Anecdotes

The reason why Hoover is known as "J. Edgar" and not "John Edgar" is because there was another John Edgar Hoover living in Washington D.C. who had a bad credit history. In order to avoid confusion and scandal, Hoover started going by his first initial.

At his death, then President Richard Nixon had Hoover's office and its contents sealed for several months. Reports are that Nixon's first reaction to being told of Hoover's death was, "Are you sure?"

Was the director of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation from May 19, 1924 until his death on May 2, 1972. Kept files on many political leaders and public figures that contained sensitive and potentially damaging information which he used for blackmail purposes. Ironically, there is strong evidence now that organized crime knew, and had evidence to prove, that Hoover was a secretly active homosexual transvestite and threatened him with exposure unless he took the heat off of their organization and onto some other person or organization. It was then that Hoover decided to focus his efforts at destroying the careers of liberal political and public figures such as Charles Chaplin and political reformers and civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King. If true, that may explain why Hoover for decades kept denying that there was any form of national organized crime syndicate in America, and he was forced to admit it only because of the testimony of Mafia killer Joe Valachi before Congress in the early 1960s--which Hoover, as it turned out, had unsuccessfully tried to prevent.

Hoover's birth certificate was not filed until 1938.

His hobby was betting on horse races.

Graduated from George Washington University in 1917 with a degree in law.

Member of Kappa Alpha Order fraternity (Alpha Nu 1914.)

Awarded an honorary Sc. D by Kalamazoo College in 1937

When vacationing, the first thing he did was to see if there was a horse track nearby.

Is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar (2011), Broderick Crawford and James Wainwright in "The Private Files Of J. Edgar Hoover" (1977), Pat Hingle in Le persécuteur (1992), Richard Dysart in Panther (1995), Bob Hoskins in Nixon (1995), Dylan Baker in Selma (2014), Stephen Root in All the Way (2016), Ernest Borgnine in Hoover (2000) and Billy Crudup in Public Enemies (2009).

Is portrayed by Aron Tager in Mr. Rock 'n' Roll: The Alan Freed Story (1999)