Understanding the Hoover Marginalia: The four-baggers

J Edgar Hoover was an armchair detective, never personally involved in investigations. He directed the fbi through typically terse but sometimes copious comments written in the margins of action proposals and other priority topics.

Such communication is commonly known as marginalia. The term ‘Four-bagger’ derived from the occasions when he had so much to say that all four margins were full.

These four-baggers are of inestimable historical value. Hoover was entirely candid and he verbalized vigorously, vividly and sometimes vehemently to Associate Directors and others under him.

There were Three types of four-baggers 1) Most marginalia consist of one four-bagger, 2) a number of them included multiple memo messages, 3) different-looking messages, some printed and a few even typed.

One of these documents documented hoover’s knowledge that the US Army was in possession of a crashed UFO in 1947. In fact, he expressed his displeasure that the army wouldn’t let the FBI VIEW the spaceship. See if you can find it amongst a couple hundred glimpses into the backstory of the American intelligence community for five decades, from the Lindbergh kidnapping through Chappaquiddick, SCLC, East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, Kent State, the John and Robert kennedy assassinations, the conspiracy to assassinate rev. Martin Luther King, jr, UFOs, COINTELPRO, and others.

I gathered these documents in 1977 during a week of doctoral research conducted in the Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act Reading Room, J.  Hoover FBI Headquarters, Washington, DC.