Beverly Gage, author of the acclaimed new biography, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, talks about the larger-than-life director of the FBI who made the bureau a fixture of American power and, in many ways, his own personal fiefdom.
Beverly Gage is a professor of History at Yale University. She is also the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.
In G-Man, Gage covers the full sweep of Hoover’s life, from his birth in 1895 to his death in 1972, offering a nuanced portrait of a complicated man who took the helm of the FBI before the age of 30, and would go on to become a confidante, and often a nemesis, to 8 presidents—from Warren Harding to Richard Nixon.