Meet the man who makes presidents wait. J Edgar Hoover built and then ran the FBI for almost five decades. He turned it from a bureaucratic backwater into a premier crime fighting and counterintelligence force. In the process, he arguably became America’s most powerful man. He has been dead for 50 years and still his shadow looms over the US. His job was to enforce the law but he would not always be bound by it.

This post was originally published on The Documentary Podcast.