Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 13, 2005



Helen Gandy was an American civil servant. Gandy, who at age 21 left her native New Jersey for Washington, D.C., was for 54 years the secretary to Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover called her "indispensable" and she exercised great behind-the-scenes influence on Hoover and the workings of the Bureau; Hoover's biographers, Theoharis and Cox, describe her as "a wraith-like, grim-faced spinster from New Jersey" whose "stern face recalled Cerberus at the gate". Following Hoover's death in 1972, she spent weeks destroying his "Personal File," thought to be where the most incriminating material he used to manipulate and control the most powerful figures in Washington was kept.

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