Movie Review: J. Edgar

I went to see the move on J. Edgar Hoover directed by Clint Eastwood fully expecting to be confronted by a bucketful of salacious details regarding a cross-dressing, blackmailing, power hungry baddie as exists in the popular imagination of even those that care to pay attention to history.  I came out of the movie very satisfied that I saw an exceptional movie on an exceptional period in history regarding a man who made a mark on it.

I also went in thinking, that it was tough for Leonardo DiCaprio to disappear into a role like a Robert Duvall can, and came out thinking that here was a talented actor playing a tough complex role to the hilt and indeed becoming it, layers of latex notwithstanding as the character aged.

I went in thinking, boy I can't stand Clint Eastwood's crotchety old coot style of impatient film making that does not give time for a story to develop and came out feeling that subtlety has never so been so beautifully explored and a movie that stands as a bulwark against mindless blockbusters churned out by the corporate suits of Hollywood.

All that said, several features stood out as I absorbed the history portrayed in the movie.

Hoover invented the filing system for the U.S. Library of congress.  While not an innovation to be listed amongst the pantheon of innovations, that in and of itself is not a bad mark on can leave on a nation's life.  Call it a brick laid on the wall of a country being built.

Filing System at Library of Congress

But that organizing mind, it turns out is what allowed him to build a formidable and effective crime fighting organization.

Taken strictly from the view of an organization man, and a manager (that I am) - it is hard not to admire one who built an organization, the FBI, from scratch, innovated, professionalized it, gave it PR and won public approval.  Hoover innovated by introducing the use of finger prints for identification and forensic science.  He used it to crack the 'crime of the century' of its time - the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

He used that episode to make kidnapping a federal crime.  He also got rid of all the thugs and hacks in the bureaucracy and professionalized it by hiring well educated young people and insisting on loyalty, discipline and good behavior.

Taken from the view of a citizen (of any country) - it is tough to be at the mercy of an all powerful, well entrenched autocrat who saw enemies at every turn, and did not satisfy himself with merely taking on other agencies or the powerful, but also helpless individuals.  And good luck if you did not fit the mould either in terms of race or personal orientation.

Hoover and Robert Kennedy

Hoover kept himself in power for nearly five decades by carrying information on various powerful people including U.S. Presidents.  Most famously on Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  The confrontation between Robert Kennedy and Edgar Hoover is the marquee match-up of the 1960s.  Robert Kennedy as the U.S. Attorney General is Hoover's boss.  He wants to fight organized crime and corruption.  Hoover denies the existence of organized crime and wants to fight the communists, the civil rights protestors and the hippies.  Hoover has the goods on the President and Robert Kennedy finds himself unable to force his hand.

Hoover finally meets his match in Richard Nixon, an equally ferocious Washington player who plays to win at all cost.  But unlike the seven U.S. Presidents before him, who realizing the damage Hoover could cause, kept him at bay, Nixon paid the price.  As was learned in the mid-2000s, W. Mark Felt, an associate director at the FBI was 'deep throat' who revealed Nixon's wrong doing to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward at the Washington Post and brought the down the Presidency and infamy to the office.

Tolson and Hoover

In Clint Eastwood's telling, there is something bi-polar in Hoover's psychology.  His domineering mother, who explicitly hates 'daffodil' men and in an age when folks had to stay in the closet and his lifelong companionship with his associate director Clyde Tolson. Hoover's personal life is so distinct and different in its evolution compared to his public life as a master crime fighter and organization man, that it takes a movie as skillful as this by Clint Eastwood to keep the two parts connected.

A final thought.  Threats to public safety, government reaction, public fear, gray areas of lines being crossed - are not alien in today's world. Since 9/11 and 26/11, the security apparatus abounds everywhere.  One hopes, in the least that no one person rules for 50 years at a time from any perch; and ideally, good and wise leadership keeps societies from jumping off a cliff.