‘J. Edgar’ Film Parrots Left-Wing Lies

Clint Eastwood’s new movie J. Edgar is another left-wing attempt to spit on the grave of FBI founder and director J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a biased representation of Hoover’s public and private life that obviously hasn’t done the true due diligence required for such a movie. It’s too bad that Clint Eastwood apparently fell for the left-wing smears against Hoover. Radical extremists, including many leaders of the Democratic Party and the liberal press, have been spreading these smears for the past 40 years!

The movie opens with an old liberal shibboleth—the idea that, in 1919, Hoover, not Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer or Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, was the main force behind a program in the Justice Department against left-wing radicals, which included many immigrants. In actuality, Wilson had already developed a program against immigrants during the war with Germany in 1917-18.

Also, in 1919 Palmer appointed Hoover the head of the investigative team purging the immigrant community of those radicals after a series of anti-capitalist bombings, one of which was aimed at Palmer’s own home. The movie is correct in saying, however, that Hoover’s experience in leading this team led to a vigorous, lifelong anti-communist attitude.

What the movie fails to note is that Hoover and his FBI also worked diligently to stop Nazi infiltration of America during World War II. This opening sets the stage for the movie’s left-wing revisionist history that Hoover pulled the strings of every Democratic Party president from Wilson to Johnson.*

After quelling the left-wing agitators in the 1920s, the movie describes how the FBI under Hoover went on to fight the gangsters and bank robbers, causing mayhem during the Great Depression in the 1930s. It also shows Hoover reminiscing about his part in the Bureau’s investigation of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby.

At the same time Hoover carries on these exploits, the movie says Hoover doted on his mother and became very close friends with a lawyer named Clyde Tolson whom he hired. The movie contends Hoover’s mother was a raving “homophobe” who forced Hoover to repress his homosexual tendencies. This frustrates Tolson, who clearly worships his friend and wants more than just the occasional handclasp from Hoover.

In one scene, Hoover tells Tolson he’s thinking of marrying Hollywood actress Dorothy Lamour. Tolson goes berserk and punches Hoover. The two men get into a fight, at the end of which Tolson plants a huge kiss on Hoover’s lips, which have been bloodied during the fight. Hoover pushes Tolson off him, and Tolson angrily retreats to another room. As Tolson retreats, Hoover whispers, “I love you,” which Tolson apparently doesn’t hear.

Finally, J. Edgar gives a brief overview of Hoover’s campaign against 1960s activists and radicals, including his wiretap of Martin Luther King’s bedroom as King has extramarital sex with some woman. The movie accepts the apparently slanderous left-wing lie that Hoover goaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy into letting him wiretap King. The historical record shows, however, that it was Kennedy and his brother, John, who ordered the wiretaps. What this movie leaves out is the fact that the Kennedys and Hoover had been informed that King’s closest white adviser, Stanley David Levison, was a secret top-level member of the Communist Party of the United States of America when he first met King in 1956.

King repeatedly misled Kennedy officials about his close ties to Levison, who left the Communist Party in 1957. Apparently, Hoover and the Kennedys didn’t believe King was a communist, or that Levison would make him one, but they were worried that Levison’s radical character might influence King to make bad decisions leading to political unrest in the country. Of course, later, King did indeed sign onto the left-wing antiwar movement and radical anti-poverty schemes. The antiwar movement led to the murder of more than 2 million people in Cambodia and Vietnam, and the oppression of millions more. And, the radical, big government anti-poverty schemes stemming from the 1960s and beyond have ruined the lives of many Americans, including millions of children and impressionable teenagers, not to mention wasted billions of taxpayer dollars.

Using the left-wing matrix, J. Edgar alleges that part of its story is being told from Hoover’s own anti-communist viewpoint. At the end, however, the character playing Hoover’s friend Tolson refutes some of the scenes in Hoover’s story involving the Great Depression gangsters and the Lindbergh baby case. The viewer is then left to question whether Hoover’s lifelong hostility and war against communism and left-wing agitators was also full of lies. The movie equivocates a little bit here, however, because the Anti-American violence of many communist, left-wing agitators cannot be denied.

Besides its acceptance of a bunch of slanderous left-wing innuendo against Hoover, J. Edgar leaves out a lot of exciting FBI material. That material includes the FBI’s cases against Nazi infiltrators, its gun battles with Great Depression gangsters, and its prevention of terrorist bombings on New York City during Thanksgiving 1962 by agents of Communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Of course, this material undercuts the movie’s left-wing worldview, so it’s not surprising these things were left on the cutting room floor.

Several years ago, Ernest Borgnine made a one-man movie about the FBI founder, called simply Hoover. That movie is based on the critically acclaimed book by Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, the deputy director of the FBI under Hoover, Hoover’s FBI. DeLoach sets the record straight on Hoover, denying the more outrageous claims against Hoover that Eastwood’s movie promotes. For instance, DeLoach clearly refutes (as do other sources) the lies about Hoover’s alleged homosexuality.

Was J. Edgar Hoover a perfect person? No. Even his close associate for 28 years at the FBI, Deke DeLoach, admits that in his book. But, people need to be extremely careful when they accept anything that the liberal, left-wing media tells them. Movieguide finds, more often than not, that nearly all of it is based on a house of cards.

Ted Baehr is founder and publisher of Movieguide: The Family Guide to Movies and Entertainment. Tom Snyder is editor.

* The movie conveniently, of course, makes Republican President Richard Nixon out to be a real bad guy (he probably was, especially when he acted more like a liberal or “moderate”). In fact, the movie shows Hoover himself stopping Nixon from getting his hands on Hoover’s private files used for blackmailing his superiors. When Hoover dies, Nixon is shown ordering his men to search Hoover’s office for the private files. “I want those f***ing files!” he exclaims. In contrast to this, the movie eschews any negative portrayals of Democratic Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy or Johnson.