j. edgar hoover and kathryn kelly. george was a student of harvey bailey, and harvey's credo was, you have to stay under the radar. doesn't do you any good to shoot up a bank. this police come after you. don't want to hurt anybody because once you hurt member, that draws the law. so, george was trying to prosecutor his business in that fashion, and in fact he didn't like machine guns. he was kind of afraid of them. he liked to rob a bank with a concealed .38. one of this charming, hail fellow well met irishmen, went into the bank, incredibly well dressed. both he and kathryn were clothe horses, very concerned about their image and their fashion statements. he would walk in, open his jacket, show the about 38 and ask the ladies behind the count to just empty their drawers into the satchel and i'll be out of here with no problem. but that -- but kathryn was -- that wasn't good enough for kathryn. catherine wanted to be married to he most famous criminal in all of america so she started working on his reputation. she beau

j. edgar huge - - hoover as well as local police. urschel comes in and immediately debriefed by the fbi agents who'd just listens having starting off telling him it is like finding a needle in a haystack after 90 minutes he said we just found a really small haystack. [laughter] but consequently urschel borrowed a plane they go up in the air with the airline they have identified they look down using urschel sketch and identify a form that looks exactly like the drawing and put together a raiding party and urschel insists he is in the lead car with a sawed-off shotgun on his lap their arrest them and of fellow who was at the farm hiding out from the state prison in kansas. harvey bailey is an incredible character and just so happen to stumble into this story consider the most successful bank robbery in american history. which involves careful planning to have multiple backup plans if there is the most money in the bank to be robbed by studying the of local economy with the police activity is like how far away the police station is what

j edgar hoover's job was to, well, he tapped his phone and that his mail and try to entrap him in a hotel room with a woman to get incriminating evidence on him, none of which succeeded , but it did succeed in making a lifelong enemy of mr. walsh who was announced by fdr as his 1st choice for attorney general. and after that announcement about to get rid of that

j edgar hoover said they were the greatest threat to internal security in america. what was it that was so threatening, given the inspiration of the group, which was to monitor police and make sure police brutality didn't take place? what happened in those four years that caused so much of white law enforcement and the white power structure to freak out about the black panthers? stanley: the panthers were in some ways a victim of their own success. the image that first came to the public was these black men with guns. they had in oakland. but that really didn't last long . very quickly after that, they changed the law in california and said ok, you can carry a gun. john: perhaps there was some relationship between those two things. stanley: after that, the panthers changed in a lot of ways. but that was the image that was in people's minds. even worse, that was the image that was in j gruber's -- j edgar hoover's mind, the director of the fbi, who went ballistic and went all out to do anything he could do destroy the panthers. john: you talk about the great characte

j. edgar hoover created the informant program.ulger was. and in the '60s, there was a gangster named joe barboza, who cooperated with the government. he was sort of a precursor to bulger in some ways. he took the stand in a capital murder case and fingered four innocent people for a crime they didn't commit. and the government knew it. it was known all the way up to j. edgar hoover. this became the dirty secret of that jurisdiction for many generations after that. we wouldn't know about that until the '90s when bulger went on the run and a lot of this dirty history came out. so this tradition of using gangsters in the way that bulger was used was established in the era before bulger and it reached deep into the system, beyond the fbi, into the prosecutor's office, all the way to the department of justice in washington, d.c. >> how did he figure out he could make this work or bend, as you say this precedent toward the criminal enterprise he wanted to run, while basically the feds were protecting him? >> many of the same fbi agents

j. edgar hoover wa given the task of coming up with leaders in the german community and the japanese comtasnity, wh were after pearl harbor immediately rounded up. the camp in crystal city was -- became the center of the president's prisoner exchange program because people from all over the world and literally all over the world came to crystal city, and the government said to them we will be a night you with your families but if we need to repatriate you then you have to sign this document saying you would agree to go and that was the price for reuniting their families. my book focuses on two families, one and german-american and one japanese-american and i will show you the face of sunni, a japanese american, now she's 90 years old but issue is, very cute with the ribbon in her hair standing in the white dress with her father tom who was a photographer in los angeles, the most successful japanese photographer in california. that is the reason he was immediately arrested. because of hoover and the government very concerned about anyone taking photographs of military installations so he was tak

j. edgar hoover, how they fought with each other that helped destroy the party. i felt that whole story hadn't been told but also, it's such a sexy story there was this whole new look we hadn't seen before. >> free hughie. >> it begins to turn and the black panthers changed the dynamic, when hughie newton and bobby sale, how did that change the movement? >> you have to look at that as another movement. this is another side of the movement. the panthers were very aggressive. they came out of oakland, california and there was a law in california that said you could carry a loaded weapon in the open as long as it was in the open. and they started following the police around and policing the police. and that's how the panthers began. so it was kind of the real opposite of the nonviolent civil rights movement. and in some ways you know the panthers made people a lot of people in this country gravitate to martin luther king. they were like oh, maybe martin luther king isn't so bad! >> so how does this connect to the black lives matter movement that's sprung up and the

of stevenson being gay, and we now know that these rumors were perpetuated by none other than j edgar hoover. so here to bring his wife onto the campaign trail in a -- his sister onto the campaign trail where the sister looked like the wife and people thought she was the wife. that is infinitely more interesting than what mamie did which is to stay completely in the background. mamie was often ill, she was not drunk. she was often ill on the campaign trail and the stress really hurt her. she was constantly in the face of eisenhower's advisers saying you are working him too hard. she wanted him to take two weeks off in the middle of the campaign. he was winning anyway. she wanted him to go to denver and come back to abilene. she did not win that battle. by the way, there is an excellent biography of maybe eisenhower.- mamie i recommend it highly, it flashed her out very well. >> there is a story that a few years before, truman tried to recruit eisenhower as his successor. what happened in the interim, and why did eisenhower run as a republican if he could have easily run as a democrat? prof.

j. edgar hoover as the most famous anti-communist in america. he'd been in congress for four years, and then he became ike's vice president. that's a pretty rapid rise. >> with the help of prescott bush. >> they didn't actually get along that well. prescott bush belonged to that now-extinct breed called a liberal republican. >> okay, thank you. >> you're welcome. anybody else? any questions? yes. step right up, sir. >> hello. hello. so, my dear uncle tim -- [laughter] cat's out of the bag. so i'm about 200 pages into the book, and i was telling my friends and my family that i'm surprised by the scope or the narrative that you've chosen for this in the sense that nixon's president by page 30. by page 200, vietnam has dominated the narrative, you know, even events like going to china get relatively little coverage. and by page -- on page 200 it says today was the day watergate was broken into. so this makes it a pretty particular scope, in my opinion. even to call it a biography of nixon's presidency might be too broad. so what concern we all mow

j. edgar hoover did not wish this to be emphasized either. he preferred the lone nut theory of the assassination. if it were shown oswald was a subversive communist the fbi would be held liable for not having identified him and protected the president. the fbi is not responsible for identifying lone nuts. so, more or less, it should be said the public did not know in 1963 of the kennedy administration efforts to eliminate castro. this was not made public until 1975 when the church commission investigated efforts by the cia when they disclosed efforts by the eisenhower and kennedy administration to assassinate leaders. including castro. the public did not have the information needed to put these pieces together but leaders did. i have a long chapter on oswald that i will not get into. suffice it to say oswald was a strange and bizarre character in the cold war, defecting to the soviet union in 1959, returning in 1962. being in contact with the communist party and the socialist workers party. he read their magazines when he returned. he purchas

j. edgar hoover's documents. you talk about how young they were.e young voices was fred hampton. let's take a listen. >> fred hampton here in chicago was the main voice for racial unity. >> stood up to say we don't kill -- we don't fight violence with violence. we fight for solidarity. >> the coalition in chicago remitted the latinos, the poor whites and poor blacks. but also because he had been in naacp, he had linkages with focus in congregations, church folks and working class folks, so fred was building a broad base coalition in chicago and that was the threat. >> so much of a threat that in the film you tell the story ultimately that -- or the film tells the story that fred hampton is killed in his own home while sleeping by the chicago police, ultimately his family winning an award against the police for that death. how -- historical factual. what difference would it have head if hampton had lived? >> fred hampton was special. we called him the one in the editing room. he was so young, 21, i think, when he was killed. but he had also come out

j. edgar hoover was convinced that she had, quote, unquote, "colored blood," tried to convene a secret meetingf the senate judiciary committee to have her declared colored, stripped of her citizenship, and sent to liberia to live with her people, the coloreds. so the fbi component of eleanor and race is -- you know, is -- peter: so the fbi kept a file on her? allida: oh, she had the largest fbi file in american history prior to the assassination of malcolm x. peter: when did it become public? in the latelida: 1980s. a lot of it is still classified. if i win the lotto, we'll get the court suit and we'll get the rest of them declassified. peter: chris is in new haven, connecticut. chris, allida black and doug brinkley are our guests. chris: well, thank you. i think that she's everything that abigail adams was to john adams and to american history in her day and age, eleanor roosevelt was for the early 20th century. it's almost as if she's a reincarnation of her. and i'm wondering if hillary clinton is maybe a reincarnation of her, too. it's just -- there are these women who have a place in histo

so in 1939, j edgar hoover was given the task of coming up with leaders in the german community and in the japanese community who were after pearl harbor immediately rounded up, the camp in crystal city became the center of the president prisoner exchange program because people of all over the world, and literally all of the world came to crystal city and the government said to them, we will reunite you with your families but if we need to repatriate you, then you have to sign this document saying that you would agree to go. that was the price for reuniting their family. my book focuses on two families, one german-american and one japanese-american and i'm going to show you the face of sumi. she is a japanese-american, now she is 90 years old, here she is with a ribbon in her hand, standing in a right dress, with her father tom who is a photographer in los angeles, he was the most successful japanese photographer in california, that's the reason he was immediately arrested because of the government was very was very concerned about anyone taking photographs of military things. he was t