And people say James Ellroy exaggerates.
I think Hoover's obsession with sexual depravity pretty much permeated the bureau, so it's not too surprising that the letter sounds like it was written by him.
The idea of a mass media that was uniformly unwilling to run with speculative stories of sexual impropriety by a public figure is basically unimaginable to me.
Long tradition of that. Including GWH Bush by all accounts.
It is hard to overstate how overblown the reputation of the FBI was among the boy cohort of my youth. It was constantly extolled in the youth-targeted media. Especially the FBI Laboratory which was the much-anticipated highlight of the patrol boy Washington trip in 6th grade (the mint was a close second). The later exposes of utterly fraudulent science and investigative procedures focused on the 80s and early 90s but I'm sure it sucked eggs in the 60s as well.
What a thing. And over in Treasury there was a parallel house of cards with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Harry Anslinger. Golden age of federal law enforcement.
8:
You're certainly right about it being constantly extolled in the youth-targeted media, such as comic books and dramas, but for some reason I don't remember being all that persuaded. Maybe because even to an eleven-year-old, it felt like propaganda. And there was the figure of Hoover himself, always front and center in those stories but an odd-looking and improbable figure, at least to me.
Maybe I was reflecting the skepticism of adults without knowing it, or maybe it was something shallower, the way the clothes and general "straightness" made the FBI ridiculous in my eyes.