Turner,W. Hoover's FBI. 1993

Turner, William W. Hoover's FBI. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993. 344 pages. Revised and updated from the 1970 edition by Sherbourne Press, which also appeared as a Dell paperback.

From 1951-1961, William W. Turner was an FBI agent, until he was fired for refusing to roll over in the face of J. Edgar Hoover's eccentric megalomania. Turner hired superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams and sued the FBI; he lost, but did manage to get anti-Hoover testimony by other agents into the record. By 1968, Turner was working on the JFK assassination for the celebrated muckraking magazine Ramparts, and was number three on Hoover's personal COINTELPRO enemies list. That year Turner wrote The Police Establishment, and after this book appeared in 1970, he wrote several others that are indexed in NameBase: Power on the Right, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (with John Christian), and The Fish is Red (with Warren Hinckle, about the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans).

What's amazing, 26 years after Hoover's death, is that this book was not only the first, but still ranks as one of the best, among the dozens of books that have since appeared on this topic. Everything anyone needed to know about Hoover was available while he was still in power, for the price of a Dell paperback, and before the Freedom of Information Act started churning out documents. It's a brutal reminder that even when the facts are indisputable, most people still find it convenient to ignore them.
ISBN 1-56025-063-1