Media Manipulation

From the Black Panthers' angle, late 60s Radical Chic was strictly a con game. "We took Marlon Brando for $10,000 and we can take Jean Seberg for $20,000," boasted party chairman Bobby Seale, lately of barbeque cookbook fame. So little did the Panthers care for Seberg that they tried to steal her wallet and keys from her hospital room while she lay dying.

Poor Seberg, the FBI also got on her case. Under J. Edgar Hoover's orders, anonymous sources primed Hollywood gossip columnists with the slander that Seberg was pregnant by a Black Panther. A memo records Hoover's intent: "to possibly cause her embarrassment and tarnish her image with the general public."

As Bob Herzberg's The FBI and the Movies details, Hoover was a master of media manipulation. For nearly fifty years the FBI's Director handled Hollywood, the newspapers, radio, and television with ease. During the Depression, a public forced to stand in breadlines—while rulers ran for cover—cheered for the gangster rather than the lawman that protected the rich. Ben Hecht captured citizen sentiment: "The forces of law and order did not advance on the villains with drawn guns, but with their palms out like bellboys."

Herzberg cites two 1931 Warner Brothers pictures, Little Caesar and The Public Enemy—which launched the careers of Broadway veterans Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney—as seminal portrayals of the gangster as "a violent but charismatic counter-culture hero." Such glorification enraged Hoover. He pressed Hollywood's self-censorship bureau, the Hays office, to adopt the "Dillinger rule," which prohibited the mention of any gangster by name. Anonymity, repugnance and punishment governed screen interpretations of criminal lives during Hoover's heyday.

Hoover also assiduously worked the press to divert the ink animating underworld celebrity toward the infusion of a new cultural icon, the FBI agent. He hired a PR man to publicize the Bureau and cultivated the country's top columnists, Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, and Rex Collier.

The FBI and the Movies chronicles the discrepancies between the Bureau-sanctioned version of events, and the more-or-less objective accounts garnered from eyewitnesses and documents. Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, for example, swore—up until he overdosed on sleeping pills in 1971—that he had made Hoover's career. In 1936 the FBI finally got the drop on the last of the era's big-time outlaws in New Orleans. The collar, however, would await Hoover's arrival. (The Director had taken the urgent call at the Stork Club in Walter Winchell's company.) Karpis was hunkered down in a new Plymouth coupe, surrounded by a squad of G-men, when J. Edgar Hoover strode in and yanked the kidnapper and murderer out by the collar, exclaiming, "Cuff 'em boys." No one, however, had any handcuffs. Thus, Ma Barker's old running buddy was "manacled" with a cravat.

Herzberg provides a running, wisecracking summation of how Hoover's publicity apparatus influenced every major movie and television portrayal of the FBI from 1935 (with G-Men, starring James Cagney) through 1974 (when ABC cancelled The FBI, starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., after nine seasons). Up until Hoover's death in 1972, the Bureau scoured the press for any trace of tarnish. In 1959, Robert Stack, who played Eliot Ness in ABC's The Untouchables, told TV Guide of an FBI acquaintance who couldn't even blow his nose for all of the Bureau's rules and regulations. It fell upon the agency's second-in-command, Clyde Tolson, to mau-mau Stack in writing: "'it takes years of hard, tedious work to merit the respect and confidence of the public; yet in a few rather flippant remarks . . . [you] managed to hold up to scorn and to ridicule the valiant past and present effort of thousands of FBI employees.'"

Public adulation of Hoover and the FBI reached its apex during the Eisenhower years. The making of The FBI Story (1959), starring Jimmy Stewart, is instructive. Warner Brothers...