J. Edgar Hoover listens to President Johnson’s speech that launched the government on a long-term drive to wipe out organized crime and its “guerrilla war against society.”(Bettmann)
We know a lot about the bad things J. Edgar Hoover did, but it it turns out there’s a lot we didn’t know. Historian Beverly Gage joins the podcast to explain. her new book is G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover & the Making of the American Century.
Also: Should the Supreme Court base its decision on what it can discern about the original intent of the framers? That’s what the “originalists” say—and they dominate today’s court. Erwin Chemerinsky comments. Chemerinsky is dean of the law school at UC Berkeley and author most recently of Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.
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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.
Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.