What happened in 1972

With this column, I have created a historical “Lego” set, placing before us four facts about the year 1972 that we are now going to treat as pieces of a larger whole.

1. On May 2, 1972, the legendary director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, died of a heart attack.

2. On June 17, 1972, operatives working for thecommittee to Re-elect the President (a.k.a. Richardnixon) broke into the Democraticnationalcommittee’s office in thewatergate complex.

3. In the spring and summer of 1972, quite a few babies were born. A small but significant subset of those 1972 arrivals later turned into impressive American historians.

4. On the day after Hoover’s death, I ran intomr. Hansen, my 80-year-old neighbor. “Hoover was a great American,” Mr. Hansen told me. “His death is a terrible blow to the nation.” We were not of one mind on this issue, or any other.

And now to put these four facts together.

Because Hoover died before thewatergate break-in, providence called a halt to the escalation of tension between him and the president. Early in his presi- dency, Nixon had “discovered that Hoover was not nearly as pliable as he might have hoped” and therefore thought about firing him. But sometimes foresighted Nixon restrained himself when he contemplated “the political dangers inherent in firing an FBI director.”

And now we are ready to snap Item 3 into its place: The quotations in the previous paragraph come from a New York Times op-ed by Yale historian Beverly Gage, who was born in July 1972 and who is now writing a biography of Hoover.

Back in 1972, I thought of Hoover and Nixon as a coalition of wickedness, scheming together to corrode the nation’s ideals. By contrast, to my neighbor Mr. Hansen, Hoover and Nixon appeared as noble cold warriors fighting against evil to save our nation.

And nowwe have Items 1-4 completely interlocked: Gage’s research onhoover is currently exposing the factual flaws of those two oversimplifiedworld views.

In her op-ed, Gage wrote of an episode in 1970, when Nixon proposed “a more aggressive surveillance campaign against antiwar protesters,” and Hoover resisted because “the program was illegal and likely to result in public backlash.”

If we had had even a hint of the complexity of Hoover’s conduct, Mr. Hansen and I would have been equally flummoxed, and thereby forced to fall silent and think.

The work of a high-powered historian has a wondrous power to set historic figures free of our efforts to simplify them, inviting us instead to question our certainties and reconsider our assumptions.

And nowfor the bad news: Although I have tried towhip you into a frenzy to read this fascinating newbiography, it isn’t finished yet. Still, I have set you up with a very early start on your 2018 holiday gift shopping. And, given the bipartisan befuddlement that episodically swirls around the FBI’S independence in investigations, we nowhave the timewe need to persuade the Colorado Republican and Democratic parties to co-sponsor Gage’s book-tour visit to Denver.

Look forward to an invitation to gather with me for conversation (in memory of Mr. Hansen) after that wildly thought-provoking talk.

Patty Limerick is Colorado’s state historian and faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.