A well-researched biography about the public and private life of J. Edgar Hoover—former FBI director and America’s most controversial law enforcer—that draws on previously unknown personal documents, a study of FBI files, and the presidential papers of nine administrations.

Secrecy and Power is a full biography of former FBI director, covering all aspects of Hoover’s controversial career from the Red Scare following World War I to the 1960s and his personal vendettas against Martin Luther King and the civil rights and antiwar movements.

Drawing on previously unknown personal documents, thousands of FBI files, interviews with former agents, and the presidential papers of nine administrations, Powers reveals a man of inalterable ideals and convictions who clung to a private vision of an orderly, traditional America, and who vowed to crush anyone who threatened it.