I believe that when many people think of the Hegemonic Country of the United States, what comes to mind is some stereotypical but also deeply rooted labels - FBI agents, CIA spies, aircraft tanks, artillery, aircraft carrier satellites, and so on.
Because of the influence of many Hollywood blockbusters, FBI agents seem to have become a special group of people, they are all skilled, proficient in Chinese, handsome or feminine, and kill people crisply and ruthlessly.
But in reality, in the United States, the people working in the FBI are just a group of civil servants, and those in charge of field work are only police officers with greater authority, and perhaps a very small number of them who are born in the military will have some fist and foot kung fu and gun means.
In the early days, they were just a small organization with dozens of detectives, and the reason why they can have such a high reputation today, and have developed into a huge intelligence agency covering the whole world of 30,000 people, is greatly related to its first director.
And this man also played an important role in the history of the "democracy first" United States, and when his power reached its peak, presidents, including Roosevelt, were to be completely subordinated to his glory, and all the high-ranking dignitaries of high society did not dare to oppose this person.
It is said that no one knows how many secrets he knows.
When he died, out of fear of his 48 years of surprise, the United States immediately issued a regulation that the future position of FBI director could not be served for more than 10 years.
This legendary figure was the FBI's first director: John Edgar Hoover.
At the beginning of the new year in 1985, in a family in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, the baby Hoover fell to the ground, his father and mother were ordinary people, and only the uncle of the mother Anna was the honorary consul of Switzerland in the United States.
Therefore, Hoover's family situation is not very good, and when he was young, his father always showed a mediocre state, and he was very weak and sickly, and the beams in the family were carried by his mother, who gave her young children a lot of care and dependence.
In this environment, the young Hoover did not become a sensitive and introverted person, on the contrary, he inherited his mother's character, and began to gradually become interested in various social issues, and the idea of politics was born.
So he studied diligently in school, his grades were always excellent, and then after finishing high school, he successfully entered the famous George Washington University.
In college, Hoover did not hesitate to choose a law major, because he still wanted to enter politics, and if he wanted to join the government, the most common way was to become a legal elite.
In the process of learning, the clever Hoover also continued to pay attention to the changes in tenses, and he gradually learned to look at things dialectically with a unique eye.
For example, the law he studied is not so supreme in his view, he believes in pragmatism, that is, at some necessary special time, special methods should be used, if it is to really eliminate bad people, then even violate the procedure and ignore the law.
In this respect, then-New York City Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock was Hoover's idol, as he used a long history to combat fraud and immorality by enforcing justice against the law.
So, by this time, Hoover had laid the groundwork for his future actions—valuing actual results more than the legitimate legitimacy of the process.
After graduating from the University of Washington, Hoover began to seek employment in the government department, during the First World War, when all the units were understaffed, so he successfully entered the U.S. Department of Justice, after which he was quickly promoted to head of the enemy country's civil registration department with his independent ideas and outstanding personal ability.
But Hoover's ambitions naturally didn't stop there, so in 1919 he volunteered to create a separate general intelligence service for the Justice Department, when he was only twenty-four years old.
As a pragmatist, Hoover was thoughtful at a young age and had a deep city government, but this did not show it, he was always very active and enthusiastic in front of his superiors, and his insight in his work was amazing, and he was very keen to see people and things, more detailed than other colleagues.
In addition, he is personally very keen on the collection of intelligence, whether it is some work-related terrorist information or non-work-related national political news.
It is precisely because of this that Hoover successfully captured a number of German spies externally and dealt with many opposition figures that the government did not want to see internally, such an excellent work performance, so that the eyes of high-level personnel finally fell on him.
As the course of the war intensified, such brilliant intelligence agents as Hoover were in short supply.
So, in December 1924, the U.S. government officially appointed the 29-year-old Hoover as director of the U.S. Bureau of Investigation.
At the time, it was just an ordinary job adjustment, and no one knew that this appointment would affect the history of the United States to some extent.
Hoover, a person with a distinct personality, must have made some big moves when he first took office, and he first carried out an earth-shaking rectification of the personnel aspects of the department.
At that time, the level of personnel in the Bureau of Investigation was uneven, so he had to dismiss all those who had been in the mixed life at one time, and even stipulated that in the future, people must have a university diploma or be born in law.
Then he established a very perfect set of rules and regulations, so that the departments within the bureau performed their duties and completed a huge leap in work efficiency.
But at the same time, he also showed his personality, kicking out some people who were capable but disobedient to him, or sending them to carry out tasks that made them never emerge, including Melvin Pervis, who was recognized as the strongest agent at the time.
Obviously, Hoover's image gradually became a strong dictator, but in response to the national crisis, he was equally brave enough to stand up, even personally participating in the arrest operation, and ignoring the various death threats he received.
This is the true and complex side of Hoover, and no one can say that he is morally high, but it is also impossible to deny that he was a very capable person.
That is why he plays a very important role in the U.S. government, because they are clearly more inclined to flawed but brilliant Hoover than noble and incompetent people.
Under his iron fist, the FBI soon became the country's sword, when a wave of bank robbery was set off in the Midwest, and the number of criminal gangs was huge, and they had a firepower comparable to that of the police, so they could always easily escape the law after committing a crime.
And the United States is a capitalist country, so those bankers only have interests in their eyes, often because of debt disputes to make some civilian families ruined, so when many banks were robbed, people not only did not condemn, but supported the robbers, and even regarded them as folk heroes.
After the local government could not help them and turned to Washington for help, the IBI people intervened, and under Hoover's orders, the agents attacked with all their might, killing and arresting the famous leaders of the gang, John Dillinger, Elvin Carpis, and others, and became famous.
Hoover also succeeded in expanding the power and size of the Bureau of Investigation with his outstanding achievements, and officially changed its name to the "Federal Bureau of Investigation".
He built on this to make a series of more rigorous deployments, such as helping to create the FBI laboratory for more sophisticated analysis of field data, and expanding the fingerprint archives of the forensic department to create the largest fingerprint database ever recorded.
In 1942, the German submarine U-boat loaded with two teams of Nazi agents secretly landed in Florida and Long Island, intending to carry out sabotage in the United States, and their plans were very elaborate, but one of them was quickly countered by the FBI and gave full account of the plan, resulting in the arrest of the eight before they could do anything.
There are many more such things, the importance of the intelligence service in the war is unquestionable, and the Bureau of Investigation under Hoover is pervasive, stealing countless very important classified information.
At the same time, he is also vigorously suppressing those radicals and unstable elements internally, vigorously searching for spies, as long as he is identified as a threat, even if he exceeds his authority, he will choose to eliminate them.
Because of these outstanding contributions from Hoover and the Federal Investigation, U.S. President Harry S. Truman spoke highly of him in his later memoirs:
"This country has reason to be proud of our security apparatus and confident in them. They allowed us to nearly avoid riots and espionage in World War II. ”
But as his power grew, Hoover's boldness grew, and in the famous Winona Project incident later in the war, the FBI was responsible for inheriting a pre-war cooperation project with Britain to spy on the activities of Soviet spies in Britain and the United States, and then after Hoover intercepted this top-secret information in the United States, he did not report to the top government officials, including President Truman or General Marshall, but locked the documents in the safe of his office.
In this way, the FBI, under Hoover's leadership, rapidly increased the expansion of power through the war, and when the war was over, their tentacles had penetrated into all corners of the country and even the world, and these elite agents all obeyed Hoover's orders alone, as if his private army could not control them even the president.
If hoover did make an important contribution to protecting national security during the war years, he gradually began to forge his vast intelligence empire later.
He listed more than 10,000 suspected disloyalty to the state, froze their habeas corpus directly, and carried them out on his own initiative without the president's approval.
There are many unconstitutional secret plans like this that have appeared in his hands, like the famous "anti-espionage program" that was revealed, and Hoover used the guise of maintaining national security against organizations at home that he himself considered a threat, such as the Black Panther Party, the Southern Christian Leaders Conference formed by Martin Luther King Jr., the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party in the United States, and so on.
Above all, he has taken a variety of ways, including infiltration, theft, illegal eavesdropping, forged documents and spreading rumors against key members of the target organization, and even incitement to violence and murder, which are already serious illegal activities, and most of these organizations do not really disturb social security in themselves.
In addition to the civil radicals and party members, the high-ranking officials and rich people of high society could not get rid of the control of Director Hoover, because he could easily obtain all the information of almost any American at that time, there was no privacy at all, and the deepest secrets could be quickly excavated.
Behind these well-dressed politicians or high-class people in the United States are full of scandals about invisible people, almost all of which have been collected neatly and neatly by Hoover, including nude photos of Marilyn Monroe and nude photos of President Roosevelt's wife Eleanor.
This became part of his enormous energy, as if he had mastered the power of life and death in the United States.
No one knows how many secrets he holds, which is why no president dares to fire him, because the president does not know, and it is completely impossible to determine that there is no part of these secrets about himself.
Hoover thus became a myth in Washington, D.C., and the most terrible nightmare in the hearts of many people, and his subordinates were in awe of him, and there is a very interesting story about this.
Hoover allegedly liked to annotate in the margins of the memo when he read it, and if the memo's margins were too narrow, he would write: Pay attention to the boundaries.
But the funniest thing is that none of the subordinates dared to ask him what he meant by this sentence, so he had to speculate desperately on his own, and finally interpreted it as if he was asking whether there was any change in the border, so he sent a commissioner to investigate the boundary between the United States and Canada and the United States and Mexico many times.
The truth didn't come out until a week later, when the FBI's frequent border surveys even led to the arrest of The Communist Leader Garth Hauer.
This is Hoover's deterrent power, and he can make anyone feel heartfelt fear.
As a result, he controlled the entire situation in the United States for 48 years, and in this long process, the president of the United States has changed 8 times, and the chief prosecutor has 16, but the FBI director has always been named J. Edgar Hoover, and he has powers that no FBI leader can surpass.
Many government officials tried to pull Hoover off the horse, but until his death, there were still many people in Congress who firmly supported him, and in 1927, he finally died at home because of high blood pressure.
When he heard of Hoover's death, the serving U.S. President Richard Nixon said that Hoover was lucky because he died at the right time, and he had not yet stepped down from his post, otherwise he would have been assassinated by many forces.
But in his national address that followed, Nixon's tone of voice took another turn, saying, "As FBI director, Mr. Hoover possessed sincere loyalty, remarkable ability, and extraordinary dedication." It can be said that he is a legend in the era in which he himself lived. ”
Nixon's attitude toward Hoover's death was that "danger is gone from us", but whether hoover made the country safer or Hoover's departure made him breathe a sigh of relief, I am afraid that only he himself knows.
Hoover was definitely a man of great controversy, which has not ended until now, but we also undeniably say that he was a true legend, and as a government official, he did make a great contribution to the country, so that the FBI headquarters in Washington today (J. Edgar Hoover Building) named after him.
He seemed to be forever wrapped in mystery, and Hoover never divulged the earth-shattering secrets he possessed, and even outsiders could not be sure that they were real, but Hoover himself knew very well that this was the source of his supreme power.