27 Years Ago in TIME

The FBI's current troubles are hardly the first time the agency has been plunged into controversy. Three years after the death of FBI Director J. EDGAR HOOVER, the legend of the man once known as America's chief crime fighter was beginning to crack.

MORE TIME STORIES Cover date: June 10, 2002 • 27 Years Ago in TIME • Can He Fix It? • A Flap About Fingerprints • Brother's Keeper • Inside Bush's Big Plan Archive stories

The gangbuster nemesis of "Baby Face" Nelson, John Dillinger, Ma Barker. The scourge of would-be spies and saboteurs ... The stubbornly independent guardian of evenhanded law enforcement, highmindedly fending off Congressmen and Presidents who sought to use his agency for political purposes. J. Edgar Hoover deserved some of that billing, although it was overblown ... [Now] Hoover is seen as a shrewd bureaucratic genius who cared less about crime than about perpetuating his crime-busting image ... He was a petty man of towering personal hates. There was more than a tinge of racism in his vicious vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. ... His informers, infiltrators and wiretappers delved into the activities of even the most innocuous and nonviolent civil rights and antiwar groups, trampling on the rights of citizens to express grievances against their Government ... As an administrator, he was an erratic, unchallengeable czar, banishing agents to Siberian posts on whimsy, terrorizing them with torrents of implausible rules, insisting on conformity of thought as well as dress. --TIME, Dec. 22, 1975