From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Documents uncovered from the late FBI director's secret files reveal for the first time the shocking extent of FBI activities in collecting and using derogatory information about prominent Americans and political groups. Historian Athan Theoharis charges that Hoover was an "indirect blackmailer," exploiting the FBI's resources to serve the political interests of the White House and to advance his own political and moral agenda. None of the documents in five separate secret files was intended ever to be disclosed; Mr. Theoharis procured them after intensive research in FBI files using the Freedom of Information Act. The memoranda, letters, telephone transcriptions, and other materials printed here detail a wide range of excesses and include Hoover's providing information about political adversaries to the Johnson and Nixon White Houses; John F. Kennedy's affair with Washington gossip columnist Inga Arvad; FBI monitoring of Supreme Court clerks and staff; the tracking of Adlai Stevenson by the FBI as a homosexual; Hoover's interest in the drinking and sexual habits of congressmen; an anonymous letter attacking Martin Luther King, Jr., composed and sent to Dr. King by the FBI; and much more. Mr. Theoharis describes Hoover's ingenious Do Not File system as well as the FBI's Sex Deviate program and Obscene File.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These selections from Hoover's official and confidential file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal how the former FBI director was able to advance his own bureaucratic, political and moralistic agenda by ``indirect blackmail'' throughout his 48-year tenure. Excerpts from memoranda, letters and phone transcriptions include FDR adviser Harry Hopkins's entreaty that the Bureau wiretap his residence and tail his wife; compromising conversations between Navy ensign John Kennedy and a gossip columnist suspected of being a German spy; Nixon staffer H. R. Haldeman's request for ``a rundown on homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps''; and the full text of the notorious FBI-written letter encouraging Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide. As Theoharis aptly remarks, these files document the perils that unelected officials can pose for a constitutional government. Hoover's willingness to authorize illegal investigative techniques is clearly revealed here. Theoharis is a professor of history of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis.
