Transcript
G-Men
June 1, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week FBI director Robert Mueller announced that the bureau would undergo a major overhaul. Longstanding doubts sparked by such PR debacles as Ruby Ridge, Richard Jewell, Waco and Wen Ho Lee have given way to even deeper concerns that FBI incompetence made it easier for terrorists to reach their targets on 9/11. Mueller suggested this week that the problems stemmed not only from a lack of manpower but from an insular and paranoid agency culture. As stories in Time and the New Yorker noted this week, information is not shared and often not acted upon; careerism and fear rule; and the initiative of individual agents is squelched by bureaucrats. Those traits clearly derive from the bureau's most famous exponent, J. Edgar Hoover, but one characteristic the bureau did not inherit from its most infamous boss was his penchant for media management. [SONG PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] GEE, BUT I'D LIKE TO BE A G-MAN AND GO BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG. I'D BE A BRAVE GANG-BUSTING HE-MAN AND GO BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG. I'D PUT ON DISGUISES OF ALL DIFFERENT SIZES AND WOULD I WIN PRIZES FOR TELLING WHO SPIESES--
RONALD KESSLER: I'll tell you -- things have really changed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ronald Kessler is author of Inside the FBI: The World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency.
RONALD KESSLER: Under Hoover, the bureau created this image of [FBI STYLE MUSIC UP AND UNDER] this invincible agency where they always got their man. They did this through the media, through radio shows, TV shows, movies that they controlled.
ANNOUNCER:Many of the incidents in the story you are about to hear are based on the actual records and authentic experiences of Matt Cvetic who for 9 fantastic years lived as a Communist for the FBI. Here is our star, Dana Andrews--
BROOKE GLADSTONE:J. Edgar Hoover, the agency's public face, policed the agency's image through and office with the impenetrable name of The Crimes Records Division. It was charged with furnishing what were called "interesting case memoranda" to the radio shows and later the TV shows and movies over which Hoover exercised an invincible veto power. He was ever-vigilant in pursuit of good PR.
J. EDGAR HOOVER: I am your new director. I did not ask for the position, but now that I have it, I intend to give it the best I have. The bureau will operate solely on efficiency, and we are going to do it as a team. Henceforth, it will be a "We" organization.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: Once upon a time, Hollywood loved the organization.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Edelstein is the film critic for Slate.com.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: There was something very, very reassuring about the discipline, the order, the routine, the sticking-to-the-rules. There was something very reassuring about those men in those gray suits, all with identical haircuts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But the love affair had cooled for the average American round about 1975 with the Senate investigation of the FBI under Frank Church. Richard Powers is the author of G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture.
RICHARD POWERS: That pretty much blew the lid off all of the--FBI horrors that Hoover had kept, you know, bottled up over all those years. The Church Committee delved particularly into the FBI's harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- and so as you had King emerging as one of the great heroes of American life in the 20th Century, his great antagonist was J. Edgar Hoover.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Hoover always said justice would prevail, and it did. After the revelations of the Church Committee, Hoover's attempts to destroy King as a leader boomerang'd.
RICHARD POWERS: Once you have an image that the FBI promoted during the 1930s of being an-- omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful agency that never could make a mistake, it was setting itself up for a terrible fall.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Already the culture was tiring of the organization man. It was the end of a long battle Hoover had waged with Hollywood since 1935 when James Cagney played a renegade G-Man. The agency hated the film but grew to love it, because it boosted the FBI's popularity like-- gangbusters. Author Richard Powers says that Americans always embraced characters that were square pegs in round holes, even as Hoover labored to shave the edges off.
RICHARD POWERS: And that's what successful adventure entertainment is all about. And it was completely contrary to the FBI image, and so they were really at loggerheads.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So the image of the FBI splintered. Films like the Die Hard series showed up the FBI as officious and obstructionist bureaucrats.
BRUCE WILLIS AS JOHN McCLANE: Al, talk to me -- what's going on here?
REGINALD VELJOHNSON AS AL POWELL: Ask the FBI. They got the Universal Terrorist Playbook and they're running it, step by step.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Meanwhile the bureau regained a measure of its old omniscience with a Jodie Foster vehicle.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: [Go ahead,] Starling. Tell me what you see.
JODIE FOSTER AS CLARICE STARLING: Well he's a white male. Serial killers tend to hunt within their own ethnic groups. He's not a drifter. He's got his own house somewhere. Not an apartment.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: Why?
JODIE FOSTER AS CLARICE STARLING: What he does with them takes privacy. And he's never impulsive. He'll never stop.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: Why not?
JODIE FOSTER AS CLARICE STARLING: Got a real taste for it now, and he's getting better at his work.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: Not bad, Starling.
JOHN DOUGLASS: Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs probably did more for the bureau as a fictional case than any real case, any real publicity [LAUGHS] that the bureau could have done. It was-- amazing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ex-profiler John Douglass is the model for Agent Starling's mentor, Jack Crawford, played by Scott Glenn.
JOHN DOUGLASS:The character was very, very serious. I always told the people working with me after we saw the movie if, if I was that serious day in and day out I'd be wearing a blue chiffon dress, smoking a cigar. I just-- wouldn't be able to keep up that intensity.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And just as Cagney's G-Man infuriated the bureau for a while, so did Silence of the Lambs.
JOHN DOUGLASS:A lot of high-ups in the FBI itself at first didn't like the movie. They said it was very, very violent, and when I went to a movie screening, I got up and I said I don't know what the rest of you think in the FBI - what kind of work we're doing here, but I see this work day in and day out -- this violence does exist in our country.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the higher-ups piped down when recruitment soared.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: Damn! You know? Who wouldn't want to sign up and, and go out and hunt themselves some serial killers?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Critic David Edelstein says that despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, the gods of Tinseltown have consistently favored the bureau with positive portrayals.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: In the beginning the FBI was all that stood between us freedom-loving Americans and those nasty immigrant gangsters. Then the FBI was all that stood between us and that evil Communist menace. Then when the Communist menace no longer seemed so imminent, suddenly the FBI was, was out doing battle with right wing white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. [THEME MUSIC FROM THE X-FILES TV SERIES]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Even the X-Files which depicts a dark and dangerous place, an agency at war with itself, has proved a boon to the FBI. As long as it seems powerful, the bureau can't lose.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: It's only in very, very, very rare instances that the FBI is portrayed as incompetent which seems to be [me ?] the worst danger to an organization that thrives on secrecy and that presents itself as a model of superhuman and enlightened efficiency.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:A headline in Thursday's Financial Times dubbed the FBI "America's Most Criticized" and according to a Time/CNN poll, a majority of Americans believe that the FBI was very or somewhat responsible for the lack of governmental action to prevent the 9/11 attacks. That puts it on par roughly with the CIA, an agency that has always had a murkier reputation. Nevertheless FBI recruitment is still robust, spurred partly by patriotism and as always by the entertainment media. There's a lesson in that. As Director Robert Mueller sorts through the mess and reorders the agency's priorities, he may want to consider beefing up the bureau in Hollywood. [SONG PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] CRIMINALS COME, BUT THEY HAVE ONE WAY TO GO; GANGSTERS ARE DONE FOR BY NOW THEY OUGHT TO KNOW. [SPIN YOUR TALE ??] OF THE GANG YOU OVER THERE; HOOVER WILL BRING THEM TO THE ELECTRIC CHAIR. A, B, C, D, E, F, G-- [HE-MAN ?], G-MAN, HOOVER RAT TAT TAT -- [POW]--
June 1, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week FBI director Robert Mueller announced that the bureau would undergo a major overhaul. Longstanding doubts sparked by such PR debacles as Ruby Ridge, Richard Jewell, Waco and Wen Ho Lee have given way to even deeper concerns that FBI incompetence made it easier for terrorists to reach their targets on 9/11. Mueller suggested this week that the problems stemmed not only from a lack of manpower but from an insular and paranoid agency culture. As stories in Time and the New Yorker noted this week, information is not shared and often not acted upon; careerism and fear rule; and the initiative of individual agents is squelched by bureaucrats. Those traits clearly derive from the bureau's most famous exponent, J. Edgar Hoover, but one characteristic the bureau did not inherit from its most infamous boss was his penchant for media management. [SONG PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] GEE, BUT I'D LIKE TO BE A G-MAN AND GO BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG. I'D BE A BRAVE GANG-BUSTING HE-MAN AND GO BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG. I'D PUT ON DISGUISES OF ALL DIFFERENT SIZES AND WOULD I WIN PRIZES FOR TELLING WHO SPIESES--
RONALD KESSLER: I'll tell you -- things have really changed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ronald Kessler is author of Inside the FBI: The World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency.
RONALD KESSLER: Under Hoover, the bureau created this image of [FBI STYLE MUSIC UP AND UNDER] this invincible agency where they always got their man. They did this through the media, through radio shows, TV shows, movies that they controlled.
ANNOUNCER:Many of the incidents in the story you are about to hear are based on the actual records and authentic experiences of Matt Cvetic who for 9 fantastic years lived as a Communist for the FBI. Here is our star, Dana Andrews--
BROOKE GLADSTONE:J. Edgar Hoover, the agency's public face, policed the agency's image through and office with the impenetrable name of The Crimes Records Division. It was charged with furnishing what were called "interesting case memoranda" to the radio shows and later the TV shows and movies over which Hoover exercised an invincible veto power. He was ever-vigilant in pursuit of good PR.
J. EDGAR HOOVER: I am your new director. I did not ask for the position, but now that I have it, I intend to give it the best I have. The bureau will operate solely on efficiency, and we are going to do it as a team. Henceforth, it will be a "We" organization.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: Once upon a time, Hollywood loved the organization.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Edelstein is the film critic for Slate.com.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: There was something very, very reassuring about the discipline, the order, the routine, the sticking-to-the-rules. There was something very reassuring about those men in those gray suits, all with identical haircuts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But the love affair had cooled for the average American round about 1975 with the Senate investigation of the FBI under Frank Church. Richard Powers is the author of G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture.
RICHARD POWERS: That pretty much blew the lid off all of the--FBI horrors that Hoover had kept, you know, bottled up over all those years. The Church Committee delved particularly into the FBI's harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- and so as you had King emerging as one of the great heroes of American life in the 20th Century, his great antagonist was J. Edgar Hoover.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Hoover always said justice would prevail, and it did. After the revelations of the Church Committee, Hoover's attempts to destroy King as a leader boomerang'd.
RICHARD POWERS: Once you have an image that the FBI promoted during the 1930s of being an-- omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful agency that never could make a mistake, it was setting itself up for a terrible fall.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Already the culture was tiring of the organization man. It was the end of a long battle Hoover had waged with Hollywood since 1935 when James Cagney played a renegade G-Man. The agency hated the film but grew to love it, because it boosted the FBI's popularity like-- gangbusters. Author Richard Powers says that Americans always embraced characters that were square pegs in round holes, even as Hoover labored to shave the edges off.
RICHARD POWERS: And that's what successful adventure entertainment is all about. And it was completely contrary to the FBI image, and so they were really at loggerheads.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So the image of the FBI splintered. Films like the Die Hard series showed up the FBI as officious and obstructionist bureaucrats.
BRUCE WILLIS AS JOHN McCLANE: Al, talk to me -- what's going on here?
REGINALD VELJOHNSON AS AL POWELL: Ask the FBI. They got the Universal Terrorist Playbook and they're running it, step by step.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Meanwhile the bureau regained a measure of its old omniscience with a Jodie Foster vehicle.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: [Go ahead,] Starling. Tell me what you see.
JODIE FOSTER AS CLARICE STARLING: Well he's a white male. Serial killers tend to hunt within their own ethnic groups. He's not a drifter. He's got his own house somewhere. Not an apartment.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: Why?
JODIE FOSTER AS CLARICE STARLING: What he does with them takes privacy. And he's never impulsive. He'll never stop.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: Why not?
JODIE FOSTER AS CLARICE STARLING: Got a real taste for it now, and he's getting better at his work.
SCOTT GLENN AS JACK CRAWFORD: Not bad, Starling.
JOHN DOUGLASS: Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs probably did more for the bureau as a fictional case than any real case, any real publicity [LAUGHS] that the bureau could have done. It was-- amazing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ex-profiler John Douglass is the model for Agent Starling's mentor, Jack Crawford, played by Scott Glenn.
JOHN DOUGLASS:The character was very, very serious. I always told the people working with me after we saw the movie if, if I was that serious day in and day out I'd be wearing a blue chiffon dress, smoking a cigar. I just-- wouldn't be able to keep up that intensity.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And just as Cagney's G-Man infuriated the bureau for a while, so did Silence of the Lambs.
JOHN DOUGLASS:A lot of high-ups in the FBI itself at first didn't like the movie. They said it was very, very violent, and when I went to a movie screening, I got up and I said I don't know what the rest of you think in the FBI - what kind of work we're doing here, but I see this work day in and day out -- this violence does exist in our country.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the higher-ups piped down when recruitment soared.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: Damn! You know? Who wouldn't want to sign up and, and go out and hunt themselves some serial killers?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Critic David Edelstein says that despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, the gods of Tinseltown have consistently favored the bureau with positive portrayals.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: In the beginning the FBI was all that stood between us freedom-loving Americans and those nasty immigrant gangsters. Then the FBI was all that stood between us and that evil Communist menace. Then when the Communist menace no longer seemed so imminent, suddenly the FBI was, was out doing battle with right wing white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. [THEME MUSIC FROM THE X-FILES TV SERIES]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Even the X-Files which depicts a dark and dangerous place, an agency at war with itself, has proved a boon to the FBI. As long as it seems powerful, the bureau can't lose.
DAVID EDELSTEIN: It's only in very, very, very rare instances that the FBI is portrayed as incompetent which seems to be [me ?] the worst danger to an organization that thrives on secrecy and that presents itself as a model of superhuman and enlightened efficiency.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:A headline in Thursday's Financial Times dubbed the FBI "America's Most Criticized" and according to a Time/CNN poll, a majority of Americans believe that the FBI was very or somewhat responsible for the lack of governmental action to prevent the 9/11 attacks. That puts it on par roughly with the CIA, an agency that has always had a murkier reputation. Nevertheless FBI recruitment is still robust, spurred partly by patriotism and as always by the entertainment media. There's a lesson in that. As Director Robert Mueller sorts through the mess and reorders the agency's priorities, he may want to consider beefing up the bureau in Hollywood. [SONG PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] CRIMINALS COME, BUT THEY HAVE ONE WAY TO GO; GANGSTERS ARE DONE FOR BY NOW THEY OUGHT TO KNOW. [SPIN YOUR TALE ??] OF THE GANG YOU OVER THERE; HOOVER WILL BRING THEM TO THE ELECTRIC CHAIR. A, B, C, D, E, F, G-- [HE-MAN ?], G-MAN, HOOVER RAT TAT TAT -- [POW]--