Context is Everything.
Hampton Sides writes of Hoover’s FBI:
Hoover’s FBI had become a curiously self-reinforcing enterprise. The sid thousand agents spread across the country were expected to ape the director’s views, mimic his style, and anticipate his needs.
“You must understand,” one special agent in charge wrote to a colleague, “that you’re working for a crazy maniac and that our duty is to find out what he wants and to create the world that he believes in.” Once, when Hoover broke out his blue pen and scrawled angrily over a memo, “Watch the borders,” agents scurried to the Mexican and Canadian borders to ascertain what Hoover meant - only to learn that the boss was merely concerned with the width of that particular memo’s margins.”
