Hoover: Bravery and black bag jobs

G-MAN: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Author: Beverly Gage
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 837
Price: $45

J Edgar Hoover, who served as director of the FBI for an astonishing 48 years, has long been remembered as the stuff of liberal nightmares: a redbaiter, a wiretapper, a sower of discord through covert manipulations.

As the Yale historian Beverly Gage makes abundantly clear in G-Man, her revelatory new biography of Hoover, all of this is true. But by casting him as a “rogue actor,” Gage argues, we neglect to see Hoover for who he really was — less