J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover is presented less through personal actions than through the office he held at a turning point in federal law enforcement. As director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he stood within the authority Bobby Kennedy assumed as attorney general, while the book contrasts the bureau’s earlier inattention to organized crime with the government’s subsequent, coordinated investigations.

Identity and Office

When JFK appointed his brother attorney general, Bobby Kennedy became responsible for the Justice Department, the United States attorneys, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. The account establishes Hoover’s institutional position in a sentence, without describing a private relationship between the two men or attributing particular investigative decisions to Hoover personally.

The Bureau Before the Kennedy Administration

The narrator recalls that, before Bobby Kennedy took office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was still basically ignoring organized crime. For years after Prohibition, mobsters faced local police, some of whom were corrupt; the narrator says that when he first spent time among underworld figures, the bureau was not a concern. The account locates the change in a wider sequence: exposure of the Apalachin meeting and the McClellan Committee hearings brought increased federal attention, and the new administration intensified the pressure.

Federal Enforcement Reoriented

Two days after taking office on February 22, 1961, Bobby Kennedy persuaded all twenty-seven federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, to pool information on gangsters and organized crime. The book presents this as a government-wide turn toward coordinated investigation, not as a measure Hoover is said to have initiated or directed. In the same period, Kennedy established the Get Hoffa Squad within the Justice Department, assigning it a focused mission against Jimmy Hoffa. Hoover’s place in the account is therefore one of institutional command and responsibility as the bureau was brought into a more aggressive federal effort.

Narrative Role and Limits

Hoover’s brief appearance marks a contrast between an earlier federal posture and the new campaign that made organized crime a national enforcement priority. That shift supplies context for the scrutiny and prosecutions described elsewhere in the book, but the evidence here does not establish Hoover’s personal views, his response to Kennedy, or his role in any specific case. The narrative uses his office to show the reach of the attorney general’s authority, while leaving Hoover himself largely outside the foreground.