Generations after he unleashed federal law enforcement to destroy the lives of people who disagreed with him, J. Edgar Hoover has finally met his match.
Beverly Gage, an author and Yale professor, has written the definitive biography of the man who built the modern FBI and oversaw its notorious COINTELPRO chapter of repression of dissidents. Gage spent 10 years on the project, poring through previously unexplored documents and bringing a clear-headed perspective to a nuanced story about not just an essential figure in American history but “power, responsibility, and democracy itself” in the words of author Jon Meacham.
Gage’s book is called G‑Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Penguin Random House releases it Nov. 22. Gage previewed the book Thursday and discussed the journey that led to it in a conversation with host Kica Matos on WNHH FM’s “Kica’s Corner.”
“Read this book!” Matos urged all her listeners, especially social-justice advocates.
Click on the video to watch the interview.
And click on the above video to watch a conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” with journalist Tzippy Shmilovitz about the recent Israeli elections, which is set to produce the most extremist right-wing government in the nation’s history. Shmilovitz, who lives in New Haven, is the American correspondent for Israeli’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yediot Aharanot. She called the election of the most extreme right-wing government in Israeli history an “inevitable” endpoint of a trajectory launched by the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the subsequent failure of the left to advance an alternative message of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians.