J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for forty-eight years — through eight presidencies — and no president dared fire him because he had files on all of them. The former Library of Congress clerk turned a small federal agency into the most powerful law enforcement organization in the world, and then used it to spy on civil rights leaders, harass political dissidents, and accumulate enough blackmail material to make himself untouchable.

This episode traces Hoover from his Washington childhood through the Palmer Raids, the gangster era that made the FBI famous, the COINTELPRO operations against King and the Black Panthers, and the secret files that kept presidents in line for half a century.

• Hoover's Library of Congress training and the card-catalog organizational mind he brought to the FBI
• The gangster era — Dillinger, Machine Gun  ...