The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 253 not please everyone. Yet it does represent a fresh way of thinking about Johnson, and such freshness is not so common in Johnsonian scholarship that one can afford to ignore it. Hinnant does not waste time on platitudes. He constructs a spare, sustained argument, with many provocative asides, and works it through to a logical conclusion. This book forces one to think again about some works and issues that have long seemed settled. That is worth doing. For those who regard Johnson as conventional and over-familiar, this book is very much worth reading. The buyer had better beware, however, in two respects. The first is a very poor standard of proofreading and copyediting. More than a hundred typographical errors spot the text, and within a few pages two passages in Irene are assigned to the wrong speakers. Someone was sleeping when this book was being produced. Even the title, Samuel Johnson: An Analysis, which might lead a reader to think that this book has something to do with Johnson's life or psyche (it does not), could have used a good editor. Indeed, the distance of this book from life might be a second cautionary sign. I do not mean that every book on Johnson has to be a biography. But Johnson's own deepest reproach was less Jenyns's devotion to the plenum than his pride in offering an abstract analytical solution to a problem that is anything but abstract, the acute suffering of human beings. "The only reason why we should contemplate evil," according to Johnson, "is that we may bear it better." The fascinations of analysis should never prevail over its usefulness. In this regard, I think, Hinnant is much closer to Jenyns than to Johnson. This book tells us more about the theory of language than about the practical uses of a dictionary, more about the dialectic of slavery than about the servitude of a hack writer, more about the problems of distinguishing virtue from vice than about the necessity of being able to tell the difference. The question, Johnson might have said, is not whether the universe is a plenum or a vacuum but how well we fill our time. This book does not have much to say on that question. There is not much life in it. But there is plenty of shrewd and interesting thought. Lawrence Lipking Northwestern University Äthan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. 489 pp. $27.95. Once an American hero admired by most liberals and positively revered by conservatives , J. Edgar Hoover has over the past generation become a national villain of perhaps slightly more standing than Benedict Arnold or John Wilkes Booth but well below, say, Jefferson Davis. This book will do nothing to change the present "judgment of history." Inevitably, a biography of Hoover is also a history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from its emergence as a significant federal police agency in World War I until the Director's death in 1972. Given the paucity of sources on Hoover's intimate life— indeed given his near lack of an intimate life—the book that emerges is of necessity as much a history as a biography. Moreover, it is a very selective one, highlighting the evil that its subject did and interring the good with his bones. The authors are persuasive enough in their conclusion that Hoover was a singularly unattractive man. Yet 254 biography Vol. 12, No. 3 their portrait remains one-dimensional because they ignore genuine accomplishments and because they fail to deliver a convincing explanation of how so petty and grasping a bureaucrat could have exercised so strong an attraction upon the American imagination for three decades. Part of their problem is a left political perspective that places repression of radicalism at the forefront of American history and envisions Hoover as the Torquemada of a grand inquisition that lasted a half-century. Part of it is a research design that relied on extensive Freedom of Information requests aimed at uncovering FBI abuses. Äthan Theoharis, the primary researcher and (one assumes) primary author of this volume...