Enemies: A History of the FBI

Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner explores the fascinating but disquieting history of the FBI.

Enemies: A History of the FBI By Tim Weiner Random House 560 pp.

FBI Director for life J. Edgar Hoover – he died in office at age 77 after 48 years in the job – could be way ahead of the times or far behind them. In the late 1940s, he was the first public official to raise the specter of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons being smuggled into the United States. In the 1950s and early 1960s, his agents were more attentive to the purported threat posed by America's nascent civil rights movement than they were to the activities of Mafia or the Klu Klux Klan.

Some of Hoover’s quirky policy decisions could be explained by his personal animosities: As a top FBI official put it, “He was very consistent throughout the years. The things he hated, he hated all his life. He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews – he had this great long list of hates.” He wasn’t that keen on women, either. His FBI agents were virtually 100 percent male and white.

In his fourth book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, Tim Weiner provides an exhaustive chronicle of the FBI’s dealings with the intelligence portion of its portfolio from its humble beginning in 1908 to its performance before and after 9/11. Weiner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of national security topics for The New York Times, knows chapter and verse.  He also makes use of recently declassified documents, oral histories by FBI agents, and Hoover’s own intelligence files. "Enemies" is a compelling and chronological read which could have been improved with better transitions and connections between episodes. Sometimes the stories come rapid fire one after another, and the reader is left longing for a bit more context or analysis.

Still, it is a fascinating, if disquieting story: Again and again a concern for national security – whether real or perceived, whether in 1919, 1954, or 2001 – trumps civil liberties. In the tug of war between safety and freedom, our nation has frequently sacrificed the latter at the altar of the former. During the past century there are illegal wiretaps by the thousands, countless break-ins and burglaries, listening devices placed in bedrooms, and warrantless arrests and detentions. Under Hoover and beyond, the FBI would freely break the law in the name of enforcing it.

Without question, actual dangers abounded and deserved attention. There were bomb-wielding anarchists, German saboteurs, and Soviet spies to ferret out, arrest, or keep track of.  The American Communist Party was hounded into even greater irrelevance by Hoover’s tactics, but there was substantial collateral damage. For example, Senator Joseph McCarthy used raw FBI information, often third-hand hearsay, in his witch hunt for Communists in America. Hoover was happy to help the Senator along until “Tail Gunner Joe” went too far and started attacking the nation’s national security establishment itself.

Not all of the FBI’s extracurricular activities can be laid at Hoover’s feet. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon knew and encouraged such FBI activities. They wanted Hoover to go after America’s enemies and he was happy to oblige – although he had a broad definition of who was a threat. It included the likes of Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, and the American Civil Liberties Union. The FBI tapped the phones of journalists and government officials and even caught Supreme Court Justices on tape. And, of course, there were files on presidential girlfriends.

The FBI’s dalliances with trivial or political matters survived Hoover. In the late 1990s, the FBI assigned hundreds of agents to investigate the Monica Lewinsky affair, while it had a lone analyst working on al-Qaeda. Neither the FBI nor the CIA get high marks for their pre-9/11 efforts to keep America secure from the machinations of Middle Eastern terrorists.

The excesses of the FBI include one of Hoover’s pet projects: the Security Index. It was a list of people, primarily American citizens, who would be detained in the event of war or some other national emergency. These people had done nothing but were deemed “potentially or actually dangerous.” There were 26,500 individuals so designated in the mid-1950s, among them American prisoners of war who had returned home after the Korean War armistice. Even before this paranoid fantasy became fodder for the movie “The Manchurian Candidate,” Hoover was worried that these soldiers had been brainwashed to serve as a fifth column. The US Congress even approved funds to create camps to house Security Index members.

The Index itself, it turns out, wasn’t all that secure. It didn’t include the name of a US Marine marksman who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. His defection had been front page news. He returned to America in 1962 with a Russian wife and settled in Dallas. He spent his spare time passing out pro-Castro leaflets. Lee Harvey Oswald was known to the local FBI bureau, but he was not monitored in the days before President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Dallas in November, 1963.   

David Holahan is a regular contributor to the Monitor's Books section.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Enemies: A History of the FBI
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2012/0410/Enemies-A-History-of-the-FBI
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe