The Director : My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover

The first book ever written about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by a member of his personal staff-his former assistant, Paul Letersky-offers unprecedented, “clear-eyed and compelling” (Mark Olshaker, coauthor of Mindhunter) insight into an American legend. The 1960s and 1970s were arguably among America’s most turbulent post-Civil War decades.While the Vietnam War continued seemingly without end, protests and riots ravaged most cities, the Kennedys and MLK were assassinated, and corruption found its way to the highest levels of politics, culminating in Watergate. In 1965, at the beginning of the chaos, twenty-two-year-old Paul Letersky was assigned to assist the legendary FBI director J.Edgar Hoover who’d just turned seventy and had, by then, led the Bureau for an incredible forty-one years.Hoover was a rare and complex man who walked confidently among the most powerful.His personal privacy was more tightly guarded than the secret “files” he carefully collected-and that were so feared b