Bureau Photo
Subject photographed in front of WNHH “Wall of Shame.”
ROUTE IN ENVELOPE
**CONFIDENTIAL**
Via Airtel
Date: 12/14/22
FROM: SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE, CONNECTICUT DIVISION (100‑9186)
TO: DIRECTOR, FBI (afterlife division)
Re: Author’s new book on you
As directed in previous memo from XXXXXXXXXX, this agent has been monitoring the movements of BEVERLY GAGE.
Subject GAGE was spotted on this date inside the studios of radio station WNHH FM on Elm Street in New Haven. She was participating in an interview about a new book she wrote about the history and previously untold story about the making of the bureau. The book is entitled G‑MAN: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.
Subject author is a known troublemaker at YALE UNIVERSITY, where she is a tenured professor. See ATTACHED PREVIOUS report about her subversive activities undermining a previously reliable “GRAND STRATEGY” program now grooming future world leaders to question the underpinnings of bureau-sanctioned government policy and emulate the philosophies and tactics of bureau-targeted “social change”/“civil rights” agitators.
Subject has caused new problems for the bureau and the Director’s legacy with her new book.
Viking, a publisher deemed reputable, published it. The book has 732 pages in it not counting appendices and notes.
The pages are full of newly unearthed or evaluated information about how the Director created the FBI, led the fight to combat Communism and then violent radicalism, and played a central role in all major events from the 1920s through 1972 under the direction of eight presidents while creating the modern surveillance state. The book has received overwhelming praise from reviews in the popular press. Here is a sample quotation from a laudatory review published by an otherwise reliable news organization (Wall Street Journal): “Ms. Gage sweeps the myths and half-truths off Hoover’s life as a museum curator might a cobwebbed antique, revealing not the bogeyman of left-wing fantasy but something no less fascinating, a closeted gay man who emerged as probably the most powerful civil servant in U.S. history. This is a nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”
GAGE was interviewed on WNHH FM for 52 minutes and 11 seconds. She was observed drinking tea from a mug known to belong to a confirmed Communist journalist. The flavor of tea was believed to be either SLEEPYTIME LEMON JASMINE DECAF GREEN TEA or PEPPERMINT in bags manufactured by a company known for promoting New Age cult conspiracies.
In the radio interview GAGE demonstrated the deceptive strategy of her new book as shown in above-referenced WSJ review: It claims to take a “nuanced” view of the Director.
GAGE stated that she spent 10 years researching and writing the book. (Bureau surveillance confirms this fact.) She revealed that she became privy to government documents newly released to the public. She referenced releases pertaining to the “JFK ASSASSINATION” and the 1975 “CHURCH COMMITTEE” U.S. Senate proceedings about the bureau’s COINTELPRO effort targeting radicals and seeking to prevent the rise of a “black messiah” by using wiretaps and forged letters to thwart the efforts of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR, MALCOLM X and other agitators to sow divisions in American society by promotion of “civil rights” and “social justice.”
Subject GAGE spoke of revelations from such documents that provided a view of the Director that challenged the popular radical depiction of the Director as a powerful racist segregationist bully who secretly broke the law. She revealed that the documents show that the Director in fact informed members of Congress and the presidential administration about the existence of the extra-legal activities conducted under COINTELPRO. These and other documents also revealed the extensive efforts the FBI made under the Director despite the Director’s conservative sympathies to conduct surveillance on right-wing white supremacist groups like the KU KLUX KLAN and WHITE CITIZENS COUNCIL in Southern states during the 1950s and 1960s and to prevent lynchings and other racist violence. Subject GAGE argued that these and other revelations showed the Director’s professionalism in putting personal prejudice aside to uphold the law even against groups that supported him.
Further, GAGE repeatedly demonstrates that the director’s actions were made possible in part because of their widespread support in American society during the Cold War and Civil Rights Movement. She shows how leaders of groups like ACLU and NAACP publicly supported some of what are now considered controversial methods. G‑MAN confronts a younger generation of unpatriotic-posing readers with the uncomfortable challenge of examining whether they would have in fact supported or enabled behavior now considered reprehensible — and even if they continue to do so today.
In the radio interview GAGE confessed her conspiratorial goal to promote free thinking and intellectual inquiry: “One of the things that I wanted to do was not only write a biography of this interesting person [but] to use it as a way of thinking about some bigger political story. That entailed getting away from this stereotype or really caricature we have of Hoover: The things that he did by strong-arming other people, sitting alone in some dark room with his files. He [had] a lot of support in Washington, in the country at large.”
Subject GAGE employs the weapons of “FACT” and “FAIRNESS” and “DEPTH” and “BALANCE” and “SCHOLARSHIP” in her remarks and in her book. As a result she is considered unreliable by both the bureau and critics of the bureau motivated by ideology. As a result subject GAGE is considered the greatest danger to the security of the director’s and the bureau’s reputation because of her success in conferring legitimacy to other “revelations” she produces: quotations from the director containing racial slurs and animus and illegal life-threatening initiatives aimed at MARTIN LUTHER KING and other “civil rights” agitators. GAGE in particular recounts the director’s lifelong membership and participation in and recruitment of agents from the KAPPA ALPHA fraternity, which she unfortunately accurately portrays as an organization dedicated to burnishing the Confederate LOST CAUSE and promoting racial separation.
Of further danger to the bureau and AMERICAN tradition is GAGE’s call on readers to draw lessons about modern-day government surveillance and what she characterizes as threats to the exercise of democratic dissent. Please be advised that G‑MAN contains the following call to philosophical arms:
Hoover built his image — however false and distorted it might have been — at least in part on the idea that public service was something to be admired, and that the federal government might act as a force for good. And he did this while holding firm to conservative principles; indeed, he saw no conflict between the two. Today that kind of balancing act seems far more difficult. In his zeal to protect the “American way of life,” Hoover helped to accelerate a turn against the federal government — indeed , against the very idea of government service — that is still a major feature of the modern right. At the same time, his reactionary politics and the abuses they inspired have made him — and the forms of government power for which he came to stand — anathema among leftists and liberals. The man who once garnered a 98 percent approval rating now has few admirers and nobody willing to claim his legacy, even within the FBI.
This agent concludes that the book’s length will not be a barrier to public consumption and influence. Subject GAGE began her career as a news reporter for the now-defunct pinko “alternative weekly” newspaper NEW HAVEN ADVOCATE before she pursed an academic career. The journalistic training shows in her success in making a fact-dense highly intelligent book a smooth, fast-moving text. This agent did find G‑MAN difficult to stop reading once becoming drawn into the revelations and analysis contained therein; at one point hundreds of pages appeared to fly by in a single sitting.
Of particular interest to the bureau are any potential direct threats posed by subject GAGE. Before leaving the WNHH studio, GAGE answered a question about what she would have asked the Director if she had had the chance to interview him before he died. At first she denied she would have ever had the opportunity to ask the Director a question. Then she stated: “I think I would have been a little afraid of him like everyone else. Also it’s true that when people came in to speak with him, he usually just started talking. You couldn’t shut him up. … Then you were out the door.”
Asked again, GAGE did divulge her intentions to pursue a line of questioning (see attached ROSEBUD memo) explored in G‑MAN about the impact on the Director of his father’s mental illness and death: “I guess I would have asked him about his father.”
Please be advised that it is the recommendation of this agent that the Director not entertain the granting of an audience to subject GAGE to answer questions.
A copy of the video of the interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” was obtained by this office. It can be viewed in full above. (Click here to subscribe to “Dateline New Haven” and here to subscribe to other WNHH FM podcasts.)
A copy of the video of another interview with GAGE on the same subject on the same radio station — conducted by known agitator KICA MATOS (see appended memos on immigration threats) — was also obtained by this office and can be viewed in full above.