Chalk another up for Hoover
Few things enrage me like the existence of the FBI. All that horseshit we pretend to celebrate on our annual day of fireworks and flag-waving are null and void as long as the Bureau exists. Free people don't have a secret political police, and it's well documented that the Bureau operated as such for most of the Twentieth century. Its role was the liquidation of political dissidents and activists from the 1919 Palmer Raids through COINTELPRO, and there's no reason on Earth to think it has changed.
But it wasn't only activists who got destroyed. According to A.E. Hotchner writing in the New York Times, you can add Ernest Hemingway to the list of Bureau casualties. See, towards the end of his life, Hemingway complained to friends and family, including Hotchner, of constant surveillance and harassment by the FBI. He was considered delusional and paranoid, a diagnosis of which led to electroshock therapy, destroying his memory, and thus, in part, his ability to write. One of the most heartbreaking things in the world is his "true foreword" to A Moveable Feast:
This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.
And, wouldn't you know it, according to Hotchner, Hemingway was neither delusional nor paranoid.
Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest's activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary's Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.
In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.
Call it another notch for Hoover. It's almost enough to make me wish I was a religious man, so's I could believe in a special ring of Hell for that motherfucker. And for everybody else who's done the Bureau's work over the last century.
There are lots of good books on the history of the FBI's war on civil rights. My favorite is Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's Agents of Repression. And if you don't find it convincing, you can see the FBI documents that led them to write the book in The Cointelpro Papers.
