“The race is not this year, although you’d think it was,” says former New York Mayor Ed Koch. “It’ll be the longest Senate race in the history of America. I hope people don’t get bored.”

Fat chance. Nauseous, maybe — but the race promises to be anything but boring.

Clinton and Giuliani are both larger-than-life figures whose first names are household words. Hillary! Rudy! Each claims grandiose achievements and a monopoly on righteousness; each is always right, their opponents always wrong.

Both are wildly adored and viciously despised.

Both are historical figures. High schools will be named after them someday.

A Fiorello H. LaGuardia and Eleanor Roosevelt for the millennium — but hungrier, angrier.

The campaign (assuming it happens — neither Rudy nor Hillary has officially declared candidacy yet) is going to be insane. For the media, the only bigger matchup would be Madonna vs. Howard Stern. And maybe not even that.

If the New York Post didn’t already exist, someone would have to invent it, right now, just for this race.

On the political front, it’s already been brutally Darwinian. A year ahead of time, two well-meaning, successful members of Congress — Rep. Nita Lowey, a motherly Westchester County Democrat, and Rick Lazio, a young buck Long Island Republican — have been rudely elbowed out of the way to make room for the stars. Plenty of Hillary Lovers, Hillary Haters, Rudy Lovers and Rudy Haters are already pouring millions of dollars into the appropriate campaign buckets.

Rudy’s May fund-raiser at Midtown’s Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, which featured Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as the honorary chairman, is said to have netted $2.1 million, probably the biggest in state history for an unannounced candidate.

Each campaign is shooting to raise upwards of $20 million, which could make this not just the longest, but the most expensive Senate race in history — topping the 1994 California match between Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington.

If it were just Hillary running, or just Rudy, the fanfare wouldn’t amount to a fraction of this.

Indeed, it’s the combination, the anticipated ugliness, the At-last! pairing of nemeses for each of these intimidating forces of nature.

It’s gonna be great.

A buzzer-beater away from Madison Square Garden, on the eighth floor of a nondescript office building undergoing some irritating and no-doubt symbolic construction, earnest young men and women slave away at the Hillary Rodham Clinton for U.S. Senate Exploratory Committee.

The offices are small and cramped and unimpressive — typical New York fare — and the poor young woman handling the phones this Monday afternoon barely gets a moment to breathe. “Hillary 2000, hold please; Hillary 2000, hold please; Hillary 2000, hold please …”

Calls come in for “Neera” and “Gabrielle” and “Samara,” exactly the kinds of names you’d expect at Hillary 2000. Most, however, are for Clinton’s overworked press secretary, Howard Wolfson, who is more or less running the shop — for now. (New York liberal pols Mandy Grunwald and Harold Ickes, pollster Mark Penn and Hillary’s right-hand woman, Maggie Williams are involved, too, but they’re all doing their best to remain invisible to date.)

The waiting room is covered with immense color images of Clinton in her familiar off-white or dark blue suits, her brilliant blonde coif — a flattering cut it only took her a half-century to find — lending her the celebrity look fans need. It’s no wonder she was on the cover of the premier issue of Talk.

Interns (though you’d think the campaign would come up with a new name for them) shuttle in and out. One spends maybe 45 minutes deliberately stapling newspaper-clipping photos of Clinton to a bulletin board.

But images and a new blond ‘do aren’t going to be enough for Hillary to prevail in this campaign. It’s going to be a relentless, grueling war, leading Republicans to already whisper that, at the end of the day, Hillary might not even run. Polls right now have Hillary and Rudy still relatively close, but, as any seasoned pol will tell you, it ain’t the poll numbers that matter — it’s their direction.

With that in mind, the Battery may be down, but it’s nothing compared to Hillary’s numbers. According to Marist Institute polls, Hillary was beating Rudy 52 percent to 42 percent in January, but since then, their arrows have headed along different trajectories. Support for Hillary has nose-dived all the way down to 40 while Rudy’s numbers have shot up to 49. That’s a net 19-point gain for Rudy in nine months.

“If the election were held tomorrow, Rudy would win,” says Koch, a former Rudy fan who now supports Hillary. “With the passage of time, voters will distinguish between the two in terms of their ability to work in the Senate and get things done for the state of New York. People will ultimately conclude that a Democratic philosophy will be better for New York, and that as a messenger for that philosophy Hillary is a better fit for New York.”

Among plenty of Hillary surrogates, like Koch, you can already hear a strategy to downplay their woman versus the other side’s man, in favor of talking parties instead.

In addition to our booming economy, Hillary has a few other numbers working for her: registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans statewide — 4,999,541 to 3,078,574, as of April 1.

Rudy might be a liberal Republican — he once worked for RFK, and voted for McGovern in ’72, plus he leans left on abortion, gay rights, and gun control. But he came out in favor of the GOP’s tax-cut plans, with more “team-player” moves sure to follow. Democrats therefore plan on tying Rudy to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., who is widely perceived throughout the Empire State as being anti-New York and pro-South.

Hillary seems to embrace the partisan approach.“The Republican Party [tax-cut] bill … would be in effect a statement that would ask us to cut and run on our obligations to older Americans,” she said at a Sept. 14 appearance in Great Neck, Long Island, in front of an audience of — you guessed it — older Americans. “It would break our faith with the seniors in New York, and I would fight it, if I were in the Congress now.”

The last Senate fight in these parts was a year ago, between the smarty-pants Democrat, Rep. Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn, and the shameless Republican, then-Sen. Alphonse D’Amato. The main battleground then is the same one now:

The suburbs.

Like Chappaqua, for instance, where mishpocheh Clinton just bought a $1.7 million, 11-room Dutch colonial, using a fishy loan from a supporter.

There’s the rest of Westchester County, and Long Island — both Nassau and Suffolk — plus all the women (and as many as possible of the Reagan Democrats) in Buffalo, Erie County, Rochester, Albany and Syracuse.

Schumer tailored his message to these folks by talking about upstate jobs, education and health care. For the women in the suburbs he threw in gun control and abortion rights. He ran a textbook campaign that also appealed to the state’s exhaustion with D’Amato, who had dragged the state through various ethics debacles and a racist joke or two, and by being just generally annoying.

Eighteen years was enough. D’Amato fatigue had set in.

But there’s another kind of fatigue at work this time around, and it doesn’t cut so well for the Democrats.

They know it, too. You can see it in the fact that just last week, Hillary’s brothers, Anthony and Hugh Rodham, backed out of an $118 million scheme to grow and import hazelnuts in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. As first disclosed by the Washington Post, not long ago les freres Rodham appeared at a press conference with Aslan Abashidze, a political leader with ties to an alleged mobster. After a Post op-ed hammered the Rodhams for the deal, the brothers announced they were backing out of it, expressing reluctance “to do any harm to the first lady or the administration.”

One senses that the brothers Rodham didn’t have much say in the matter. It doesn’t much seem to matter if the Rodhams were up to no good.

After all, you can’t buy a blintz in the former Soviet Union without bumping into someone with ties to the mob.

As the Clintons have maybe — finally — learned, it ain’t the impropriety, it’s the appearance, that matters.

Still, it doesn’t even have to be impropriety to make news.

Hillary can’t so much as look at a doctor’s office these days without the New York Post blaring a headline that she’s considering plastic surgery.

The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, discovered that one of Hillary’s grandparents had married a Jew and suddenly she was accused of shamelessly pandering, trying to shed her goyish kopf in exchange for one more yiddesche.

“Oy Vey!” blared the Post.

Meanwhile, Hillary 2000 campaign workers say that the Forward came to them, not the other way around, so they faced a no-win situation of either being accused of pandering or denying a link to an important ethnic block. They tried for the middle ground and got slapped for it, unfairly.

Of course, you hardly know who to blame for that. As we’ve all learned the hard way, you never quite know what to believe with the Clintons. With them, a cigar is never just a cigar.

“And Monica’s apartment is only 36 miles away from their Chappaqua estate!” gloats a Republican National Committee staffer.

One of the reasons for the “Oy Vey!” headlines is that Hillary hasn’t yet been able to focus her campaign on the issues she wants to talk about.

“The problem is the same old one,” says a Democratic political operative “The Clintons are all about polling. They don’t know what they believe in. Every question that comes in to that campaign should be put through the context of her message, of her as the ‘Education Senator’ or whatever.”

If you ask her campaign or her supporters, however, they’ll tell you that Hillary is indeed focused on her issues — education and health care.

“The No. 1 issue is comprehensive health insurance and care,” Koch says. “And people will say, ‘Didn’t she muck it up the first time?’ Well, yes, she did. She didn’t bring in people who disagreed with her. But now she is. And when she was talking about it then, 32 million Americans didn’t have insurance. Now it’s 43 million. So the issue is still with us. And it’s a very compelling issue. Women are affected more, since they live longer than men, and 11 million children are involved. The Republican Party is against prescription drugs for Medicare coverage, so I believe that issue is a winner.”

Bring it on, says an executive at the RNC. “The last time she talked about health care was 1994,” he says. “Our candidates ran on it, and we won the House and Senate.”

“Another important question is who’s better on education,” Koch says, “And she can win that one … Rudy can’t work with anybody, and you have to work with people when it comes to education.”

True, Rudy’s battles with the various chancellors of the city school system are legendary, and he also recently launched a $21 million, 3,000-student voucher plan.

But Hillary may not be able to exploit that effectively in the campaign because of those suburban swing voters, many of whom commute precisely because the city’s schools are so abysmal.

Still, Hillary should be able to pluck out her education bona fides from her days in Arkansas — Children’s Defense Fund board member, founder of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families — even though her husband’s administration has been somewhat lackluster on the issue.

In any case, Hillary has yet to blend her talking points into a coherent message. She’s still doing her “listening tour,” taking in what the voters have to say. Hillary staffers marvel at the fans who appear at these events, as if she were a rock star. But groupies only get you so far. September’s Marist Institute poll showed Rudy clobbering Hillary among suburban voters, 62 percent to 28.

Then there’s the carpetbagger issue, which Republicans in the U.S. House tried to highlight last week by adding a provision to the campaign finance bill that would require the first lady to reimburse the government for using Air Force Hillary for her campaign. Forty-five House Democrats supported the measure and it won 261-167. Ouch.

“The carpetbagging issue has resonance now, but it won’t in six months,” Koch says. Koch and others are quick to point out that Sens. Robert Kennedy and James Buckley won seats despite the fact that their paths to the Senate began along I-95.

But, as pollster John Zogby recently pointed out, RFK ran just a year after his brother was assassinated, and it wasn’t the easy task one would think. While RFK won New York City overwhelmingly, as Hillary will do doubt do (Rudy’s people have already written off scoring more than 35 percent or so in the mayor’s own city), RFK did so when the city held 42 percent of the state electorate.

Today, the city vote accounts for only 27 percent of the state’s total.

Besides, in his 1964 Senate race, RFK lost the suburbs.

Zogby’s summer poll asked New Yorkers what he called “a simple, open-ended question: ‘What is the No. 1 thing you would ask (Giuliani/Clinton) if (he/ she) were to run for the Senate?’”

Rudy was asked about education, health care, and upstate New York.

Two of Hillary’s top three: “Why is she running in New York?” And “Why did she stay with him?”

“In other words,” Zogby wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “1 voter in 3 is already ‘off message’ — not concentrating on the issues Mrs. Clinton will want to stress.”

Speaking of issues the first lady doesn’t want to stress, there’s the brouhaha that erupted when her husband announced clemency for Puerto Rican terrorists. Law enforcement, editorial boards, Capitol Hill Republicans and Mayor Giuliani blasted President Clinton’s decision. When asked where she stood, Hillary stuttered, looking not only clueless about what was going on in the White House, but out of her element in New York’s gruelingly demanding ethnic constituency.

In the end, she opposed clemency, but she did so without informing a few key Latino pols. They whined about it, and thus she stumbled once again. Without question, as New York salesman Willy Loman’s wife once said, attention must be paid. During the heated 1998 Senate face-off between Schumer and D’Amato, “the Schumer campaign didn’t order Taco Bell without getting the OK from [Bronx County Democratic Chairman Roberto] Ramirez,” says one in-the-know Democrat.

Ramirez and Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and a host of other Latino pols expressed disappointment in Hillary’s move but seemed ready to move on. There’s a lot that’s unfair about the melee, but the substance of it won’t be remembered as much as her incompetence in the sewer of New York City politics, where even a man like Bronx congressman Jose Serrano can command front pages if he knows how to play the fiddle.

At best an irrelevancy as a congressman, Serrano is best known in Washington for talking about his love of Frank Sinatra. But he successfully used the clemency debacle to draw attention to himself making like the Chairman of the Board, even though it’s common knowledge that his two rivals — Ramirez and Ferrer — are the Latinos with the huevos in New York. Thanks to Hillary’s screw-up, Serrano told the press that he was reconsidering endorsing Hillary — which was enough to give the story an extra media bounce, earn Serrano a flattering profile in the New York Times, and make Hillary look like a tourist.

Welcome to New York. Now get the fuck out.

And Hillary still has to contend with Al Sharpton, Irish activists, the Italians, gays, lesbians, Caribbeans, Catholics and ad infinitum. Next up probably will be a small vocal pool of Jewish activists who want clemency for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Rudy has already supported clemency for the man who many feel was given life in solitary because of the lingering anti-Semitism of the Bush administration. But it’s an ugly issue, one that Hillary clearly is reluctant to touch.

“There are going to be a lot more FALN-type controversies,” predicts a White House senior staffer.

Not to mention renewed questions about Whitewater, Rose Law Firm billing records, the health-care debacle, Troopergate, Zippergate, the impeachment hearings and all the stuff we all so desperately want to move beyond.

Oy vey, indeed.

A few miles down Broadway, at City Hall, two-term Mayor Rudy Giuliani is full of kinetic energy, a coiled spring ready to burst.

So far his campaign is bare-bones: a temporary campaign head, his assistant, a fundraiser, and a receptionist. That’s it. The phone calls and checks are coming in, but it’s all disconcertingly low-key. As is Rudy himself, who has been uncharacteristically restrained these last few months. If he chortles over the first lady’s clumsy entrie into the five boroughs and beyond, he does so behind closed doors.

He is, after all, the mayor. He presides. He rules. And, in addition to raking in unbelievable amounts of cash, he somehow managed to dispose of potential challenger Lazio — who had more conservative credibility and therefore more potential for upstate support — with nary a bead of sweat on his public brow.

Word on the street is that the RNC did some polling and found that Lazio, who just turned 41, just didn’t have the stature or celebrity to touch Hillary. The only one who did was Rudy. Thus, the tale goes, some RNC consigliere were dispatched to Albany to pay a little visit on New York Gov. George Pataki, Rudy’s upstate rival ever since Rudy endorsed Pataki’s opponent, Democrat then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, back in ’94. Since then, Pataki has seen his patron, D’Amato, go down in flames, and a Democrat win the attorney general’s office.

“Pataki was faced with the prospect of whether or not he wanted to lose another one for the state GOP,” a Rudy confidante says. Thus, as talk has it, the RNC leaned on Pataki, who leaned on Lazio, who withdrew from the race.

Rudy’s celebrity obviously isn’t all he has to run on. He’ll make the case that voters should let him do for the state what he did for the city. And out will come his three major talking points: 1) New York was once considered the most dangerous large city in America, but FBI stats now show that it’s the safest. 2) New York once was known as the welfare capital of the country, but now it’s recognized for running the largest and most successful welfare-to-work initiative anywhere. And, 3) Rudy shook up the “heavy-taxing, anti-business philosophy” of the city that had resulted in the loss of over 300,000 private-sector jobs between ’90 and ’93.

“Rudy’s targeted tax cuts and pro-business philosophy have led to the highest five-year period of private-sector job growth in the city’s history,” his campaign crows. A $2 billion budget deficit transformed into a $2 billion surplus! And, of course, a stat soon to be as well known to New Yorkers as former Yankee Roger Maris’ 61 season homers: 330,000 new jobs.

When Hillary observes, as she recently did on a listening tour, that “if upstate New York were a separate state, it would rank 49th in job-creation and economic development,” she may be unwittingly leading the overture for Rudy’s aria: 330,000 new jobs; 330,000 new jobs; 330,000 new jobs.

But of course, Rudy doesn’t anticipate much help from Hillary. Rudy’s campaign expects that Hillary, or her surrogates, will attack the mayor’s temperament — and his administration’s disasters.

“The ‘Tough Rudy’ who everyone liked in his first term has been replaced with the ‘Bully Rudy,’” says the senior White House staffer. “Everything’s going to be viewed through the prism of “police brutality victim Abner Louima and police shooting victim Amadou Diallo.

That Rudy has revitalized New York only by sacrificing certain key threads of the Constitution is a criticism that no doubt will win over a lot of readers of the Village Voice. In his recent kung-fu fighting against the city’s cultural elite, he has been particularly — though characteristically — egregious and tyrannical, critics say. Rudy is threatening to withhold $7 million in city funds if the Brooklyn Museum of Art doesn’t cancel an exhibit that features a collage of the Virgin Mary fashioned out of polyester resin, oil paint, and elephant dung.

But, Rudy’s supporters say, how much will trifles like this sway the suburbanites? They seem more likely to be moved by Rudy’s ability to point to the 50-percent drop in overall crime than anything Norman Siegal of the New York Civil Liberties Union might have to say.

“The city’s homicide rate is at its lowest level since 1964,” Rudy’s campaign documents boast. “According to FBI statistics, between 1993 and 1997, New York crime reduction accounted for a full 25 percent of the nation’s drop in crime. The numbers of shootings have fallen by 61.4 percent between 1993 and 1997.” And, Rudy will counter on the stump, “shootings by police officers have declined 62 percent since 1993.”

Despite that stat, however, the Louima and Diallo cases cast long shadows. But if Rudy has written off the minority vote, and even the majority of his own city which overwhelmingly reelected him just two years ago, that’s going to require attracting a huge majority among those much-coveted suburbanites.

The Louima and Diallo outrages cost Rudy plenty of in-city support from his traditional voting blocks. “Fewer than a quarter of all New Yorkers believe that the police treat blacks and whites evenly, with blacks in particular viewing the police with fear and distrust,” a March New York Times poll revealed. More than two-thirds of the blacks polled believed that the policies of Rudy’s administration have directly spiked an increase in police brutality.

And a March Daily News poll taken in the aftermath of the Diallo shooting showed Giuliani’s approval rating at an all-time low — down to 40 percent after a peak of 65 percent around his reelection in November ’97. Support from Jewish voters was down from 81 percent in November ’97 to 59 percent in March; support from Latino voters plummeted from 64 percent to 24 percent. Two-thirds of all New York voters disapproved of Rudy’s criticism of those who protested the Diallo shooting at One Police Plaza. Fifty-seven percent of those polled said that the mayor’s tough, take-no-prisoners policing “interferes with the rights of innocent people.”

Since March, of course, Rudy’s support has bounced back. But New Yorkers have long memories. And Hillary will no doubt do everything she can to remind them — and their suburban friends — of Louima and Diallo. Rudy can rant and rave that police shootings are down, that the criticism is unfair, that he quickly condemned the Louima incident. But his relationship with those sympathetic to the plight of minorities is strained, and people remember things like plungers and 41 bullets.

And by the time Team Hillary gets done with him — if it does its job, which is by no means a sure thing — it will seem clear that Rudy’s bull-headed, sanctimonious pugilism served him far better when he was a U.S. attorney than it ever would in the U.S. Senate.

When he went after Anthony “Tony Ducks” Coralla, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, his anger and fire worked wonders. But outside the courtroom, where his energy is channeled to combat all sorts of others — former Police Commissioner William Bratton, strippers, vendors, cabbies, gardeners, Tina Brown, New York Magazine advertising executives, and jay-walkers — Hillary (or, more likely, Hillary’s allies) will argue, Rudy’s prosecutorial mien is more histrionics than heroics, and it’s ill-suited to Capitol Hill.

The waiting room of Rudy’s high-security campaign office contains wall blow-ups of the 1997 reelection endorsements of all four major New York daily newspapers — the Times, the Post, the Daily News and Newsday. But more than one of these endorsements also voiced concerns about Rudy’s personality — which makes the wall decorations rather odd and disjointed pages of campaign literature.

“Mr. Giuliani’s combative temperament is a bit like nuclear fission,” the Times reelection endorsement reads. “His pugnaciousness is less attractive when it is aimed at an individual whose only sin was to make a legitimate criticism of the administration.”

What’s unclear is whether Rudy’s prickly exterior will really matter that much in the Senate race.

Though the Marist poll indicates that Hillary is perceived as having a more likable personality than Rudy (69 percent find her likable, just 45 percent for the mayor) and would make a better neighbor (66 percent think she’d make a “good neighbor,” to Rudy’s 57 percent), few New Yorkers seem under the impression that they’re electing a best friend. Rudy’s pugnaciousness has its plusses: He is perceived as more “honest and trustworthy” than the first lady (the first lady!), 59 percent to her 48 percent. And, of course, Rudy wins the election match-up, which is really the only litmus test that counts.

“He can’t help himself,” Koch says. “His temperament is like that of a scorpion. If you ask a scorpion, ‘Why do you sting?’ he says, ‘Because it’s my nature.’ Rudy’s the same way. He can’t help himself when he demonizes people or tries to destroy his critics. He will try to smear her. He will take the low road. I told Hillary she should ignore his personal attacks and leave them to her surrogates to address.”

And she’ll certainly have no shortage of surrogates.

“It’s obvious that Giuliani is awkward dealing with blacks,” powerhouse Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel told reporters during the Diallo aftermath. “He would just rather not see blacks and Puerto Ricans anywhere. I don’t know where he was raised or what school he went to, but it’s abundantly clear that the mayor does not include among his friends any African-Americans. Because if he did, he would get better advice than he’s getting. Whether he likes it or not, we are his constituents, and it’s our community that is feeling the pain and the suffering of his indifference.”

“Ouch!” you might say.

But how much will Rangel’s rhetoric matter to an unemployed white guy in Rochester?

“This race, in many ways, will be about who makes the most mistakes,” says a professional New York Democrat.

Hillary’s up on that count so far, but it’s a few lifetimes until November 2000. Both Hillary and Rudy are following their business plans — Hillary’s listening, Rudy’s talking, and both are raising gobs of cash.

Not much has stood in the path of either candidate. But now Rudy has in front of him a woman just as presumptuous and pugnacious as he. “Fat Tony” is a lightweight compared to Rudy’s latest foe.

Two mighty, mightily flawed leaders, undeclared candidates facing off in the undeclared capital of the country: Millions will pour in to fund the shockingly bright reds and blues that paint Hillary and Rudy as heroic; millions more will be devoted to the uglier hues — the dingy grays and muddy reds.

Hillary as a vicious, carpetbagging Lady Macbeth, presiding over the most corrupt, tax-happy administration in history and suddenly presumptuously buying a Yankees cap.

Rudy as a bigoted totalitarian, taking all the credit and none of the responsibility, awkward and mean-spirited and all too willing to take a lesson from Faust.

Hideous egos seeking power and standing for nothing!

Maybe, by the time this ends, one of them won’t have a high school named after him or her, after all.

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.

The distinction between entrapment (which is illegal) and a sting (which is legal) now appears to be a much eroded line in the sand. As Perlstein’s piece points out, it is up to a jury once arrests have been made whether law enforcement set up a trap or a sting. In previous decades, defendants have been acquitted in cases of entrapment; but not in recent years:

Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them when offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)

One of the most famous recent cases of FBI infiltration — which is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone article — hangs over anarchist networks worldwide. Brandon Darby, the once trusted activist and organizer-turned-FBI-informant and now writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, is the dirtiest name to utter in anarchist circles. Darby infiltrated groups organizing protests around the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Darby fed the FBI information, which helped them seize riot shields made by a group from Texas. Enraged by the seizure (but still viewing Darby as a comrade) two young men from Austin, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, bought the materials for and constructed Molotov cocktails with the thought of using them against state vehicles. The two, however, decided overnight that this was a bad idea — and left the devices at home, with no intention of using them.

Darby passed information about the Molotov cocktail plans on to the FBI, and McKay and Crowder were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. While Crowder accepted a plea deal without trial for a two-year prison sentence for making the devices, McKay went to trial, arguing Darby entrapped him. The trial ended with a hung jury. Before the retrial, however, McKay retracted claims of entrapment and agreed to accept a plea deal (and serve a four-year prison sentence, for making the Molotovs and perjury).

Perlstein notes that “the State is singling out ideological enemies” – and if federal sting targets are much to go by, the State’s position is clear: anti-capitalists, environmentalists and Muslims are threats; racists are not. We can respond by decrying FBI activity, and by arguing that their targets are not real threats. Or, we can take patterns of FBI activity more seriously and ask why anti-capitalists are more threatening than white supremacists. This line of questioning can likely be reduced to two questions, chanted again and again up and down the country when protest front lines are faced with lines of police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)

You will learn that the Bureau has served first and foremost as a secret intelligence service reporting to the president of the United States. In its first incarnation under J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled the Bureau for 48 years, the FBI was the president’s secret intelligence service. Today, 40 years after Hoover’s death, we still live in the shadow of his legacy. How do you run a secret intelligence agency in an open and democratic society? How do you balance national security and civil liberty? How can we be both safe and free? These are questions that Hoover struggled with, and that we struggle with still.

Your prize-winning book about the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” was called “a credible and damning indictment of U.S. intelligence policy” by Publishers Weekly. What are the counts in your indictment, if you agree with that assessment?

I certainly agree that “Legacy of Ashes” is credible, because every assertion is documented. There are about 200 pages of endnotes, and about 80 pages of endnotes in “Enemies.” When I say something, I back it up. But “Legacy of Ashes” is not an indictment of the CIA. The CIA and FBI are reflections of who we are as Americans. We are the most powerful nation on earth. We project our power across the globe, and in order to do that we need good intelligence. When intelligence fails, war happens and people die. When intelligence succeeds, war can be prevented and lives can be saved.

America is not very good at gathering intelligence, but we’re getting better. It’s understandable, because Americans have only been at it in a serious and concerted way since World War II. The British have been at it since Queen Elizabeth I, over five centuries. The Russians have been at it since Peter the Great. And the Chinese have been at it ever since Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War,” so 26 centuries.

I want my books to serve not as an indictment but as a warning. If the U.S. doesn’t strike the balance correctly between security and countervailing concerns, we may lose our rights and our liberties, and we may not survive as a free republic. We have made many mistakes, the consequences of which can be measured in blood and treasure, but we are improving – particularly over the last three years.

Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen, beginning with Sun Tzu. Tell us about “The Art of War,” and what an ancient Chinese military treatise has to do with contemporary U.S. intelligence.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what “The Art of War” teaches.

Chapter seven focuses on the dangers of direct conflict. How do U.S. intelligence agencies, as Sun Tzu says, “subdue the enemy without fighting”?

Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons.

How about black ops?

Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins.

All of them committed by U.S. intelligence?

The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis.

Let’s turn to a 1964 book that brought to light the role that intelligence services played in U.S. foreign policy.

“The Invisible Government” was the first reported book that actually described what the CIA did. It was written almost 50 years ago, and was a landmark. It explained that the CIA was not James Bond, which was just then becoming popular – that intelligence was not a matter of flying into a foreign capital in a trench coat, overthrowing a government, having a martini, making love and then catching the next plane. It showed that intelligence was a difficult, dirty, dangerous and at times tedious business which was about information, and how information meant power.

So it’s a very good book that is still vital today. And David Wise is still writing great books about intelligence.

In the introduction, the author defines the invisible government as the “interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States… a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government”, with the CIA “at its heart”. Is that 50-year-old description of America’s intelligence apparatus still accurate? How did 9/11 change the structure of U.S. intelligence?

Things got much more complex. There are now 17 different American intelligence services, with a bureaucracy of interlocking directorates above them overseen by the Director of National Intelligence. All of them are required to report to the secretary of defense, who in turn reports to the president. In the last three years things have gotten better, largely due to the author of our next book.

That author is former CIA director and U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Michael Gates.

Robert Gates was the head of the CIA under the first President Bush. Under the second President Bush, at the end of 2006, he succeeded the irascible Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. He stayed on under Obama until just a few months ago.

Gates, as you can see in “From the Shadows,” really understands how intelligence can serve and do disservice to the president of the United States. He probably had more experience in intelligence than anyone who has ever been secretary of defense. The secretary of defense basically runs the show when it comes to intelligence. We spend somewhere just south of $100 billion a year – the precise amount is classified – on intelligence, and the secretary of defense controls 85 to 90 percent of that.

Tell us more about this book.

Bob Gates basically got off the bus from Wichita, Kan. in 1966 and went to work for the U.S. government. He went from the air force to the CIA. After learning Russian, he became an expert – as we defined it – on Russia during the Cold War. He himself never went to Russia until the Cold War was ending, even though he was considered to be among the leading experts on the USSR. He got off the plane and Gorbachev said to him: “How does it look from the ground?” Because the U.S. had been staring down at the Soviet Union from spy satellites and planes, but we didn’t understand what was going on on the ground. We could count the missiles, but we didn’t see the potatoes rotting in the field because there wasn’t enough fuel to take them to market.

Gates learned through bitter experience, over the course of half a century, how intelligence works. It’s an amazing book. And as secretary of defense he used that knowledge to improve our intelligence services.

What precisely is the relationship between the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence apparatus?

Ultimately, intelligence should serve the national security of the United States. When you get up in the morning and open the paper or turn on your computer, you want to know: Is the world safe? Is my country safe? Is my city safe? Is my family safe? That is what the president wants to know too, and that is the job of intelligence.

Can any flow chart explain the relationship between the 17 agencies that are part of the U.S. intelligence service and Department of Defense?

In theory, it’s a bunch of boxes that connect and send intelligence up through the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to the president. In the past, it has worked more like 17 different musicians with 17 different scores playing a cacophonous tune with the conductor flailing his arms madly. But we’re getting better at it.

Next you cite one of Barbara Tuchman’s lesser-known works of history, “The March of Folly.” Tell us about it.

In short, this is one of the greatest books ever written. Why did the Trojans take in the wooden horse? Why was America in Vietnam? Barbara Tuchman explores those questions, and the answer is folly – leaders acting against the interests of their constituents.

Folly explains so much of the history of world events. People believe that the world is run by conspiracies because that is what they read in novels and see on cheap TV series. But the course of world events is determined less by conspiracies than it is by stupidity. Why did the British lose the United States? How did the Renaissance popes bring on the Protestant reformation? Folly. Lack of intelligence.

Please connect the dots to our topic of intelligence.

Consider the three meanings of the word intelligence. It is the power of your mind; it is secret information; and it is secret action taken in the name of a nation. If we had more intelligence we would know our enemies, have fewer wars and there would be less folly throughout history.

If the Trojans knew the Greeks were in the horse, they wouldn’t have opened the gates.

Exactly. Why did they let the horse in? Folly.

“The March of Folly” is used to teach blind spot analysis in business schools, a method for uncovering faulty or obsolete assumptions. How do intelligence agencies perform blind spot analysis to prevent the sort of folly that Tuchman described?

“The March of Folly” explains how not to make decisions. Leaders must learn to act only out of enlightened self-interest. To use power wisely, they must make intelligent use of information. If they blunder on based on faulty assumptions, then the Greeks end up inside of Troy and Americans wind up mired in Vietnam for a decade.

Let’s end with George Orwell’s “1984.” Most of us know it, but please explain why you chose it.

None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?

“1984″ described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in “1984″ was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, “Enemies,” is about.

But you suggest that America’s Big Brother is a bit of a bumbling uncle.

Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance.

Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power.

During a visit to the FBI, as you point out, President Obama proclaimed “we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals.” But you suggest that liberty and security are opposing forces. How has the pendulum swung between liberty and security? And which way is it swinging now?

In the introduction to “Enemies” I point out that Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance.

I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory.

When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress.

The film deservedly gives Hoover credit for establishing the first federal police force that used modern forensics to nab bad guys, especially Prohibition-era gangsters whose grisly kidnappings and murders had captivated the public’s appetite for the lurid underworld of criminals and their molls. Eastwood also provides a plausible rationale for Hoover’s lifelong paranoia about Communism:  Soon after World War I ended, the Washington home of Hoover’s boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was bombed by an anarchist.

Fair enough.

But the biopic inaccurately portrays Hoover as a critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy. In fact, the FBI director was a crucial ally of the Red-baiting demagogue.  Indeed, at Hoover’s personal direction, agents spent hundreds of hours perusing FBI files to supply McCarthy with evidence of Communist subversion.   Hoover also coached McCarthy about how to insulate himself from criticism by labeling targets as “loyalty risks” instead of “card-carrying Communists,” which was harder to prove.  A Hoover deputy even instructed McCarthy on manipulating press coverage by releasing his attacks just before news deadlines so that reporters wouldn’t have time to interview the other side.

Nor does the film discuss Hoover’s order to “neutralize” Eastwood’s one-time costar, actress Jean Seberg, by falsely telling journalists that she was pregnant thanks to a leader of the Black Panthers.  Seberg later committed suicide; her family blamed the FBI smear.

The biopic does portray Hoover’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly because of his ties to Soviet agents, which led to FBI bugs that captured the civil rights leader’s marital infidelity.  But here, too, “J. Edgar” underplays Hoover’s nefariousness.   In fact, the FBI planted listening devices in King’s home, office and hotel rooms, recording more than a dozen large tape reels whose contents Hoover provided to numerous parties: the president and vice president, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA, the military, the United Nations, members of Congress, and the press.

What vital intelligence did Hoover disseminate?  That King, according to Hoover, was a “tom cat” with “obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”  The FBI claimed to have recorded King in flagrante during group sex parties in which, according to FBI transcripts, he boasted of his prowess (“I am the best pussy-eater in the world”) and invoked Jesus while in the throes of passion: “I’m fucking for God!”

Ultimately, FBI accounts of King’s sexual antics turned out to be embellished.  Although King committed adultery, a Hoover deputy involved in the smear campaign later admitted that the African-American voices captured on FBI bugs may actually have been those  of King’s associates;  to the white agents who made up Hoover’s force, all black voices evidently sounded the same.  Still, that didn’t stop Hoover’s minions from compiling yet another field report that spread the preposterous story that King, after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got drunk and chased prostitutes down the hallway of his Oslo hotel — while stark naked.

Hoover stubbornly believed his incendiary leaks would “destroy the burrhead.”  But they didn’t.  Despite Hoover’s best efforts to spread the dirty details, no member of the press reported on them; in the mid-1960s, such gossip-mongering was anathema to the mainstream media.  Still, no journalists had the courage to reveal the FBI’s witch hunt against King, either; news executives feared crossing Hoover no less than the politicians who were routinely blackmailed by him.  (According to author Curt Gentry, Hoover blocked a critical magazine article by circulating photos of the publisher’s wife performing fellatio on her black chauffeur.)

Even King’s assassination didn’t stop the FBI’s vilification.  Indeed, the worldwide grief over his murder made Hoover more determined than ever to resurrect the salacious stories about the martyr’s sex life.  This time, the FBI found a willing outlet: columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who quoted from Hoover’s classified files about King’s “illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent Negro dentist.”  (Anderson later decided that Hoover had used him to implicate King in “a posthumous scandal, to turn even his death into a sordid affair.”  Three years later, Anderson paid him back by becoming the first prominent mainstream journalist to turn on Hoover — rifling through his trash, exposing his financial corruption and blackmailing techniques, even hinting that he was gay.)

And what about such gossip, including that Hoover had a secret double-life as a drag queen?  In Eastwood’s movie, the rumor is transformed from the erotic to the morose: Minutes after the death of Hoover’s mother, he grieves near her body, weeping mournfully as he dons her necklace and a favorite dress.  The lawman is not a sexual pervert, you see, just a faithful and bereaved son.

In truth, the outlandish cross-dressing story was circulated more than three decades after it allegedly occurred, when a witness of dubious credibility told writer Anthony Summers that she saw Hoover at a New York orgy, engaging in sex with young boys while reading a Bible. He was supposedly dressed in a red skirt, lace stockings, high heels and curly wig, a black feather boa around his neck and makeup with false eyelashes on his face.

Perhaps the posthumous vilification of Hoover as a depraved sexual hypocrite is only poetic justice; after all, during his lifetime, he was Washington’s consummate master of sexual slander and political blackmail.  But instead of ignoring the baseless transvestite story, “J. Edgar” attempts to sanitize it and rehabilitate Hoover’s image.

Even Eastwood’s depiction of the FBI director’s relationship with his longtime deputy and confidant — and reputed lover — gives Hoover the heterosexual benefit of the doubt.  Although Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is portrayed as Hoover’s loyally swishy sidekick, Hoover returns the adoration with only a manly love, rebuffing Tolson’s overture to turn the relationship physical.  However tormented, Hoover remains in the end closeted even from himself.

To be sure, cinematic license is to be expected in such movies; feature films are not nonfiction biographies.  But given the known facts of Hoover’s life, Eastwood has painted his subject in the best light possible—better than he deserves and infinitely kinder than Hoover ever treated his many enemies, who included some of the most heroic figures of that tumultuous era.

Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling: Clint Eastwood has made his day.

I’ll get to the historical and political insults of “J. Edgar” shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie, which features Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around his dreary, post-Victorian suite of offices, looking worried under a mountain of latex and makeup (when he plays the 1970s-era Hoover) and talking in one of those unplaceable, old-timey Northeast Corridor accents. (Admittedly, Hoover in life had a strange voice; he lived from birth to death in Washington, D.C., but spoke in an affected manner that sounded nothing like today’s mid-Atlantic accent.) It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if “J. Edgar” is about to become “Queer Eye for the FBI,” and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t.

Actually, if there’s one area where Black’s lumpy screenplay, with its awkward chronological backing-and forthing, deserves some credit, it’s in the highly plausible account of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. From early on in Hoover’s FBI career it was widely assumed that he was gay, but the evidence was always circumstantial and the handful of people who knew him personally always denied it. (The allegations that he was a cross-dresser came from only one source, and don’t match anything else we know about this intensely cautious and private individual. Most historians view them as urban myth.) I think the fairest thing to say is that it seems likely Hoover was primarily homosexual, despite his purported romance with actress Dorothy Lamour, but not at all clear whether he acted on those impulses. Black imagines Hoover and Tolson cohabiting as “confirmed bachelors,” in a state of permanently unresolved erotic tension, which would go a long way toward explaining the secret policeman’s massively screwed-up psychology.

But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, “J. Edgar” goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random. Historical characters appear and disappear in shticky little pieces — Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman, Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh, Jeffrey Donovan doing the world’s worst “pahk the cah in Hahvehd Yahd” accent as Robert F. Kennedy, Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon — without ever seeming to justify their presence on the stage. You get the feeling they’ve all got a problem with Hoover, but you’re never sure why. Maybe they just found him a weird and distasteful little man, which is certainly how he comes across. On the other hand, it might be helpful if this movie made the point that Hoover was as close as we’ve ever come (so far) to having an unelected dictator, and that the only real reason he didn’t become a Stalin-level tyrant was the constraint of a democratic political system he could not entirely subvert, much as he tried.

Eastwood and Black certainly bring up many of the things that made Hoover so noxious, beginning with the Palmer raids of 1919-20, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists and anarchists who had committed no crime. At the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed to head a special Red-hunting branch of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, which launched his long career as a self-appointed guardian of American political rectitude, devoted to stamping out dissident opinion wherever it cropped up, and whether or not constitutional rights got trampled in the process. “J. Edgar” makes clear that Hoover conducted secret surveillance on suspected Commies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who purportedly had a lesbian affair with a reporter); perjured himself before Congress; conducted an especially vile counterintelligence program aimed at undermining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders; and generally turned a blind eye to organized crime in his relentless persecution of left-wingers.

But you get almost no sense of the extent or intensity with which Hoover mobilized the federal government’s police force to crack down on unconventional political opinion. The second Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy 1950s is never mentioned, nor is the word COINTELPRO, and Hoover’s vicious racism is largely ignored. (Intriguingly, the rumors that Hoover was gay were echoed, during his lifetime, by speculation that he might be partly black.) Furthermore, all this stuff is presented as quirky side info in a story about a weird dude who lived with his mom (Judi Dench, giving the only tolerable performance in the whole film) and had a lifelong boyfriend he maybe never slept with. Oh, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to fingerprinting. Did I mention that? Everybody pooh-poohed his interest in bringing forensic science to law enforcement, and now look! Yes, Hoover was a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, quite likely a paranoid sociopath and incipient fascist, a terrifying incarnation of many of the worst currents of American political opinion in one individual. OK, yeah, that’s all true — but his real legacy is found in “CSI: Miami.”

Just in case you think I have some kind of personal bias when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover, well, I plead 100 percent guilty. He ruined the lives of countless innocent people and was instrumental in spreading the idea that the Constitution doesn’t apply to people who say bad things about the government. He pretty much built the slippery slide that led to the national-security state of the last decade, when civil liberties have been eviscerated and privacy is a sham. (I will further add that he personally supervised the surveillance and harassment of my mother, her then-husband and many of their colleagues in the 1940s labor movement, and I’ve seen the files to prove it.) If there’s a darker figure in American history since the Civil War, I’m really not sure who it is. Nixon? George W. Bush? Not even close. Dick Cheney? Only in his undead dreams. I only wish I believed in hell so I could believe that it wasn’t hot enough for John Edgar Hoover.

But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain. But honestly, what can we expect from Clint Eastwood at this point? This movie says a great deal more about him, I’m afraid, than it does about J. Edgar Hoover. And what it says is that one of the greatest American screen actors of the 20th century has squandered much of that legacy in the 21st by becoming a director of indifferent Oscar-bait movies that look handsome on the surface but have nothing to say, and that nobody ever wants to watch twice. Even by the dismal recent standards of “Hereafter” and “Invictus” and “Changeling” this movie is a disappointment, because watching it once is bad enough, and because it may leave younger viewers with the impression that J. Edgar Hoover was mostly important to history because he wasn’t gay enough to have decent fashion sense.