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For several decades, Hoover was a figure of heroic probity—another generation's pistol-packing version of Ralph Nader. Unmarried to the end, he lived with his mother until her death in 1938. For recreation, he went to the racetrack, usually with his lifelong friend Clyde Tolson, who became Associate Deputy Director of the bureau; Hoover always cautiously restricted himself to the $2 window. In the '30s and '40s, he began to appear in New York nightclubs, such as the Stork Club, with cronies, notably Walter Winchell, but he would have only one drink, or two at most. Columnist Jack Anderson, whose agents assiduously went through Hoover's trash cans recently in an exercise of exceptionally personal journalism, confirmed that he liked to drink Jack Daniels.
Hoover ultimately came to his police work with a vision of national destiny. If his FBI was incorruptible, it became at the same time an instrument of his zealotry. He exaggerated the domestic Communist menace while for years curiously neglecting organized crime. His men were swift to find the bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Chancy and Michael Schwerner after they were killed in Philadelphia, Miss., and to solve the Klan killing of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo in Alabama; yet they seemed slow otherwise to enforce the cause of civil rights. When Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that Southern FBI offices were unsympathetic to blacks, Hoover called him "the most notorious liar in the country."
Embattled End. Perhaps the '60s, with their extravagances of assassinations and riots and accelerating crime, were more than his stern and orderly mind could accommodate. He had become a legend whose own sense of discipline and integrity prevented many of the abuses that his vast power made him capable of. Yet toward the end the myth had begun to deteriorate. There were charges that the FBI was tapping Congressmen's phones. Even if that claim was never proved, it did suggest the critics' general theme: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was in his last days dangerously turning its resources to ideological purposes—harassing political radicals and even liberals, accumulating a frightening inventory of dossiers. And even within Hoover's granitically disciplined bureau, the cracks were showing. Morale had deteriorated. Last fall Hoover forced out one of his top deputies, William Sullivan, in a feud that jarred the bureau's highest ranks.
For J. Edgar Hoover, it was an unhappy, embattled end. After nearly half a century of his masterful, autocratic reign, the word senility was loudly whispered about. President Nixon's highest advisers counseled him to find a dignified moment to ease Hoover out, and although the President resisted, he undoubtedly would have done so as soon as the criticism had sufficiently faded. Instead, the moment was chosen for him. One night last week in his neo-Georgian house at the edge of Washington's Rock Creek Park, John Edgar Hoover died of hypertensive cardiovascular disease.