Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover

For nearly fifty years, J. Edgar Hoover held great power in the United States. The creator of the FBI and its Director until his death, he played a role in nearly every major tragedy and scandal in America during the twentieth century. 
 
Hoover was lauded when he died as an American hero. Anthony Summers' controversial bestseller, Official &amp; Confidential, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, draws on more than 800 interviews to explode the myths, exposing the dark secrets that remained hidden throughout Hoover's lifetime. 
 
Hoover used his intimate knowledge of the John F. Kennedy's sex life to ensure that Lyndon B. Johnson became Vice President, and suppressed evidence about J.F.K's assassination. Hoover himself, meanwhile, was a closet homosexual, which allegedly led to him being blackmailed by the Mafia. 
 
This fascinating book reveals that even Hoover's death, on the eve of Watergate, was clouded with mystery. Witnesses have indicated that, in the panic over the secrets he was holding over President Nixon, an operation was mounted to break into his house - possibly even to murder him.

The sensational and definitive account of the life of J Edgar Hoover, America's most celebrated FBI Director, who is now the subject of the J Edgar movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio

I read Official and Confidential with mounting horror, fascination, revulsion... Enthralling

Summers' book is not just a history of a single hero-sized hypocrite, it is a history of a vast national delusion

The exposure we have been waiting for these last forty years

Cartha DeLoach, former close aide to Hoover

The book is more exciting, and more damning, than the film...This is bold, excoriating, unmissable stuff.

Anthony Summers is a writer, journalist and television producer . After education at Oxford University, he began his career in television with Granada TV's 'World in Action' investigative current affairs program. He moved on to the BBC, traveling worldwide and becoming a Deputy Editor of the flagship 'Panorama' program. Coverage for the BBC included the Vietnam War and the Middle East conflict, and - extensively - the United States, notably the Martin Luther King assassination and Robert Kennedy's presidential bid. 
 
He is the bestselling author of The File on the Tsar (1976), The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980), Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (1985), Honeytrap (1987), Not in Your Lifetime: The definitive book on the J.F.K. Assassination (1998), The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (1998), Sinatra: The Life (2005) and The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 &amp; Osama bin Laden (2011). 
 
Anthony lives in Ireland with his wife and three children.

The Life

Sinatra

In 1941, at age twenty-five, Sinatra told a friend, 'I'm going to be the best singer in the world'. Two years on, the bobbysoxers were already weeping and screaming for him in their thousands. Half a century on Bono defined him as 'the Big Bang of popular music'. 'To hell with the calendar,' a music critic wrote before his death in 1998, 'The day Frank Sinatra dies, the twentieth century is over.' 
 
There have been many books about Sinatra, but the last comprehensive biography was Kitty Kelly's HIS WAY, published in 1986. it has taken renowned biographer Anthony Summers years to research this new biography, which promises to be the definitive story of a musical and film career spanning six decades. In this massively documented book, meticulous investigation is coupled with sensitivity to examine every aspect of Sinatra's life, public and private, from his obscure beginnings in an immigrant neighborhood in Jersey City to his twilight years as a living legend in Palm Springs. It tells the human story of an American icon who was irresistible to women and who was plagued throughout his life by scandal and hints of links with the Mafia. In this book, Summers finally uncovers the whole truth.

The first and last definitive, fully-documented,massively researched birth-to-death biography of Frank Sinatra by the bestselling author of File on the Tsar and Goddess:The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

Astonishingly well-researched...incredibly well-sourced

Summers and Swan tell us much that is new, and with panache. Compelling ...sterling work

First-rate reporting...dense and intimate

Anthony Summers never writes a book that fails to offer accurate material you will find nowhere else...No surprise then that Sinatra: The Life is one of the very few, bona fide, three-dimensional portraits of an amazingly complex, interesting and sometimes god-awful guy

Anthony Summers worked for many years as a senior producer on Granada's World in Action and on the BBC's Panorama, and produced many landmark TV documentaries. His bestselling books include THE FILE ON THE TSAR, CONSPIRACY (about the JFK assasination which won the CWA Gold Dagger), GODDESS (about Marilyn Monroe) HONEYTRAP and THE ARROGANCE OF POWER (on Nixon). 
 
Robbyn Swan is a writer for VANITY FAIR, LIFE MAGAZINE and others.

Anthony Summers

Robbyn Swan

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan have written the definitive account of 9/11. The shockwaves of the September 11, 2001 attacks in America reverberate to this day. Though Osama Bin Laden has been killed, questions remain. What exactly happened? Could 9/11 have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and misinformation arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what has yet to be revealed? 
 
The Eleventh Day, written with access to thousands of recently released official documents, is updated for this edition – and reports on a development which the former chairman of Congress' 9/11 probe describes as the ‘most important in years’.

Anthony Summers

The Eleventh Day

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