The FBI: A History

Description

This fast-paced history of the FBI presents the first balanced and complete portrait of the vast, powerful, and sometimes bitterly criticized American institution. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a well-known expert on U.S. intelligence agencies, tells the bureau’s story in the context of American history. Along the way he challenges conventional understandings of that story and assesses the FBI’s strengths and weaknesses as an institution.   Common wisdom traces the origin of the bureau to 1908, but Jeffreys-Jones locates its true beginnings in the 1870s, when Congress acted in response to the Ku Klux Klan campaign of terror against black American voters. The character and significance of the FBI derive from this original mission, the author contends, and he traces the evolution of the mission into the twenty-first century.   The book makes a number of surprising observations: that the role of J. Edgar Hoover has been exaggerated and the importance of attorneys general underestimated, that splitting counterintelligence between the FBI and the CIA in 1947 was a mistake, and that xenophobia impaired the bureau’s preemptive anti-terrorist powers before and after 9/11. The author concludes with a fresh consideration of today’s FBI and the increasingly controversial nature of its responsibilities.     Cover CONTENTS PREFACE CHAPTER 1 Race and the Character of the FBI CHAPTER 2 Secret Reconstruction, 1871–1905 CHAPTER 3 Proud Genesis, 1905–1909 CHAPTER 4 Loss of Mission, 1909–1924 CHAPTER 5 The First Age of Reform, 1924–1939 CHAPTER 6 Counterespionage and Control, 1938–1945 CHAPTER 7 The Alienation of Liberal America, 1924–1943 CHAPTER 8 Gestapo Fears and the Intelligence Schism, 1940–1975 CHAPTER 9 Anachronism as Myth and Reality, 1945–1972 CHAPTER 10 A Crisis of American Democracy, 1972–1975 CHAPTER 11 Reform and Its Critics, 1975–1980 CHAPTER 12 Mission Regained, 1981–1993 CHAPTER 13 Strife and Slippage, 1993–2001 CHAPTER 14 9/11 and the Quest for National Unity NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z