Why J. Edgar Hoover’s biographer worries about Kash Patel running the FBI
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist, to be FBI director has prompted politicians to draw historical comparisons.
J. Edgar Hoover headed the FBI with almost limitless authority for almost half a century. Democrats call him in when they warn about Mr. Patel, Which suggests he will target Mr. Trump’s political enemies. Republicans compare Hoover’s tenure to what they say is the modern “deep state” that resists and harasses Mr. Trump.
Why did we write this?
Kash Patel, nominated to run the FBI, has suggested he would use the agency to target political opponents. An expert at J. Edgar Hoover compares the two and assesses what’s at stake.
Yale University professor Beverly Gage won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her book “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The book examined how Hoover built and ran the agency, and was the first book in decades to deal with his complex and often dark legacy.
We caught up with Ms. Gage for a Q&A. She says she is concerned that Mr. Patel’s policies could trump his talk of making the agency more transparent and accountable.
“We have a contradiction between two different risks,” she says. “One is kind of like an independent, unaccountable, unelected FBI, like the one that Hoover ran. The other is this politicized, highly partisan version that Patel seems to want.” The second version is “probably the bigger danger,” she says.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist, to be the next director of the FBI has prompted politicians to draw historical comparisons.
J. Edgar Hoover headed the FBI with almost limitless authority for almost half a century. Democrats call him in when they warn about Mr. Patel, Which indicates that he will target political enemies. Republicans compare Hoover’s tenure to what they say is the modern “deep state” that resists and harasses Mr. Trump.
So we went to the expert. Yale University professor Beverly Gage won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her book “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The book examines how Hoover built and ran the agency, and is the first substantive work in decades to deal with his complex and often dark legacy.
Why did we write this?
Kash Patel, nominated to run the FBI, has suggested he would use the agency to target political opponents. An expert at J. Edgar Hoover compares the two and assesses what’s at stake.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start with the big picture. What do you think about these comparisons between Hoover and Mr. Patel?
What strikes me as a Hoover biographer is actually how different Kash Patel and J. Edgar Hoover were.
Hoover was a great institutionalist. He spent his entire career in government. He believed in the strength and independence of the FBI. He loved the FBI. Perhaps he loved the FBI so much, he came to regard it as a kind of great protector of the American way of life.
On the other hand, Kash Patel comes with a wrecking ball. He has said he wants to limit the FBI’s independence and make it more responsive to the political needs and desires of the White House. And he really wants, in many ways, to dismantle the bureaucracy that Hoover built. He said he wanted to close the FBI headquarters inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
Hoover manipulated and sometimes threatened legislators, including presidents, who stood in his way. Between the isolated institutional power that Hoover amassed and the FBI’s loyalty to the president, what do you think poses a greater risk?
Hoover built a bureaucracy that he used to achieve his own political goals. Sometimes it enhanced his own strength. Sometimes this was to protect secret FBI files. Sometimes this made his power known in Washington. He is known to have files on members of Congress, members of the press, and major activists such as Martin Luther King.
He abused the civil liberties of thousands upon thousands of Americans, often people doing things that were perfectly legal. So, in some ways, Hoover invented how to use a large institution like the FBI to advance your own political goals. But the interesting thing is that it wasn’t exactly partisan the way he did it.
Kash Patel comes in and says, “I believe in Donald Trump. I wrote a series of children’s books about Donald Trump in which I call him King Donald. “And I’m here to do whatever Donald Trump wants me to do.”
We have a contradiction between two different risks. The first is a kind of independent, unaccountable, unelected FBI, like the one Hoover ran. The other is this highly politicized and partisan version that Patel seems to want.
This seems weird, because I’m not a huge fan of J.K. Edgar Hoover. But I think Hoover had a real understanding that for the FBI to maintain any kind of real legitimacy — in terms of its investigations, or in terms of people believing what it says — it had to be outside of partisan politics, otherwise its credibility would remain so. You will collapse. So, at this moment, I think this hyper-partisan, hyper-politicized version that Patel is promoting is probably the biggest danger.
Are you concerned about Mr. Patel at the head of the FBI?
I’m concerned about Patel at the helm of the FBI.
See, some of what he says makes a certain amount of sense. And some of what Patel wants is more checks and balances on the FBI’s power—greater accountability and transparency—to the extent that he wants to achieve these things wholeheartedly, some of them are a good idea.
But I think that’s not his deepest agenda. His deepest agenda is to seize this incredibly powerful secret institution and turn it against the enemies of the Trump administration. He has publicly said he wants it Prosecution of members of the press. He wants to go after politicians. He wants to file cases against people who criticize the president. This seems to me to be very dangerous and very hostile to the traditions of freedom of expression and democracy.
There is this real tension and contradiction in what Patel says, between “I am the great reformer; I will come in and make this an institution that serves all citizens with transparency, integrity, and a lack of partisanship, and then these incredibly partisan “I will crush the enemies of the administration, whether they are the political elite, the media, or the movements on the ground.” And these things don’t go together.
From the outside, I tend to see the partisan side prevailing over the reformist side. But I think maybe we’ll find out which one he really means.
Mr. Patel has called the FBI “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley told me a few days ago that he believed the FBI was working “Like J. Edgar Hoover on steroids.“ Do you think such criticisms are fair and justified? Are there similarities between the way the FBI operated under its directors Christopher Wray and James Comey before him, and how it operated under Hoover?
I don’t think Comey and Wray were running the FBI like J. Edgar Hoover. Frankly, they didn’t have the ability to run the FBI like J. Edgar Hoover, even if they wanted to. They are in a much weaker manager position. There is a lot of transparency. There are a lot of rules-bound and law-bound policies.
I think so [criticism] It comes mostly from a partisan place. But there are interesting ways in which someone like Patel sounds like a classic civil libertarian, whether you’re talking about the 1970s or you’re talking about the 1920s. In those moments, this criticism often came from the left, rather than from the right, as it does today.
I think that [modern] The FBI tried their best. But by its very nature, when it engages in these political investigations, it cannot make perfect judgments that everyone agrees with.
And of course, the FBI has a long and deep history of hostility to the civil rights and civil liberties of all types of American citizens.
So, from a broad perspective, do the FBI and the large intelligence bureaucracy pose particular risks to civil liberties if used wrongly? definitely. Is this what is really inspiring this wave of attacks on the FBI? I’m less convinced of that.
The FBI director’s ten-year tenure was both post-Hoover and post-Watergate reforms. Presidents It did not always adhere to this standardBut it has been mostly upheld since Richard Nixon. What impact could Mr. Trump’s decisions to fire Director Comey in 2017 and force current Director Wray to resign have?
I think it’s a problem. We don’t want the FBI director to be primarily a friend or loyalist of the president. The FBI is supposed to remain free from partisan pressure of any kind.
It’s very difficult to find the right balance between an institution that is going to be politically responsive, responsive to the public will, democratically responsive, and also be outside of politics and able to make really difficult decisions. Highly politicized investigations.
That ten-year period was put in place for a very good reason: it was supposed to be longer than the term of any single president, to give the FBI some insulation from politics, while at the same time making sure no one had access to the service. 48 years in that job just like J. Edgar Hoover did. It wasn’t a bad settlement. Looks like one is falling apart now.
Mr. Patel has discussed prosecuting opponents of Mr. Trump, including political opponents. How much do you think you will like the post-Watergate reforms? Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Will you help serve as a check on this?
I think there are real checks now [guard against] This is the kind of very clear and obvious “I’ll throw my political enemies in jail” tyranny. It is difficult to file criminal cases. There are a lot of limits on that.
It is a little easier to launch investigations, launch intelligence inquiries that are very expensive for their purpose, and which give rise to all sorts of undesirable information, which in themselves constitute forms of threat and harassment.
I think it’s entirely possible that we’ll see things like this pop up.
But this is a large, powerful, independent bureaucracy, and it is not easy to actually change it.
I’m not a bureau insider so I have any idea how things work, but one of the big questions is: What will the FBI staff and officials do? Will they resist these changes? Will they accept these changes? How the general public responds will be one of the big deciding factors in whether or not he can do what he says he wants to do.
There are some real laws and forms of external accountability. But a lot of it has to do with internal politics, and for outside organizations, whether you’re talking about Congress or private citizens, through the Freedom of Information Act, even being able to find out what’s going on. So, it seems to me that this field certainly has a lot more structure and a lot more safeguards than it did during the Hoover era. But I think it’s still a real danger zone.