Was J Edgar Hoover Right That We Need a Federal Police Force?

Is it fair to put J. Edgar Hoover in the same category as Bob Moses or Henry Kissinger? He wasn't an elected figure, but he built all of this power in the administrative wing of the state. Was Hoover right that we needed a federal police force? It strikes me that one of the challenges the United States faced after the Civil War was that there were very few mechanisms by which the federal government could enforce the law.