Official and confidential

Presidents yearned to fire him, but feared his storehouse of damaging secrets. Public officials & private citizens feared his illegal surveillance & harassment tactics. Now, in this ground-breaking, oft shocking biography, J. Edgar Hoover, the man who ruled over the FBI for nearly 50 years, emerges as one of the greatest menaces of our times. Official & Confidential, by award-winning investigative journalist & author Anthony Summers, is the 1st book to expose the public & the private man. Other biographers have hinted at dark secrets in the Director's life, but Summers discloses the truth. After conducting over 800 interviews & accessing previously concealed documents, he's created a chilling portrait of a figure who blatantly abused public trust. Summers establishes Hoover was a closet homosexual & transvestite. Mafia bosses obtained information about his sex life & used it to keep the FBI at bay. Without this, the Mafia might never have gained its hold in America. Hoover shamelessly accepted gifts & free lodging from millionaire oilmen & appropriated FBI facilities for personal use. Hoover influenced the course of WWII by ignoring an early warning about Pearl Harbor. Hoover used his knowledge of JFK's womanizing to ensure that LBJ became Vice President. He relied on dirty tricks to stay in office under JFK & subverted the Warren Commission's probes. Hoover himself was the target of a Watergate-era burglary attempt--perhaps even a murder plot. With these & other disclosures, Summers defines a man & his times. He explores Hoover's troubled youth under a mentally ill father & demanding mother, & the development of the obsessive behavior dominating his life. Summers takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, as a zealous young lawyer rebuilds an ineffectual corps of agents into a massive force capable of police-state tactics. With riveting detail, Summers documents Hoover's behind-the-scenes role in war & peace thru 50 years & 8 presidential administrations. Richly anecdotal, meticulously researched Official & Confidential depicts some of the most controversial & colorful events of our century. Here is a lesson in how one man abused a position of power & changed history.