This is a really famous moment. It’s still a point of reference today. The moment that Hoover really publicly goes after King and calls him “the most notorious liar,” and today, of course, we think “evil J. Edgar Hoover, nobody would support that kind of attack on the sainted Martin Luther King.
But at the time, that is not at all how the politics played out. So in a poll conducted in that moment, a full 50% of Americans say that they support Hoover. 16% say they’re on King’s side. And then a whole bunch of people say they don’t really know which side to be on. And what’s interesting to me about that poll is that it suggests that some of our more comforting national narratives should be rethought a little bit — because that’s actually what the politics of the sixties looked like.

JW: You can conclude your story of J. Edgar Hoover that this is a story about America in the 20th century — what we tolerated, and what we refused to see.

BG: Right.  Part of the goal in this book is not just to have it be about this very, very interesting and long lived and influential man named J. Edgar Hoover, but really to tell a story about the growth of American government, particularly of the security state over the course of the 20th century, and to tell a story about Washington and national politics itself. And I think that Hoover conceived of himself as being a person who really policed the limits of American democracy and decided what was going to be legitimate speech and what was going to be illegitimate speech. And he did a lot of that in secret. And so I think today there’s something really to be contended with about the idea. First of all, that Hoover was as popular as he was. We tend to think, oh, he was a rogue actor and therefore had people only known what he was up.Surely they would’ve rejected it.
But he was pretty open about a lot of what he was doing, and in fact had very deep and widespread support. And I think that tells us something different about our story of the 20th century than we might like to think. And then the piece that was secret, which was some of the details of his secret apparatus, also ought to lead us to think really seriously about the kind of security state that was built out of the pressures of the 20th century, the ways in which it has contained political possibility and political speech over the course of the 20th century. And we should think about how much of that we want in our own lives today.

JW: The book is G-Man: J.Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.  In the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot called it “crisply written, prodigiously researched, and frequently astonishing.” The author is Beverly Gage. Bev, thanks for this book — and thanks for talking with us today.

BG: Thanks, Jon.

JW: We spoke with Beverly Gage about J. Edgar Hoover in December, 2023.