J. Edgar Hoover Quotes
We are a fact-gathering organization only. We don't clear anybody. We don't condemn anybody.
Hoover, J. Edgar. Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950, p. 327.
The issue under discussion was the fact that the United States Military does not, unlike all civilian courts, maintain a docket of court martials. An interested citizen or a reporter, who usually has a right to attend and observe the proceeding has no way of finding out where and when the proceeding will take place unless the military chooses to inform people or make it public. Courts Martial are legally open to observers except for special circumstances—like civilian criminal trials. However, the military wants as little coverage as possible.
John Edgar Hoover was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI's predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover is also credited with establishing and expanding a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List, renamed in 2001 as the Terrorist Screening Database which the FBI still compiles and manages.
