J. Edgar Hoover's contribution to the FBI's organizational failure from 1939 and 1945 (original) (raw)
Abstract
J. Edgar Hoover was a man of great clarity of purpose, and his purpose was always focused on the welfare of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Bureau). The Bureau had already been in existence for several years when, as a young man, Hoover was appointed as its director and eventually became its embodiment. He transformed it from a barely known federal agency into a national institution, with a respectable reputation for efficiency and achievement; an institution regarded as the most definite assurance that crime in the United States will not pay. Hoover directed the Bureau so long that he seemed set in the political scene in Washington. There was that bulldog face: those tiny, squinting eyes; the clenched jaws; and squashed-in nose – features so distinctive that any decent cartoonist could produce a familiar likeness with a few strokes of a pen. It was a face of confident power. When Hoover was appointed Director of the FBI (Bureau), he was relatively unknown and hardly ever noticed. Upon his appointment, Time magazine described him as distinguished by “an unusually accurate and comprehensive memory”. However, most of the press ignored Hoover. It was only almost five years following his appointment to the Bureau that he was written about by the Congressional Record thereby attaining such distinction symbolic of prominent Washington bureaucrats. But before long, once he had consolidated power and genuinely improved the agency, Hoover opted to go public, build a reputation for his Bureau, and nurture what came to be a cult around himself. Such weird accounts of Hoover conjure an image of a man who regarded himself as infallible and god-like, and who exerted immense influence over thousands of lives. Hoover acquired the degree of authority and prerogatives rarely seen in and possessed by bureaucrats in a democratic, egalitarian polity. The longer Hoover stayed in power, the more pervasive these prerogatives had evolved thereby giving him an aura of indispensability. Indeed, some suggested that in times of trouble the ascension of Hoover to power was just what the country needed. However, in spite of all the institutional, cultural and political changes Hoover initiated, a closer scrutiny of his actions and policies reveals that he utilized his power and influence to pursue his personal ambitions which gave rise to political turf wars, critical intelligence failure, flawed organizational structure, and a maladaptive law enforcement culture. As shall be seen in the ensuing discussion, these problems comprise Hoovers’ contributions to the Bureau’s organizational roots of failure, and impacted on the Bureau’s overall performance as an intelligence and investigative institution during the years following his death.
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