It has greatly advanced the concept of law enforcement by introducing scientific methods and professional disciplines.”  However, the FBI’s investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr., is surprising and shocking in the extent that it was about personal destruction. The authors of a 1977 Department of Justice task force report shift much of the blame for this on Hoover, stating that the investigation should have been shut down in 1963.  There do appear to be three major parts of the investigation: the initial probe into Levison and King’s relationship with communism, a marked shift in focus to King’s personal life, and a movement back to King’s ideology. Defenders of the FBI can cite legitimacy in the Bureau taking an interest in King in the first and last phases, for it was ostensibly the job of the FBI to identify domestic threats particularly in dealing with Communism. In addition, both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations knew that Hoover possessed a great deal of information on just about everyone, particularly King. Robert Kennedy approved the first wiretaps on King, and Johnson enjoyed frequent updates on King’s sexual escapades. Hoover, while he had a great deal of autonomy and power, did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, the institutions surrounding him failed to limit him in any significant way, tacitly condoning his status as unchallenged national policeman. The conduct of the FBI reflected the leadership of Hoover, but it was a larger societal force of generational and racial conflict that led to Hoover’s actions regarding King. Perhaps above all the role of the FBI was to suppress extremists of any kind, though it was Hoover and other members of the establishment that wrongly labeled King as one.


	Common historiography surrounding the creation of the United States focuses on the triumphs of the founding fathers, the small group of leaders at the top of the political hierarchy. These men are now venerated and celebrated, to the point where they are national icons thought of with few faults. Lost in this is the bitterness of the politics of the years and those following, when extreme tests of the principles of the new nation became clouded with personal vendettas and disputes. One such example is in the conspiracy and trial for treason in 1807 of Aaron Burr, a man who nearly was president and had served as vice-president. Substantiated facts about what precisely Burr planned or hoped to accomplish in personal land and power acquisition, or even the division of the United States as his enemies thought, are obscure, but the result was a highly publicized and politicized trial that pitted Burr against the sitting president, Thomas Jefferson. In the center of the chaos was John Marshall, a Federalist Chief Justice who had a history of tensions with Jefferson. Presiding over the trial, Marshall had to face issues central to how the new nation would define itself, such as the definition of treason, separation of powers between executive and judicial branches, and the danger of presidential tyranny. 