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John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington, D.C. on New Year's Day, 1895. He received an LL.B. from George Washington University in 1916 and a master's degree in law in 1917. While he was attending night school at George Washington University, J. Edgar Hoover worked at the Library of Congress for a period of five years. He began as a messenger and rose to cataloguer and finally, clerk. Biographer Curt Gentry notes that a coworker of Hoover estimated that Hoover was destined to become chief librarian had he stayed there. Hoover was destined to become chief librarian had he stayed there.
Instead of pursuing a career at the Library of Congress, Hoover began working for the Department of Justice. He served from 1919 to 1921 as special assistant to the Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer. In this position, Hoover directed the so-called Palmer Raids against suspected radical communist aliens. In 1924, Hoover was named the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was not yet thirty years old at the time he was named Director. He held the appointment through eight presidents until his death in 1972.
Hoover devoted his substantial talents to increasing the power and prestige of the FBI. At the time of his appointment, the FBI had been the target of much criticism and scandal. Hoover quickly improved the quality of FBI employees. He also built an efficient crime-detection agency, established a centralized fingerprint file, a crime laboratory and a training institution for police. Hoover monitored what he considered immoral and dissident activities. It has been verified that he condoned and planned the systematic harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover accumulated enormous power, in part from his secret files on influential social and political leaders. "He devised sophisticated records procedures to preclude the discovery either of his authorization of illegal investigative techniques (break-ins, wiretaps, bugs) or the accumulation of derogatory personal information" (The Columbia Encyclopedia, p.17,586).
Although J. Edgar Hoover successful avoided independent investigations of the FBI's conduct and his administration during his tenure, Congress enacted legislation requiring Senate confirmation of future FBI directors and limited their power to ten years. His writings include Persons in Hiding, Masters of Deceit, A Study of Communism and J. Edgar Hoover on Communism.