J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles: The History of 20th Century America’s Most Controversial FBI and CIA Directors

No single figure in 20th century American history inspires such opposing opinions as J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In his time, he was arguably the most powerful non-elected figure in the U.S. government. Serving under 8 presidents (and outliving 2 of them), he remains the longest-serving head of a major government office. But in essence, Hoover died as he began—a civil servant, having been appointed by the Attorney General and serving at the pleasure of the president. But no civil servant had ever accrued to themselves the power and public attention that Hoover did.

To many Americans in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, J. Edgar Hoover was a real American hero. In a country suffering from the Great Depression and the crime wave of the early 1930s, Hoover was the symbol law and order as his “G-Men” used the newest in scientific crime solving methods to bring gangsters like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson to justice. In the 1940s he protected a country at war from German and Japanese spies and saboteurs. In the 1950s he let the charge against Soviet spies and domestic Communists who he saw as undermining the institutions of the country. Every boy in the country wanted to be a G-Man, helping Mr. Hoover ferret out anyone who would harm the United States.
But by the 1960s and 1970s Hoover the hero had become Hoover the villain. Various exposes and investigations revealed a darker side to the legend, one that included serious violations of the civil liberties of individuals. Hoover’s G-Men, it was discovered, engaged in illegal break-ins and wiretaps of suspected subversives; they wrote fake letters that undermined the reputations of public individuals; they paid informants for information and push the groups they belonged to into committing illegal acts. It was alleged that Hoover led a personal vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr., and the entire civil rights movement. Hoover, it was said, had stayed in office so long by gathering secret files of damaging information about politicians (including presidents). Shortly after his death in 1972, the Hoover legend was in tatters, replaced by a caricature of a vain, vindictive, power-mad petty dictator who was a closet homosexual and cross-dresser.


The 28-year period from 1933-1961, bracketed on one end by Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and on the other by the very height of the Cold War, was marked by a remarkably stable succession of American presidents. In fact, only three men held office in this period, and that predictability led to a general stability among government agencies. Conversely, the CIA had five different directors in its first 15 years, from 1946-1961, and then nine different directors in the next 20, with four of those directors serving less than a year. But of all the CIA’s directors, none wielded the immense influence or power of Allen Dulles, who, together with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, became arguably the two most powerful people in the government after the president.

To this day, Dulles’ eight-year tenure in that office is the longest, and as one of the country’s leading experts in international law, intelligence, and spycraft, he became renowned for his unwavering anti-communist ideology and readiness to take decisive measures to counter what he perceived as a menace to American safety. As such, it would be Dulles who sanctioned many of the CIA’s most notorious operations, including the ousting of Iran's democratically elected government in 1953, spying and experimentation on American citizens, and the disastrous Bay of Pigs. That last episode cost him his job, though he continued to play a role in American political life after President John F. Kennedy forced him out of the CIA in 1961.