Any study of FBI public relations is incomplete without a review of Director J. Edgar Hoover’s handwritten comments on memoranda, known within the Bureau as “blue gems.” The director ruled the FBI’s strictly hierarchical bureaucracy largely through those comments on documents that crossed his desk and then flowed back the bureaucracy carrying his orders. For this study, more than five hundred of Hoover’s blue gems on topics related to public relations were reviewed and sorted into categories based on the work of organizational communication scholars Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn. Hoover’s blue gems provide a window into his minute-to-minute thought process. They are a record of the director’s efforts to influence policy on public relations and of his managers’ efforts to adhere to Hoover’s ideological statements, explanatory notes, and task-specific directives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]