This year marks the centennial of John Edgar Hoover becoming the director of what was then known as the Bureau of Investigation. Federal soon became part of the name, and Hoover ran the agency until 1972. Obviously, he was very controversial.
We want to focus here on his ties to Nevada … which were also controversial.
You might say Hoover’s impact predated any real interest on his part in Nevada. For one thing, he was a close ally of U.S. Senator Pat McCarran. In that case, the issue wasn’t anything all that critical to Nevada. Both were ardent anti-communists. McCarran obtained information from “my friend the director,” as he called Hoover. It was a two-way street as Hoover helped McCarran’s investigations.
For much of his tenure with the bureau, Hoover basically denied that organized crime was a national issue. He told Senator Estes Kefauver’s committee investigating organized crime that if local authorities simply enforced their own statues, the mob would be, as he put it, eliminated. That attitude gave a lot of latitude to mob figures. Rumors persist that the real reason for Hoover’s approach was deeply personal: that mob leaders like Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello extorted him. Maybe.
Hoover really took action against the mob during John Kennedy’s administration, when Bobby Kennedy was attorney general. RFK had
fought Jimmy Hoffa and the rackets as counsel to a Senate committee. He continued the fight, so Hoover stepped up his efforts. Unfortunately for the FBI, some of those efforts didn’t go well. They bugged the office of Ed Levinson, the main operator of the Fremont Hotel. They did it illegally, so there wasn’t much they could do with the information. Levinson later sued the FBI for what it did, and a Las Vegas agent admitted he placed the bug on Hoover’s orders. Levinson dropped the lawsuit because he was caught skimming and paid a fine.
But the illegal wiretaps of gaming operators angered Nevada’s governor at the time, Grant Sawyer. In 1966, he ran for a third term as governor. He compared Hoover’s tactics with the Gestapo, for which he apologized. He did not apologize or criticizing Hoover and the FBI, although his opponent, Republican Lieutenant Governor Paul Laxalt, announced that he was doing so on. At the time, Hoover was seen as a heroic figure.
The FBI was one of the country’s most popular television shows, and the bureau made sure its depiction was favorable. Hoover made it clear to Nevadans that he didn’t want Sawyer to continue in office. Sawyer lost to his lieutenant governor, Republican Paul Laxalt. To be fair, no Nevada governor who ran for a third term won, and Laxalt ran a fine campaign. But it’s an irony of Nevada politics that the liberal Democrat was attacking a federal agency, a conservative Republican was defending it, and the conservative Republican benefited from it.
Times change. So has J. Edgar Hoover’s reputation. More reports have appeared that tarnished his once-great reputation, including targeting the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior.
Nevada has changed, too. Some of that had to do with the FBI investigating organized crime … after the death of J. Edgar Hoover.