Shocking grim, frightening, Curt Gentry's masterful portrait of J. Edgar Hoover -- director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972 -- is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how this unscrupulous man created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years. Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from FDR to Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden mikes to destroy anyone who opposed him.

The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; and what role he played in the investigations of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.