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The recent armed assault on the FBI’s Cincinnati office by a right-wing insurrectionist, and his fellow travelers’ social media salvos against the bureau for executing a lawful search warrant at Donald Trump’s Florida estate, indicate that it’s time to recall past efforts to shore up the agency’s public image.

With a passion for history and cinema, a fondness for Jimmy Stewart, and a cousin-in-law in the FBI, I spent part of my childhood watching The FBI Story multiple times. I still tune in when the Turner Classic Movies channel runs the 1959 film. Of course, I now realize that it represents a propaganda vehicle created by controversial FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to aggrandize the bureau’s image in the American mind.

Amidst the Cold War, and the FBI’s efforts to fight communism, while recognizing the blowback against McCarthyism from civil libertarians, Hoover calculated in the 1950s that literary and Hollywood paeans to his agency were in order. He and his colleagues cooperated with Don Whitehead, a double Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting during the Korean War, who published in 1956 a book on the bureau’s history, The FBI Story: A Report to the People.

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