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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. Today’s fears of a ‘deep state’, often expressed by Donald Trump and his supporters - of unaccountable government officials working against the public in their own interest – can be traced back to J Edgar Hoover. His job was to enforce the law but he would not always be bound by it.

(Photo: circa 1945, American criminologist John Edgar Hoover (1895 - 1972), the Director of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) for 48 years. Credit: MPI/Getty Images)