Cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover story dismissed by historians

By Jeff Stein

November 11, 2011

“Too good to check!” reporters sometimes joke when they hear a story so fantastic they fear checking it out, lest it turn out untrue.

Likewise, the public seems determined to cling to the story that J. Edgar Hoover, the piranha-jawed director of the FBI for over 40 years, liked to par-tay in a cocktail dress, fishnet stockings, full makeup and a wig.

No matter that it’s almost certainly untrue, based as it is on a single discredited source, according to almost every historian of the FBI, including the G-man’s fiercest critics.

With the opening last week of “J. Edgar,” however, the transvestite legend is likely to get fresh legs. While the movie sidesteps any reference to cross-dressing parties the G-man is alleged to have attended, it does include a poignant scene of a deeply grieving Hoover caressing, then donning, his just-deceased mother’s necklace and dress.

Why the obsession with Hoover in a dress?

It’s “the sheer snicker-inducing incongruity of the visual . . . the delicious irony in the spectacle of the man who kept everyone else’s secrets having such a transgressive one of his own,” says Thomas Doherty, a Brandeis University professor and author of “Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture.”

The legend took root in 1993, with publication of “Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover,” by Irish journalist Anthony Summers. Summers’s principal source was socialite Susan Rosenstiel, the embittered former wife of millionaire bootlegger and distiller Lewis Rosenstiel, a Hoover crony who was bisexual himself.

Susan Rosenstiel had been “trying to peddle this story for years,” Peter Maas, the late organized crime chronicler, wrote in Esquire.

“She had an interest in discrediting her former husband,” Marquette University historian Athan Theoharis, author of several authoritative works on the FBI, said in an e-mail.

What lent credence to the legend was the G-man’s widely known relationship with Clyde Tolson, his elegant longtime aide, with whom he had a spouse-like, but perhaps unconsummated, relationship.

“They ate lunch together every day and dinner together almost every night. They vacationed together, staying in adjoining rooms, and they took adoring photos of each other,” writes Ronald Kessler, author of “The Secrets of the FBI” and other books on the bureau. But no evidence of sex between them exists, he and other historians point out.

The cross-dressing story is “a fabrication concocted by Susan Rosenstiel, who had served time in prison for perjury,” Kessler wrote, noting that FBI protective agents followed Hoover just about everywhere he went.

If “anything scandalous had happened with the director,” one agent told him, “it would have gone coast to coast within the bureau in 30 minutes.”

Theoharis also doubts that Hoover was gay, much less a transvestite who attended an “orgy” Rosenstiel claimed she witnessed at the Plaza Hotel in New York, hosted by Roy Cohn, top aide to the communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Doherty agrees. “I’ve always been suspect of the claims that Hoover held hands with Clyde Tolson,” as shown in the new movie, “or that he would appear in full-on drag,” he said.“It’s just one of those stories that is too good to be true.”

Summers stands by his story, and provided a copy of Rosenstiel’s sworn affidavit. He called the cross-dressing allegation “one passage in a biography of some 600 pages.”

But it was the one that stuck.

Former Washington Post “SpyTalk” blogger Jeff Stein specializes in intelligence issues.

J. Edgar Hoover: Gay or Just a Man Who Has Sex With Men?

Clint Eastwood film leaves question of homosexuality ambiguous.

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

November 14, 2011, 9

Nov. 16, 2011; -- J. Edgar Hoover led a deeply repressed sexual life, living with his mother until he was 40, awkwardly rejecting the attention of women and pouring his emotional, and at times, physical attention on his handsome deputy at the FBI, according to the new movie, "J. Edgar," directed by Clint Eastwood.

Filmgoers never see the decades-long romance between the former FBI director, and his number two, Clyde Tolson, consummated, but there's plenty of loving glances, hand-holding and one scene with an aggressive, long, deep kiss.

So was the most powerful man in America, who died in 1972 -- three years after the Stonewall riots marked the modern gay civil rights movement -- homosexual?

Eastwood admits the relationship between Hoover, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Clyde Tolson, played by Armie Hammer, is ambiguous.

"He was a man of mystery," he told ABC's "Good Morning America" last week. "He might have been [gay]. I am agnostic about it. I don't really know and nobody really knew."


In public, Hoover waged a vendetta against homosexuals and kept "confidential and secret" files on the sex lives of congressmen and presidents. But privately, according to some biographers, he had numerous trysts with men, including a lifelong affair with Tolson.

Dissociation -- denying homosexuality, but displaying sexual behavior -- is "not uncommon," according to Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York City psychiatrist who is an expert in gender and sexuality.

Men with strong attractions to other men can have different degrees of acceptance from being fully closeted to being openly gay. And even if they are homosexually self-aware, they can embrace it or reject it publicly.

"We confuse sexual orientation with sexual identity," said Drescher. "Some men do not publicly identify as gay, regardless of their sexual behavior."

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks a group that is not labeled "gay" but "men who have sex with men."

Roy Cohn, the lawyer who served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his anti-communist campaign of the 1950s and who successfully convicted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of espionage, denied he was gay, despite an attraction to men.

Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986, was a contemporary of Hoover and according to one biography, the two attended sex parties together in New York in the 1950s.

Cohn was characterized in a scene from Tony Kuschner's play, "Angels in America," speaking to his doctor: "...you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don't tell you that ... Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who f****s around with guys."

Hoover's degree of self-awareness may have been the same as Cohn's. Despite his same-sex dalliances, he occasionally sought a "Mrs. Hoover" and even courted -- albeit uncomfortably -- actress Ginger Rogers' mother and actress Dorothy Lamour.

Hoover's neuroses were likely rooted in childhood: He was ashamed of his mentally ill father and was dependent on his morally righteous mother, Annie, well into middle age. Until her death in 1938, Hoover had no social life outside the office.

In the film, Annie chastises her powerful son as he wilted before some of his FBI critics, telling him, "I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son."

In a 2004 biography by Richard Hack, "Puppetmaster," which was culled from the notes of Truman Capote, who had begun interviews on Hoover and Tolson's relationship, the author says Hoover was not gay, but suggests the man was vicariously turned on by the smut he collected on others.

One 200-page secret document was on the extracurricular activities of Capote himself, who was openly gay.

But Anthony Summers, who exposed the secret sex life of Hoover in his 1993 book, "Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover," said there was no ambiguity about the FBI director's sexual proclivities.

"What does Clint Eastwood know about it?" he asked ABCNews.com. Summers collaborated with historians and conducted 800 interviews for the book, including nieces and those who were young enough at the time to have known the man personally.


"We were able to get a close view of the man as an individual and as a human being -- as close as anybody who had not been afraid of him since he died," said Summers.

With interest in the Eastwood film, publishers in the U.S. and in Britain are issuing a remake of the book.

One medical expert told Summers that Hoover was "strongly predominant homosexual orientation" and another categorized him as a "bisexual with failed heterosexuality."

Hoover often suppressed his urges, but would break out in lapses that could have destroyed him -- alleged orgies in New York City hotels and affairs with teenage boys in a limousine, according to interviews conducted by Summers.

"He was a sadly repressed individual, but most people, even J. Edgar Hoover, let go on occasion," he said.

Hoover as a Cross-Dresser Is Controversial

One short scene in the film showed the FBI director in anguish over his mother's death, putting on her dress and beads, a nod to Summers expose that Hoover had been a cross-dresser.

The Washington Post recently dismissed that account because of a discredited source, but Summers maintains he had two other independent sources from different periods in Hoover's life.

Hoover often frequented New York City's Stork Club and one observer -- soap model Luisa Stuart, who was 18 or 19 at the time -- told Summers she saw Hoover holding hands with Tolson as they all rode in a limo uptown to the Cotton Club in 1936.

"I didn't really understand anything about homosexuality at the time," said Stuart. "But I'd never seen two men holding hands. And I remember asking Art [Arthur] about it in the car on the way home that night. And he just said, 'Oh, come on. You know,' or something like that. And he told me they were queers or fairies --- the sort of terms they used in those days."

Hoover promoted men inclined to homosexual indiscretions, including Tolson, who had barely 18 months experience with the FBI when he became Hoover's deputy.

The pair used to make "saucy jokes" about some of the other agents, like Melvin Purvis, who was a hero for arresting John Dillinger, according to Summers.

Purvis's son shared his father's 500-letter correspondence with Hoover, who teased the good-looking, blond-haired agent as "the Clark Gable of the FBI," even though he was heterosexual.

Many were intimate and one was highly charged with innuendo, as Hoover referred to himself as the "Chairman of the Moral Uplift Squad."

Ethel Merman, who had known Hoover since 1938, knew his sexual orientation, according to Summers. In 1978 when the actress was asked to comment on Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign, Merman told the reporter, "Some of my best friends are homosexual. Everybody knew about J. Edgar Hoover, but he was the best chief the FBI ever had."

Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations, confirmed that Hoover and Tolson sat in boxes owned by and used exclusively by gay men at their racing haunt Del Mar in California.

"They were nodded together as lovers," he told Summers.

Another FBI agent who had gone on fishing trips with Hoover and Tolson revealed that the director liked to "sunbathe all day in the nude." Even novelist William Styron told Summers that he once spotted Hoover and Tolson in a California beach house -- the director painting his friends toenails.

But, according to Summers, "Nobody dared say anything, he was so powerful."

The author interviewed the widow of respected Washington, D.C. psychiatrist Dr. Marshall de G. Ruffin, who treated Hoover in 1946 after his general practitioner had been "puzzled by a strange malaise in his patient."

Monteen Ruffin told Summers that Hoover was "very paranoid" about anyone finding out, and he eventually stopped seeing the psychiatrist. She said her husband burned the evidence.

"He was definitely troubled by homosexuality," she said in 1990, "and my husband's notes would have proved that ... I might stir a kettle of worms by making that statement, but everybody then understood that he was a homosexual, not just the doctors."

As the movie depicts, after Hoover's death, his loyal secretary Helen Gandy destroys the "official and confidential" files.

When Hoover died in 1972, President Richard Nixon ordered his "dirty tricks man" Gordon Liddy to scour the FBI director's office for files. But when they arrived, someone had taken "drastic action," said Summers. Nothing but tables and chairs remained.

Summers said he is often asked, but rarely answers the question about what he personally thought of Hoover as a human being.

"Yes, I had sympathy for somebody who has to bury their real preferences through a long life in the public eye," he said. "But not sympathy for the way in which he was dictatorial, the way he behaved politically and personally to people right from the beginning in his late teens and early 20s.

"He was totally self-serving and the way in which he was a repressed homosexual didn't require him to abuse individual rights and human liberties the way he did," said Summers. "It does not begin to justify his behavior toward blacks and concoct an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King and suggest he end it all and kill himself."

Psychiatrists have concluded that Hoover "no doubt" had a narcissistic personality disorder, perhaps because of his dependency on a forceful mother who had "great expectations for her son," he said.

"Studies suggest that people with such backgrounds block their feelings and cut meaningful relationships," according to Summers, who said Hoover would have been a "perfect high-level Nazi."

However, Eastwood, who is a Republican, contends that J. Edgar Hoover was "probably good for the country," and whether he was homosexual or not makes no difference.

"I don't really know and nobody really knew," he told ABC. "It's definitely a love story. You can love a person and whether it goes into the realm of being gay or not, is here nor there."

A younger generation of gays was moved by the film precisely because it portrayed such an iconic figure's struggle with his sexuality.

"The audience I was in clearly rooted for Hoover to be gay and to have happiness in his sex and love life," said Ben Ryan, a 33-year-old novelist from New York City. "In a pivotal scene between DiCaprio and Hammer in which the two men engage in the classic brawl-leads-to-furious-kiss, everyone got so excited when they finally locked lips."

"Anyone in their right mind would see this movie and say, 'Oh, well, of course Hoover was gay,'" he said. "The more suspicious among us might think that the filmmakers were still afraid of Hoover's ghost suing them for libel if they just put it right out there that he was gay."

Still, he said, the film is a "tragic story that should hopefully teach society lessons about how dangerous sexual repression is."

Was J. Edgar Hoover a cross-dresser?

By Cecil Adams

STRAIGHT DOPE

Dec 5, 2002,


Dear Cecil: Was J. Edgar Hoover’s cross-dressing an urban legend or a fact? Are there any pictures of him in drag? Where are they if there are/were any? I have never been able to find any info on this except small references in conspiracy books. 

Cate

Cecil replies:

One more example of how the oligarchs plot to keep the truth from us, you’re thinking — not that this is something you necessarily want to see covered in sixth grade social studies. In point of fact, however, the alleged transvestitism of John Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, has never been established, and reputable historians say it’s an urban legend.

The story probably got its start because of more plausible rumors that Hoover was gay. He and his right-hand man, Clyde Tolson, were constant companions for more than 40 years, even vacationing together, and both remained lifelong bachelors. (Hoover lived with his mom until she died in 1938.) They say Richard Nixon, on hearing of Hoover’s death, exclaimed with his customary delicacy, “Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!”

The cross-dressing thing, however, is a definite no. The story appears in Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993), a gossipy biography by British journalist Anthony Summers, who has also written a JFK assassination conspiracy book. Summers says he got his info from Susan Rosenstiel, fourth wife of Lewis Rosenstiel, chairman of Schenley Industries, a liquor distiller with reputed mob connections.

Ms. Rosenstiel claimed that in 1958 she and her husband went to a party at a New York hotel, where they met Hoover and McCarthy witch-hunt lawyer Roy Cohn. Hoover, whom Cohn introduced as “Mary,” was supposedly wearing a wig, a black dress, lace stockings, and high heels. Hoover went into a bedroom, took off his skirt to reveal a garter belt, and had a couple of blond boys — one wearing rubber gloves — “work on him with their hands.” Cohn and Hoover then watched while Lewis Rosenstiel had sex with the boys.

A year later Ms. Rosenstiel attended another party at the same hotel; this time Hoover wore a red dress and a black feather boa. He had one of the blond boys, who were now dressed in leather, read to him from a Bible while the other “played” with him. Hoover then grabbed the Bible, tossed it down, and told the first boy to join in.

Most researchers, including many hostile to Hoover, say this story is ludicrous. In a 1993 Esquire article, journalist Peter Maas wrote that Susan Rosenstiel, the sole source of the cross-dressing allegations, had “been trying to peddle this story for years,” apparently because she believed Hoover had put FBI agents on her tail to help her husband during their divorce. According to Ronald Kessler, author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (2002), Ms. Rosenstiel did jail time for perjury in connection with a 1971 case.

Even if we set aside the teller’s credibility, it’s difficult to take this tale seriously. Hoover was an old hand at blackmail — he used incriminating information his agency collected about prominent people to maintain his hold on office and otherwise get his way. Would a man with so many enemies put himself in a position to be blackmailed by waltzing around a hotel in drag?

Summers also claims that the FBI gave the Mafia a pass for many years because mob boss Meyer Lansky had a photo of Hoover and Tolson having sex. (Apparently a photo of two men humping on a beach did exist, but one source who claims he saw it says it was too blurry to permit the men to be identified.) Though Hoover did appear reluctant to go after organized crime, most observers think that was because he preferred easy targets to bulk up his arrest records. Once ordered to take on the mob by Robert Kennedy, Hoover pursued Lansky in particular with zeal — irrational behavior if Lansky could expose him. Maas also wrote that when he asked Lansky’s closest associate about the photo, the old mafioso replied, “Are you nuts?”

Which brings us back to Tolson, and to Hoover’s rumored homosexuality. There were hints about this throughout the FBI boss’s career, some of them a little silly. A 1930s magazine article, for example, describes Hoover’s mincing step. He was a bit dandyish, favoring white linen suits as a young man; he had classical statues of male nudes at his home, and one of his hobbies was antique collecting. On the more serious side, many people sensed that his long relationship with Tolson was more than a friendship — the pair never lived together, but they’re buried side by side. Today some gay activists include Hoover and Tolson in their pantheons of famous gay couples.

Appearances notwithstanding, no one has found concrete evidence that the two men were anything other than buddies. Given Hoover’s ability to cover his tracks — his associates, with Tolson’s help, destroyed many of his files upon his death — it’s unlikely anyone ever will.

Cecil Adams

STRAIGHT DOPE

For FBI legend J. Edgar Hoover, Christian nationalism was the gospel truth, argues new book

In 'The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover,' Stanford professor Lerone Martin details how the longtime FBI director shaped the belief in America as a Christian nation.

J. Edgar Hoover in an undated FBI file photo. Photo courtesy of FBI/Wikipedia/Creative Commons

March 10, 2023

By 

Bob Smietana

(RNS) — Lerone Martin’s new book began with a cup of coffee that led him to sue the FBI.

While working on a book about religious broadcasters, a colleague suggested over coffee that Martin, a religion scholar, research the FBI to see if they had any related files. At the time, the colleague, scholar William J. Maxwell, author of “F.B. EYES,” had been studying the FBI’s surveillance of Black writers. Perhaps the FBI had been keeping an eye on religious broadcasters as well.

Martin, then living in St. Louis, began filing Freedom of Information requests. Around the same time, he was also hearing from local pastors in St Louis who had been contacted by the FBI in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The FBI, they told Martin, wanted to know what the pastors were going to do to calm protests in that city.

“That got me thinking,” said Martin. “This is not a surveillance story. This is a story of partnership.”

Martin began thinking about the kinds of pastors the FBI might want to partner with. Chief among them was the late evangelist Billy Graham, known for his crusades for Jesus and against communism and liberals.

Lerone Martin. Photo by Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University

When Graham died in 2018, Martin asked for his FBI file. The Department of Justice said no. So, Martin sued in federal court and three years later settled with the FBI and got the files. He also obtained files on other Christian leaders and organizations, most notably more than a thousand pages of documents outlining the relationship between longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the editors of Christianity Today, the flagship publication of Graham’s evangelical movement.

What Martin, now an associate professor of religion at Stanford, found in those files was this: Hoover was perhaps the most influential Christian leader in America during his tenure in office, promoting a gospel of America as a Christian nation and labeling anyone who threatened the power of white Christian men as communists and a threat to God’s will.

“Hoover saw his politics as nothing more than an extension of his faith,” said Martin, author of “The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism.“ “And because America is a Christian nation, the FBI is charged with defending and perpetuating that ideal.”

RELATED:   Old-school Christian nationalism’s avatar of racism, antisemitism and conspiracies

Unlike early Christian nationalists, like Father Charles Coughlin — a star of early broadcast radio — or Gerald L.K. Smith, longtime editor of “The Cross and the Flag,” Hoover had the institutional power and discipline to make his beliefs stick. And he had a gift for convincing conservative Christian leaders to join his crusade.

When the Nation magazine ran a series of articles critical of the FBI and Hoover, legendary Christianity Today editor Carl Henry rode to his aid, offering to run one of Hoover’s essays in the magazine. When the essay arrived, Henry was effusive in his praise.

In his book, Martin documents how Hoover saw anyone who upset the status quo and pushed for goals like “love, justice, and the brotherhood of man” or “personal freedom” as part of an atheistic communist plot. He used the power of his office to investigate those who opposed him, including religious leaders like the National Council of Churches and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism” by Lerone Martin. Courtesy image

He turned his office into a bully pulpit, writing essays for major Christian publications, saying that all the nation’s problems — including issues of race — could be solved if only everyone gave their hearts to Jesus. The FBI then reprinted those essays, adding an FBI seal as if they reflected official government policies, and shared them with churches, Sunday schools and almost anyone who wanted them.

Some preachers even preached them word for word on Sundays, Martin recounts, complete with Hoover’s warnings of disaster if America strayed from its spiritual roots and the Marxists took over.

“We are today threatened by twin menaces,” he wrote in a 1961 essay for Christianity Today. “Materialism has fathered both crime and communism. The criminal statistics for the year just past attest to the steady growth of the one evil. The progress of the other — and the intensity of the struggle in which we are engaged with it — does not yield to such forthright measure.”

Many evangelical leaders were eager to join Hoover’s crusade against communism and liberals. They also saw the advantages of having Hoover as an ally, said Martin in an interview.

“What better way in the midst of a cold war to authenticate your organization than to have the approval of the FBI — the organization that knows all and sees all?” said Martin.

Evangelicals embraced Hoover even though he shared few of their theological convictions. He did not believe in being “born again,” said Martin, and never had the kind of conversion experience that is so essential to evangelical life. He also did not share evangelical prejudice against Catholics, which was common in the middle of the 20th century. Instead, Martin writes, he saw Catholics as essential partners.

“I am a Protestant,” he said in a 1939 address to a Catholic gathering in Washington, D.C., that is recounted in Martin’s book. “And as a Protestant, I say sincerely and from experience, that the Catholic Church is the greatest protective influence in our nation today.”

Martin writes that Hoover was a particular admirer of the Society of Jesuits and recruited Jesuit priests to train FBI agents to be spiritual warriors. The FBI held yearly retreats for agents at a Jesuit retreat house in Annapolis led by his friend, the Rev. Robert S. Lloyd, and donated a chalice engraved with “FBI” to Lloyd for use during Mass.

The agency also held an annual Mass and Communion breakfast for Catholic agents and an interdenominational vespers service for Protestant agents to counter rumors the FBI had been taken over by Catholics. At both, only White Christian agents were welcomed, Martin writes. Agents of color never received invitations.

J. Edgar Hoover, left, fingerprints Vice President John N. Garner, circa 1939. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress/Creative Commons

In an interview, Martin said Hoover was a true Christian nationalist, who believed he was working for God — not the Constitution or the American people. He saw enforcing the law as a spiritual battleground, said Martin, a view he developed as a teenage Sunday school teacher.

“He saw Sunday school as spiritual formation — and believed the Bible teaches you how to live your life in a moral way,” he said. “And if you follow the teachings of God, you will be a great American citizen. And then the reverse of that is — if you’re a criminal, that means that you didn’t get the spiritual teachings as a child. And if you did get them and are a criminal, you’ve just decided to reject them.”

Hoover’s commitment to law and order above all and his views of America as a white Christian nation led him to reject Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement. Martin, who also directs the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford, said Hoover dismissed civil rights legislation as misguided and called King and other civil rights leaders “extremists.” 

“Hoover’s gospel was focused on the individual soul,” Martin writes. “The best way to fix America’s race problem was not violence, protest, or legislation. Rather, individual and group piety was the best way for Black Americans to earn white respect and the eventual prize of equality.” 

Any other approach, Hoover believed, was simply the work of communists.

Hoover remained influential for decades, said Martin, in part because he was a master at mythmaking. During his tenure, the FBI and its agents were cultural heroes, stars of “This Is Your FBI,” a popular radio program; television shows like “The Untouchables”; and a long list of movies. In the popular imagination, the FBI was America’s protector — which, combined with his endorsements of Christian America, turned Hoover into one of the most well-respected people in the country.

Martin said Hoover’s views — and his strategies — still shape American politics. Especially his habit of labeling all his enemies as socialists or Marxists. Doing that, Martin said, allowed Hoover to dismiss any criticism of American culture.  

“Today we see people using ‘socialist’ the same way,” he said. “It’s a tactic where you don’t have to actually engage opposing ideas, you can just dismiss them while using that label.”

RELATED:  How big Christian nationalism has come courting in North Idaho

(This story was was reported with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.)

Review: New insight into the complex character of Hoover

By JEFF ROWE

July 12, 2021


This cover image released by Scribner shows "The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover" by Paul Letersky with Gordon Dillow. (Scribner via AP

“The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover,” by Paul Letersky with Gordon Dillow (Scribner)

J. Edgar Hoover’s life has been picked apart in other books; Paul Letersky and Gordon Dillow deliver insight that only could be obtained from Letersky’s vantage point as Hoover’s personal assistant for two years.

“The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover” is actually a pair of books in one; the first half Letersky’s experience as Hoover’s assistant; the second covers Letersky’s years as a field agent, first in Cincinnati and then Alexandria, Virginia.

Letersky offers less a historical breakthrough than finer brushstrokes on an American icon, whom the author describes as kind, courteous, formal, thoughtful, fearless, occasionally funny, a perfect gentleman and a devout patriot. He also could be vindictive, closed-minded, hypocritical and a holder of eternal grudges who sincerely thought he was serving his country. In his later years, however, Hoover apparently was oblivious to ethical lapses such as bugging the Rev. Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms

Hoover also emerges as petty, judgmental and sometimes bizarre. He didn’t want men with “pear-shaped” heads as agents and woe to the agent who added a few extra pounds.

More than anything, Hoover was that uniquely American character, the workaholic. His entire life was dedicated to the FBI, which he built into the world’s most respected law enforcement agency. Agents feared letters of censure from the boss; Hoover’s FBI allowed no room for error or forgiveness. Hoover’s singular devotion to the FBI’s success and image made the bureau a tense, competitive place to work. Arrests, closed cases, the accuracy rate of typed pages – everything was measured. “All men, even the best men, must be closely controlled and supervised at all times,” Letersky quotes Hoover as telling him.

He stayed too long and in later years needed an afternoon nap but other than attending horse races, he had little other life.

As for Hoover using his famed and feared “personal files” to pressure the eight presidents he worked for to allow him to stay; in Letersky’s telling, it was more the other way around – several presidents tried to lean on Hoover for political leverage.

The director usually resisted. Letersky says Hoover never joined a political party and never voted.

With Hoover’s death in 1972, many thought the mystery of what was in his personal files would be revealed. Their mere existence generated fear – what secrets might those 30-some file drawers hold?

We can get some clues as to the contents from a file Letersky saw on The Monkees, the American pop group from the 1960s. The file consisted of a few newspaper clips, cut and stored because an informant said the group was transmitting subliminal anti-war messages during their concerts.

This would have been impressive at many levels. The Monkees’ musical abilities were such that studio musicians recorded many of their songs for them.

And the rest of the files?

We will never know. After Hoover’s death, they were shredded by his long-time secretary, Helen Gandy. The job took two weeks.

Historian explains why Donald Trump’s COVID-19
response is remarkably similar to Herbert Hoover’s
failed crisis leadership

I HAVE MADE THIS SAME COMPARISON HERE

 April 14, 2020 By Robert Rupp  History News Network - Commentary


On April 9, the New York Times reported more than 6 million new unemployment claims for the previous week, and nearly 17 million over the previous three weeks. As this massive unemployment has followed the coronavirus crisis, a comparison between Presidents Donald Trump and Herbert Hoover becomes more apt than ever. For both presidents failed to project candor or show leadership during an unprecedented national crisis.

President Hoover during his first year in office confronted an economic collapse. Unemployment soared to a record 25% at time when most Americans did not have access to unemployment benefits let alone health care. But as the nation sank into the Great Depression of the 1930s, Hoover radiated confidence. He was fond of saying that prosperity was just around the corner.

Hoover allegedly explained his optimistic proclamations by saying that “A doctor does not tell his patient how sick he is.” His lack of openness prompted a pushback as opponents during his administration labelled the slums built outside major cities as “Hoovervilles,” and encouraged people to call an empty pocket turned inside out as a “Hoover Flag.”

Like Hoover, Trump leans toward overconfidence rather than openness. According to the Washington Post, he had sought to downplay the coronavirus threat 33 times in February and March. At the start of the pandemic Trump appeared to dismiss the threat by highlighting low numbers (only 5 deaths and 15 cases). In the following months he repeatedly ignored Winston Churchill’s observation that “ There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hope soon to be swept away.” On April 3, President Trump did warn Americans that this week “there’s going to be a lot of death.” But then he talked about “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Another characteristic shared by the two presidents is an avoidance of strong presidential action; each proved reluctant to use the full power of the federal government.

Any discussion of presidential leadership must first recognize that Hoover was not a laissez-faire bystander as the depression worsened. Over the objections of his Secretary of Treasury, Andrew Mellon, who fought any federal action, Hoover pushed for historic initiatives such a Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which provided loans to banks and other major businesses and a Home Loan Bank to help the construction sector. He also undertook “jawboning” to convince certain industries not to reduce wages and promoted a direct loan to state governments for spending on relief for the unemployed.

However, Hoover’s initiatives were constrained by his conservative political philosophy. He had strong ideological resistance to excessive federal intervention—a profound belief that such action would undermine initiative and responsibility. He expressed his strong views in his 1922 book American Individualism, which highlighted the danger of collectivism and a reliance too much on the federal government. In this regard he believed that assistance should be handled on a local, voluntary basis rather than on the federal level.

The American public would have to wait until President Franklin Roosevelt initiation of the New Deal and mobilization efforts during the World War II to witness dramatic model of full government intervention.

Like his overconfident pronouncements, Hoover’s principled resistance to extensive federal intervention did not serve him well as president and may have undermined his political future. Hoover was elected with 444 electoral votes winning all but 8 states in 1928. Four years later he received 59 electoral votes and carried just 6 states. Today no politician mentions him, except to compare their political opponent to him.

If history shows Hoover followed the wrong path for principled reasons, what will it say about Donald Trump, who has several tools that were not available to Hoover? Unlike Hoover, Trump could use such tools as War Production act and Defense Production act that date to World War II and the Korean War era, plus he has the precedent of the New Deal. All of these things happened after Hoover was president, and although available to Trump, he nonetheless is choosing not to use them as part of his action plan.

Armed with these tools Trump’s response has been confusing and impotent. While Hoover refused to initiate such action for ideological reasons, Trump has expressed no ideological justification. Trump apparently does not adhere to set of policies and ideology that would explain his reluctance to show strong presidential leadership.

Instead the man who just last year was making extraordinary claims about the unlimited power of a president has become the champion of federalism as he hands off to the states the decisions about the pandemic. He asserts that the federal government is only a backstop and that it is the responsibility of the state governors to set up the rules. The result is a patchwork of required action across the nation as fifty governors must fight each other for aid the President could implement as one nation.

As the United States faces the oncoming surge in victims, America does not have a uniform policy on stay-at-home-only suggestions and recommendations. States rights appear to trump federal action as we await future dissertations on the failure to allocate effectively ventilators, hospital beds and medical personnel during this pandemic emergency.

This lack of action and unified policy reminds one of the Articles of Confederation- that failed form of government replaced by the Constitution as our leaders realized the importance of strong federal government in times of crisis. As Alexander Hamilton wrote to James Duane on September 3, 1780, the danger was that the people “cannot long respect a Government which is too feeble to protect their interest.”

To flatten the curve of the coronavirus we need to be ahead in our planning and in our action. For delay is an ally of the coronavirus. As hockey star Wayne Gretzky said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.” As we await the pandemic’s impact on the nation, Presidents Hoover and Trump have provided negative role models.

Robert Rupp is a professor of history and political science at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

This article was originally published at History News Network

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Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage

BOULDER CITY, Nev. – Hoover Dam towers more than 700 feet above Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada state line, holding back the waters of the Colorado River. On top of the dam, where visitors peer down the graceful white arc of its face, one of its art deco-style towers is adorned with a work of art that memorializes the purposes of the dam.© Mark Henle/The Republic A high-water mark or "bathtub ring" is visible on the shoreline of Lake Mead at Hoover Dam.

In five relief sculptures by Oskar Hansen, muscular men grip a boat’s wheel, harvest an armful of wheat, stand beside cascading water and lift a heavy weight overhead. Words encapsulate why the dam was built, as laid out in a 1928 law: FLOOD CONTROL, NAVIGATION, IRRIGATION, WATER STORAGE and POWER.


Eighty-six years after its completion in 1935, the infrastructure at Hoover Dam continues doing what it was designed to do: holding water and sending it coursing through intake tunnels, spinning turbines and generating electricity. The rules for managing the river and dividing up its water – which were laid down nearly a century ago in the 1922 Colorado River Compact and repeatedly tweaked – face the greatest strains since the dam was built.

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The effects of years of severe drought and temperatures pushed higher by climate change are striking along Lake Mead’s retreating shorelines near Las Vegas, where the growing “bathtub ring” of whitish minerals coats the rocky desert slopes.

Since 2000, the water level in Lake Mead, which is the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam and holds the title of the largest reservoir in the country, has dropped about 140 feet. It is just 37% full, headed for a first-ever official shortage and sinking toward its lowest levels since it was filled.

One of the West's driest 22-year periods in centuries is colliding with the river's chronic overuse. As the reservoir falls toward record lows, its decline threatens the water supplies of cities and farmlands and reveals how the system of managing water in the desert Southwest faces growing risks.

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Water levels expected to fall below federal threshold this summer

Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation leads a team of engineers and hydrologists who plan water releases from Hoover Dam, as well as Davis and Parker dams downstream, sending flows that travel through pipelines and canals to Phoenix, Los Angeles and farmlands in the USA and Mexico that produce crops such as hay, cotton, grapes and lettuce.

Bernardo’s team sets power generation goals and produces a monthly report with the latest projections of how reservoir levels will probably change over the next 24 months.

Lately, each month’s report has brought worsening numbers.

Predicted water-level declines have grown as estimates of inflows into Lake Powell, the upstream reservoir, have shrunk because of extremely parched conditions across the upper watershed in the Rocky Mountains, where much of the river’s flow originates as melting snow.

“Unfortunately, due to how dry things have been,” Bernardo says, “what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping.”

That will mean less water flowing into Lake Mead for the rest of the year. The past 12 months have been among the driest on record across the Colorado River Basin. Inflows into Lake Powell from April through July are estimated to be just 26% of the long-term average, and that’s leading to rapid declines in Powell and Mead, the two largest pieces of the river's water-storage system.

The warm, dry conditions over the past two years have baked the watershed’s soils to such an extent, Bernardo says, that “when the snowmelt starts to run off, it just gets sucked up into the ground like a sponge.”

The demands for water downstream from Hoover Dam continue. The Southwest’s farmlands' peak irrigation season lasts through June, Bernardo says, so Lake Mead’s surface drops about 1 foot each week.

'Something we directly cause': Study blames climate change for 37% of global heat deaths© Mark Henle/The Republic "Due to how dry things have been, what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping,” says Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation at Hoover Dam.

The reservoir has declined more than 16 feet over the past year and is forecast to fall about 9 feet more by the end of this year.

The latest projections show that by the end of 2021, Lake Mead will decline below an elevation of 1,066 feet, far below the threshold – 1,075 feet – for the federal government to declare a shortage. That’s likely to happen in August, triggering the largest water cuts to date next year for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.

Even larger cutbacks could come in 2023 if the reservoir declines as projected over the next year into a more severe “Tier 2” shortage.

Lake Mead's downward spiral is driven largely by the dire situation upstream at Lake Powell, which has declined to 34% of full capacity.

“We need three to four consecutive years of above-average inflow, snowpack runoff and inflow into Lake Powell to refill these reservoirs,” Bernardo says. “So that's what we're hoping for.”

The Colorado River naturally cycles through wet and dry periods, but over the past 22 years, the watershed has had 17 dry years, Bernardo says, and only five years with above-average or wet conditions.

Hotter temperatures have evaporated more moisture off the landscape, leaving less flowing in the river and its tributaries. Scientists describe it as a “megadrought” and one that, unlike the long droughts of the past, is amplified by carbon pollution and the heating of the planet.

One of the unknowns facing the officials who manage Colorado River water is how severely the reservoirs could be affected by climate-driven “aridification” in the years to come. Some scientists have estimated the river could lose roughly one-fourth of its flow by 2050 as temperatures rise, and that for each additional 1 degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the average flow is likely to drop by about 9%.

“With the warmer temperatures,” Bernardo says, “not only do we see things melt off quicker but you have that rising snow line, which creates less inflow.”© Mark Henle/The Republic The Lake Mead reservoir has declined since 2000.

The declines in the reservoirs have accelerated over the past two years.

In 2019, representatives of Arizona, Nevada and California agreed under a deal called the Drought Contingency Plan to share in water reductions through 2026 to reduce the risks of Lake Mead falling to critically low levels. The agreement calls for progressively larger cutbacks if Lake Mead drops below lower trigger points in the coming years.

If the reservoir drops below 1,045 feet, California would start to take cuts. Mexico contributes by leaving some water in Lake Mead.

“These mechanisms have been put into place to protect these reservoir elevations,” Bernardo says.

Though the latest agreement is intended as a stopgap measure, officials from the seven states that depend on the river are preparing to negotiate rules for managing shortages after 2026, and those talks promise to be tougher.

Bernardo says the bureau's responsibilities in managing the dams and water deliveries remain the same, and they include incorporating the latest science and models and providing up-to-date information to representatives of the states, water districts, tribes and other entities along the river “to communicate what's going on and what we're seeing, so everyone can act proactively.”

“When you have a river system like this, a complex reservoir and river system especially, that is experiencing the hydrology that we've been seeing, and such a quick decline in the Upper Basin over these last two years, transparency and communication is key,” Bernardo says.

Harris tackles migration in high-profile visit to Guatemala and Mexico: Here’s what’s on the agenda© Mark Henle/The Republic Patti Aaron with the Bureau of Reclamation explains how Hoover Dam works.
Iconic dam holds less and less

Bernardo, 35, has worked for the Bureau of Reclamation for nearly a decade, including the past two years as river operations manager. A mechanical engineer who grew up in New Jersey, he usually works with his staff at the agency’s office in Boulder City, Nevada, but he regularly drives out to visit the dam, sometimes to lead special tours.

Whenever he rounds the curve in the canyon and sees the dam, Bernardo says, he feels awestruck, and “the hair still sticks up on my arms.”

“It never gets old,” he says. “I’m wowed by the engineering marvel.”

Part of that comes from knowing the history of all that went into the dam’s design and construction during the Great Depression, from the hand-drawn blueprints to the blasting with dynamite, the railroad that carried supplies and the massive amounts of concrete poured in, creating a dam that is 660 feet thick at its base – nearly as thick between the reservoir and the downstream side as it is tall. (According to the Bureau of Reclamation, Hoover Dam contains enough concrete to build a sidewalk 4 feet wide around the entire Earth at the equator.)

Bernardo says the dam's historical significance is inescapable: how it controlled the Colorado’s floods, opened arid lands for farming and fed the rise of cities across the Southwest. As he describes it, the dam “helped nourish our nation” and helped the West thrive.

“We like to show it off,” he says.

Hoover Dam's normal capacity is 2,074 megawatts, Bernardo says, generating enough power per year to supply approximately 450,000 average households. At today’s lake level, the dam’s capacity has decreased about 25% to 1,567 megawatts, generating enough power for roughly 350,000 homes.

With every foot the lake declines, about 6 megawatts of power-generating capacity is lost.

The lowest level at which Hoover could produce power is about 950 feet, with an expected capacity of 650 megawatts. If the lake fell below that point – a scenario the rules are geared toward avoiding – the dam would no longer be able to generate power.© Mark Henle/The Republic As water levels drop, Hoover Dam is less able to generate power.

As the reservoir declines, releasing the same amount of water yields a bigger drop in lake level.

“That's one of the concerning pieces,” Bernardo says. “The reservoir is shaped, we call it a teacup, but more like a martini glass. And the lower the elevation goes, the faster the rate of decline.”

That dynamic affects how much the planned water cuts could help Mead’s level. Under a first-tier shortage next year, for example, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico are preparing for cuts totaling 613,000 acre-feet, which Bernardo says is equivalent to 7-8 feet of elevation in Lake Mead.

If the reservoir dropped below 1,025 feet, the total cuts among the three states and Mexico would add up to more than 1.3 million acre-feet. That amount, Bernardo says, would equal nearly 20 feet conserved in Lake Mead at those low levels.

When representatives of California, Arizona and Nevada negotiated the deal, they decided on 1,025 feet as a threshold to avoid, one they thought the lake would be unlikely to reach. The agreement includes a backup provision. If the two-year projections show Mead is likely to decline below 1,030 feet, the agreement says, the states and the interior secretary “shall consult and determine what additional measures will be taken.”

The government’s latest five-year projections, using an approach that considers the river’s lower flows over the past three decades, estimates a 25% chance of Lake Mead declining below 1,025 feet in 2025.

Much could change if there's a snowy winter in the mountains.

“We hope and we feel very strongly that the measures that have been put into place should slow down the decline,” Bernardo says. “Now, if it's enough to make it recover, your guess is as good as mine, because the hydrology has been so bad.”

If the river basin gets a wet year with average flows, Bernardo says, the cutbacks in the plan “will buy us time to get to the next year, in hopes to get a better water year.”

“And I think that's what the system is designed to do,” he says.
An ‘Era of Limits’

The outlook for the Colorado River has grown increasingly dire over the past several years. In one study, scientists found that about half the trend of decreasing runoff in the Upper Colorado River Basin since 2000 was due to unprecedented warming.

Other researchers warned in a report this year that an “incremental approach to adaptation” is unlikely to be enough. They pointed out that flows from 2000 through 2018 were about 18% less than the 20th century average and said the downward trend will probably continue as temperatures rise with climate change.

Worries about overusing the Colorado river predate the current dry spell. Some early warnings came before the legal framework that divided the Colorado among the seven states and Mexico.

John Wesley Powell voiced concerns in 1893, 24 years after his expedition down the river in the Grand Canyon, when he told attendees at the International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles, “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.”

Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and subsequent agreements, the river has long been severely overallocated. As University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon put it, “there are more water rights than there is water.”

So much has been diverted that most of the river’s delta in Mexico was transformed decades ago into stretches of dry riverbed that wind through farmlands and desert in the Mexicali Valley. Only a smattering of natural wetlands remain.


A journey into the heart of a river forever changed by human hands



In his 1986 book “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisner wrote that Hoover Dam “rose up at the depths of the Depression and carried America’s spirits with it. Its electricity helped produce the ships and planes that won the Second World War, and its water helped grow the food.”

Reisner wrote that from these hopeful beginnings, “the tale of human intervention in the Colorado River degenerates into a chronicle of hubris and obtuseness” and that people in the river basin – at that time 20 million – “will probably find themselves facing chronic shortages, if not some kind of catastrophe.”

“One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam,” Reisner wrote. “And one could say that, amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.”

Authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck wrote in their 2019 book “Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River” that “even absent climate change, we would be in trouble” and that the current problems surrounding the river “are the inevitable result of critical decisions made by water managers and politicians who ignored the science” as early as the 1920s.

Scientific analyses in the 1920s found the Colorado River would be in deficit if dams and canals were built to meet the anticipated demand, Kuhn and Fleck wrote. The scientists’ warnings were ignored, and that “set in motion decades of decisions that would end in the overuse seen today.”


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They suggested that addressing the river’s deficit will require recognizing that the “over-allocation became embedded in basin rules in very specific ways that remain unresolved” and should be fixed.

Negotiating the post-2026 rules will be challenging for everyone involved, Kuhn and Fleck wrote, and some of the fundamental issues facing negotiators are similar to those a century ago, including questions of how much water the river will provide in the years ahead and how the system should be governed amid uncertainty.

The Colorado River Basin needs “a stable and effective governance of the use of the river’s waters under conditions where current demands already exceed the exiting supplies,” Kuhn and Fleck wrote. “Like one hundred years ago, the river’s future is not all dark. Innovation, cooperation, and an expanded reliance on science are now the foundation for basin-wide solutions.”

One effort to restore some of the wetlands and ecosystems in Mexico began last month, as water began flowing into the delta under an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. The water releases in the delta, which will total 35,000 acre-feet from May to October, are intended to nourish vegetation and wildlife at habitat restoration sites where conservation groups planted cottonwoods and willows.

The influx of water is supposed to mimic a small portion of the floods that once swept across the delta toward the Sea of Cortez. This year’s releases amount to a smaller version of a planned flood that coursed through the delta in 2014. In that “pulse flow,” 105,000 acre-feet of water brought back a flowing river in areas that had been dry since floods in the late 1990s.

The releases in the delta this year, using water previously stored in Lake Mead, amount to just 5 inches of water in the reservoir. Much more of the water that passes through Hoover Dam is pumped to Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles and flows through canals to irrigate farmlands along the river from Parker to Yuma, and across the Coachella, Imperial and Mexicali valleys. © Mark Henle/The Republic Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border, is one of the great feats of engineering.
Low water levels bring risks

If the water declined about 125 feet from where it stands, below the elevation of 950 feet, Bernardo says, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.

“That's what we call minimum power pool,” Bernardo says.

If Mead falls further, the dam could still release water down to a level of 895 feet.

“At 895 and below, Hoover Dam is unable to pass water by any conventional means. So you would essentially have to pump it out of Lake Mead. That's what we call dead pool,” Bernardo says. “And at dead pool, Lake Mead still has 2.5 million acre-feet in storage, but there's just no way to get it out.”

If the lake declines that much, only the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Las Vegas, has an intake deep enough to continue pumping water. © Mark Henle/The Republic A view of the 30-foot diameter penstock (bottom) from the penstock access room on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.

The risks of Mead falling to such lows gave impetus to the last round of negotiations, which led to the signing of the Drought Contingency Plan in 2019 at Hoover Dam.

The river would have been in a shortage years ago if the states and Mexico hadn’t made concerted efforts to prop up Lake Mead’s levels, Bernardo says, and those steps included various conservation programs that have yielded 4 million acre-feet over the past 15 years, about 50 feet of water in the lake.

During the unrelenting dry years, he says, “we knew that we couldn't postpone a shortage forever.”© Mark Henle/The Republic Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation says that if the water level fell below the elevation of 950 feet, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.

He reiterates that the shortage measures, including the mandatory cutbacks, were adopted to reduce risks.

“And although it's scary that this will be the first time we're using them, they were designed by very smart people throughout the Colorado River Basin,” Bernardo says. “And let's hope that they work the way that they were designed to work.”

If the situation worsens, he says, everyone involved in managing the river’s water will get together again, as stipulated in the 2019 agreements, to take steps to protect the reservoirs. About 40 million people rely on water from the Colorado and its tributaries, he says, and “all of us as water managers have a responsibility to all of those that are in the basin.”

By mid-June, Lake Mead is set to decline to its lowest levels on record. Hoover Dam will soon hold the smallest amount of water since it was filled in the 1930s. The next few years may show how much water use needs to decrease to rebalance the river and reduce the risk that Hoover Dam might one day fall silent.

Follow reporter Ian James on Twitter: @ByIanJames.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.






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The power plant on the Arizona side of Hoover Dam on May 11, 2021.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage

Is the US government ready for the rise of artificial intelligence?

Robert Reich
Tue, 7 March 2023 



We’re at a Frankenstein moment.

An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with high-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry.

Yet AI could also spread conspiracy theories and lies even more quickly than the internet already does – fueling political polarization, hate, violence and mental illness in young people. It could undermine national security with deepfakes.

In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI’s most threatening aspects.

Most lawmakers don’t even know what AI is, according to Representative Jay Obernolte, the only member of Congress with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence.

What to do?

Many tech executives claim they can simultaneously look out for their company’s interests and for society’s. Rubbish. Why should we assume that their profit motives align perfectly with the public’s needs?

Sam Altman – the CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for some of the most mind-blowing recent advances in AI – believes no company, including his, should be trusted to solve these problems. The boundaries of AI should be decided, he says, not by “Microsoft or OpenAI, but society, governments, something like that”.

But does anyone trust the government to do this? If not, how can “society” manage it? Where can we look for a model of how to protect ourselves from the downsides of an emerging technology with such extraordinary upsides, without stifling it?

One place to look is Herbert Hoover. Seriously. Not when Hoover was president and notoriously failed to do anything about the Great Depression, but when he was US secretary of commerce between 1921 to 1929.

One of Hoover’s great achievements a century ago, largely unrecognized and unremembered today, was managing the development of a new and crucial technology in the public interest.

That new technology was electricity. Thomas Edison and other entrepreneurs and the corporations they spawned were busily promoting all manner of electric gadgets.

Those gadgets had the potential to make life easier for millions of people. But they could also pose grave dangers. They could destroy buildings, and injure or kill people.

Hoover set out to ensure that the infrastructure for electricity – wires, plugs, connectors, fuses, voltage and all else – was safe and reliable. And that it conformed to uniform standards so products were compatible with one another.

He created these standards for safety, reliability, and compatibility by convening groups of engineers, scientists, academics, experts and sometimes even journalists and philosophers – and asking them to balance public and private interests. He then worked with the producers of electric gadgets to implement those standards.

Importantly, the standards were non-proprietary. No one could own them. No one could charge for their use. They were, to use the parlance of today, “open source.”

Much of today’s internet is based on open-source standards. We take them for granted. Computers could not communicate without shared models, such as HTTP, FTP, and TCP/IP.

Although digital standards haven’t protected the public from disinformation and hate speech, they have encouraged the creation of services such as Wikipedia, which are neither privately owned nor driven by profits.

In fact, you could view our entire system of intellectual property – copyrights, patents, and trade names – as premised on eventual open-source usage. After a certain length of time, all creations lose their intellectual property protections and move into the public domain where anyone is free to use them. (Not incidentally, when he was secretary of commerce, Hoover advanced and streamlined the intellectual property system.)

So what would Hoover have done about AI?

He wouldn’t wait for the producers of AI to set its limits. Nor would he trust civil servants to do it. Instead, he’d convene large and wide-ranging panels to identify AI’s potential problems and dangers, come up with ideas for containing them, and float the ideas with the public.

If the proposed standards stood the test, he’d make them voluntary for the industry – with the understanding that the standards could be modified if they proved impracticable or unnecessarily hobbled innovation. But once in place, if corporations chose not to adapt the standards, their AI products would lose intellectual property protections or be prohibited.

Hoover would also create incentives for the creation of open-source AI products that would be free to the public.

In other words, Hoover wouldn’t rely solely on business or on government, but on society to gauge the common good.

AI has the potential for huge societal benefits, but it could also become a monster. To guide the way, we need the leadership and understanding of someone like Herbert Hoover when he was secretary of commerce.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

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