text: Plenty of Americans have regarded all these uses of the FBI’s resources as entirely legitimate; plenty of others have found them entirely unacceptable. But you cannot argue they were not political. And in the hands of such figures as McCarthy or Richard Nixon, the FBI most definitely was a tool of one political party.
  Hoover’s passion for rooting out radicals was formalized in what was called COINTELPRO (for counterintelligence program). Aimed originally at the Communist Party, the effort expanded to battle leftists in general and especially leaders of protests against the Vietnam War.
  The program was also a scourge of the civil rights movement, most prominently the Rev. Martin Luther King. Hoover had a kind of obsession with King, hounding him for years — at one point sending him tape recordings of his tapped telephone and urging him to commit suicide.
  At largely the same time, under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the FBI engaged in disruptive tactics against the Ku Klux Klan in the South. But after bloody riots erupted in many U.S. cities in the mid-1960s and later, Hoover turned his focus to “black nationalist” groups such as the Black Panthers, bringing disrepute and sewing dissent in its ranks.
  Here again, the FBI was proving its worth to at least one concept of law enforcement even as it showed itself as a dangerous and repressive institution to others. But what one cannot deny was that it became a political tool – not just repeatedly but continually over many years.
  Hoover also used his bureau to compile dossiers on people in government he thought might be security risks. These included hundreds of officials and bureaucrats he thought might be vulnerable to blackmail because they were gay. Hoover compiled mountains of evidence regarding people’s sexual orientation, a store that was eventually destroyed by one of his successors in the 1970s – after Hoover’s death.