1. FDR
The head of the FBI reports to the Attorney General. It was FDR who authorized Hoover to come directly to him. FDR didn't want people to know how suspicious he was of the labor movement (man that drives liberals crazy). He had Hoover spying on them throughout the 30's.
2. JFK
That's right, he and Bobby were both suspicious of the civil rights movement. Liberals heads explode when you mention that all of the wiretapping and spying that Hoover did on Marting Luther King was with warrants signed by ROBERT KENNEDY.
3. LBJ
He was totally suspicious of the antiwar movement and gave Hoover complete authority to go after them with every means possible.
Oh yea, Nixon.
He hated Hoover, had nothing to do with him, and made no secret of his plans to fire him as soon as he was elected a second time. Many people suspect Hoover blew the whistle on the whole Watergate thing because he knew Nixon was going to get rid of him.
Liberals have done a magnificently job of linking Hoover and Nixon as well as Hoover and Republicans, when in fact all of his worst excesses occurred under LIBERAL DEMOCRAT PRESIDENTS!
Their patron saint of world peace, Woody Wilson, loved the APL and their tactics that were much like a certain German movement of a few years later.
The American Protective League
By the first year of WWI, American political leadership was ferreting out disloyalty and enforcing scientific conformity. Any number of private and secret societies appeared to forward this cause. The "Anti-Yellow Dog League" was one of these, composed of schoolboys above the age of ten, who searched out disloyalty each day from one of its thousand branches nationwide, barking like German shepherds when a disloyal yellow dog, otherwise someone looking like you or me, was flushed from cover and branded. Schools enthusiastically cooperated in "Dog Hunts," as they were called.
The U.S. Justice Department secretly empowered private associations as volunteer spy-hunters. One, the American Protective League (APL), earned semi-official status in the national surveillance game, in time growing to enormous size. Founded by a Chicago advertising man, the APL had twelve hundred units functioning across America, all staffed by business and professional people. It was a genuine secret society replete with oath and rituals. Membership gave every operative the authority to be a national policeman. The first location placed under surveillance in every neighborhood was the local public school. Assignments were given by the old (Federal) Bureau of Investigation and by the War Department’s Intelligence Division to report on "seditious and disloyal" conversation. From the authorized history of the APL comes this specimen case:
Powers County, Colorado: investigated fifty cases of mouth-to-mouth propaganda, a notable cause being that of a German Lutheran minister who refused to answer the questions as to which side he wished to win the war. He asked for time. The next day he declared very promptly that he wanted the United States to win. He was instructed to prove this by preaching and praying it in private as well as in public, which he agreed to do.
The APL checked up on people who failed to buy Liberty Bonds. It spotted violators of food and gasoline regulations, rounded up draft evaders in New York, disrupted Socialist meetings in Cleveland, broke strikes, threatened union men with immediate induction into the army. The attorney general of the United States reported to Congress, "It is safe to say never in history has this country been so thoroughly policed."
It is something that keeps me awake at night -- why this is verified fact and is virtually unknown today