After 11 years in the post, Hoover became instrumental in founding the FBI in June , where he remained as director for an additional 37 years until his death in May — serving a total of 48 years leading both the BOI and the FBI under eight Presidents.
Hoover expanded the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency and instituted a number of modernizations to policing technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was also found to have routinely violated both the FBI's own policies and the very laws which the FBI was charged with enforcing, to have used the FBI to harass and sabotage political dissidents, and to have extensively collected information on officials and private citizens using illegal surveillance, wiretapping, and burglaries.
Hoover did not have a birth certificate filed upon his birth, although it was required in in Washington. Two of his siblings did have certificates, but Hoover's was not filed until when he was Hoover lived his entire life in Washington, D. He attended Central High School , where he sang in the school choir, participated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, and competed on the debate team. He eventually spoke with such ferocious speed that stenographers had a hard time following him.
Hoover was 18 years old when he accepted his first job, an entry-level position as messenger in the orders department at the Library of Congress.
The library was a half mile from his house. It gave me an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence. Hoover obtained a Bachelor of Laws [ 17 ] from the George Washington University Law School in , where he was a member of the Alpha Nu Chapter of the Kappa Alpha Order , a Southern fraternity that was born out of a desire to "carry on the legacy of the 'incomparable flower of Southern Knighthood'" after the defeat of the Confederacy in Hoover graduated with an LL.
