Interested mostly in Hoover’s celebrity surveillance, Eastwood et al. barely mention COINTELPRO, and completely elide the assassinations of Fred Hampton and many other Black Panther Party members, the development of the violent proto-terrorist Secret Army Organization, the pervasive incitement of gang violence, and the vast array of life-ruining black-op schemes inflicted on tens of thousands of citizens.

The FBI’s reaction to the Civil Rights era protests–in actuality, every type of Constitution-desecrating espionage imaginable directed at virtually everyone who raised a left-of-Goldwater voice–is reduced to Hoover’s conservative-paranoid rants. There’s a danger here, for a viewer unfamiliar with history, to take Hoover as simply a blackmailing big mouth, and not a man whose opinions were actually realized by bloody federal misdeed, over and over again.

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