J. Edgar Hoover and His G-Men

The last phrase in this panegyric to the first director of the FBI pretty well sums it up: ``one of America's towering heroes.'' Breuer (American Saga) makes a strong case that Hoover (1895-1972) changed a corrupt and graft-ridden division of the Justice Department into an incorruptible agency. This biography, which concentrates on the bank robbers and kidnappers of the 1920s and '30s--Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd et al.--ends with the WWII era. Breuer considers his subject's career an unalloyed success and attributes negative comments about the director to cowards who did not have the courage to confront him while he was still alive. Thus he ignores the criticism, voiced long before 1972, that Hoover had never taken steps to curb organized crime and that his racism was blatant. Such bias calls into question the author's objectivity. (May)