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Enemies
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - GOVERNMENT
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Q&A with Tim
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Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
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May 30, 2012 02:00PM
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Question (hoping this isn't a spoiler-type of question)In the book you discuss the role of U.S. Department of Defense Secretary James Forrestal and his interaction with the FBI under President Truman. When writing about Forrestal's 1949 death you describe it as a suicide. Do you feel that definitively Forrestal did take his own life or is there any question in your mind that perhaps some type of foul play could have been a factor in his bizarre death?
Craig, I describe Forrestal's breakdown and suicide in detail in my last book, Legacy of Ashes. There is no question that the pressures of the cold war drove Forrestal mad and that he took his own life by jumping out a window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. There was no evidence whatsoever of foul play.
Tim, I'm reading Legacy of Ashes prior to starting Enemies and I've noticed the large number of sources you used that were only declassified relatively recently. So I have a question that probably applies to both books, as well as the Pentagon book you are currently working on. What classified documents are you most looking forward to seeing once declassified? And as everyone else has said, thanks for participating in this discussion.
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Tim Weiner
I met Tim Weiner in person..... heard him speak about his book.....very interesting.....
Mike asked: What classified documents are you most looking forward to seeing once declassified?Long list, Mike.
There are hundreds of hours of Nixon tapes waiting to be transcribed. It's been 40 years since the Watergate break-in and we still don't know who ordered the break-in -- or why.
We await tens of thousands of State Department and CIA documents from the 1950's and 1960's that under law should have been declassified a generation ago. We have little idea what the U.S. did to speed the fall of Soviet Communism in the late 1980's and early 1990's. I suspect there was a good deal of covert political warfare, including Trojan Horse industrial cyber-sabotage of the kind that we are now seeing used against Iran's nuclear program.
In short, under law, virtually every classified government document is supposed to be declassified after 25 years. In reality, the declassification machine is running 10 to 15 years behind schedule. This is a huge problem. If we don't know what mistakes we made in the past, we run the risk of repeating them.
Question: what materials did you use to learn about Hoover, particularly his early years?
Bryan, I obtained a unique set of Hoover's files on intelligence operations from 1945 until his death, released under the freedom of information act. The FBI records from Hoover's early years include microfilm records from 1922 onward that are in the National Archives. Another valuable resource was primary records of the American communist movement collected on a website called marxists.org.
Tim wrote: "Bryan, I obtained a unique set of Hoover's files on intelligence operations from 1945 until his death, released under the freedom of information act. The FBI records from Hoover's early years inclu..."Very interesting. How surprised were you about all these mass arrests and raids going on? I'm shaking my head in disbelief.
http://www.marxists.org/index.htm
I learned about the "Palmer Raids" of 1920 in college, as I hope any history major would. (For those of you just opening the book, they are detailed in Chapter Five). Palmer was President Wilson's attorney general, and he was a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1920. The great surprise for me was that the raids are misattributed and misnamed. They rightfully should be known as the Hoover raids.
Tim wrote: "I learned about the "Palmer Raids" of 1920 in college, as I hope any history major would."Yup, and I think I remember hearing about them in high school. (Of course there wasn't nearly as much history to teach way back then.) (heh)
question - Scanning the index I do not see the rather high profile yet secretive John Birch Society. Has the FBI tended to ignore the society over the years because they are foremost against communism or more so because the members stand for fundamental American principles and are not affiliated with criminal activity?
Question:Did you ever see Hoover running for president, and if he did win, how comfortable would he be in such limelight as the presidency?
I don't remember learning about the Palmer raids in High School or college (I got my BA in history, too). But in reading about them I was reminded of how common it is that GA's and DA's prosecute or arrest with re-election or higher office in mind. It's disturbing, but I don't know any way around it.
It is evident that Hoover and his investigative team in the 20th Century were searching all parts of society for links to Communism as well as illegal activities. In 2002 UNC Chapel Hill (labeled “Communist Hill” by Senator Jesse Helms) made national attention through their attempt to list the Quran as mandatory reading for the incoming freshman class. Public lawsuits and protest erupted, but outside the school system the government seemed to shy away from the issue.
Question In general, might Hoover have had concerns regarding the overall curriculum offered in the 21st Century throughout our nation’s publicly funded colleges and universities?
Tim wrote on Page 15, regarding Rose Pastor Stokes conviction under the Espionage act of 1917:"unanimous Supreme Court upheld the ten-year sentence"
I've read in several places that, on further appeal, this was overturned.
Jewish Woman's Archive article by Judith Rosenbaum says:
"Stokes’s conviction was appealed twice before the decision was reversed in March 1920, on the grounds that the charge to the jury was prejudicial against the defendant"
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/s...
Was this overturned? Thanks.
Tim here, catching up on this week's questions:Mark asked if the FBI ignored the John Birch Society in its heyday (the '50's and '60's) because both were staunchly anticommunist.
Yes, but the Birchers' attacks on the policies of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy also were within the realm of protected free speech; they were not law-breakers.
Bryan asked: Did you ever see Hoover running for president? How comfortable would he be in that limelight?
No, I think Hoover saw himself as above politics. He certainly looked down on most politicians!
Mark asked: Would Hoover have had concerns about the curricula in today's publicly funded colleges and universities?
In the 1950's, as we will see, Hoover tried to make sure that the faculties of the nation's colleges and universities were purged of communists and homosexuals. The FBI destroyed more than a few lives and careers in the process.
Brian, if you re-read pp. 14 and 15, you will see that it was the conviction of Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party, that was upheld by the Supreme Court. The Stokes conviction was indeed challenged on appeal and the Justice Department eventually dropped the case.
Tim, once again thanks so much for the insight and information on a fantastic topic!
Tim oops - thanks. Wonder if I can blame comprehension error on difference between reading on Kindle versus had copy.... Probably not.
Just an observation about the early years covered in the first four chapters. There was during those early years extreme social & economic forces at work that are not discussed here. The beginnings of the national labor force movements the early years of the formation of groups to fight racism and other inequalities that were rampant during this time. The founding of the NAACP in 1909. The granting of women the right to vote in 1920. I just wonder what role the FBI played in subverting these organization. It seems from what I have read so far that these organization would have been a high priority for Mr Hoover. Does anyone else have any comments on this.
Clayton, you will see in pages to come that the FBI worked hard to fight the leaders of the NAACP and organized labor from the 1920's onwards. Hoover saw both movements as inspired if not controlled by communism. There is little evidence that Hoover took action against the women's rights movement as a whole, though he was certainly unsympathetic to its aims. The FBI had no women in the ranks of its agents until after he died.
Question: I was impressed by the court case in Boston and the National Popular Government League that tried to swing the "tug of war" back toward civil liberties. How popular was the league and its sympathetic audience against the deportations and raids?
Bryan, the league's brief against the red raids was fairly widely published and it definitely swayed editorial opinions in major newspapers and a good number of members of Congress against the dragnets. The political reaction against the raids surely helped to sink Attorney General Palmer's bid for the 1920 presidential nomination.
Question: Can you tell me where Hoover kept all these files? I imagine there were hundreds and hundreds of them.
Bryan, there were millions of pages by the 1950's. FBI HQ at the Justice Department was the central repository. Field offices kept their own files. It was an empire of paper. And it so remained through the century.
Tim wrote: "Bryan, there were millions of pages by the 1950's. FBI HQ at the Justice Department was the central repository. Field offices kept their own files. It was an empire of paper. And it so remained thr..."I imagine only a few select individuals had access to the repository. Is this correct?
Strictly on a "need to know" basis, and Hoover would decide who needed to know. As I've said, he was the world's greatest bureaucrat. And as we will see, Hoover devised truly brilliant schemes for keeping secrets, including the "Do Not File" files.
But there are no secrets that time will not reveal.
Nathan asked: did the red raids of 1920 teach Hoover any lessons about large-scale FBI actions?They did. Hoover became the Bureau's director in 1924; he served until 1972. He learned that in intelligence operations, secrecy was better than publicity, no matter how fine the headlines.
In the light of the way prisoners are currently treated in American jails, I'm wondering if we have any insight as to how those arrested were treated? I imagine it wasn't as 'comfortable' as it may be these days...?
Tim, I don't know if the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" were as tightly drawn as they seem to be in today's politics. But I'm still curious about something. You make mention of some early challengers of the bureau in chapter 5, including Judge Anderson whom you quote. Back in his day, would he have been considered a liberal or a conservative?
Natacha, no present-day prison is a pleasant place. That said, any jailer who treated inmates in the way that they were treated after the red raids might well be charged cruel and unusual punishment.Lest we forget, quite a few people were rounded up after 9/11 on scant evidence, and many of them faced the same contempt and callous disregard.
Kay, by today's standards Judge Anderson would probably be seen as a liberal. We are indeed more polarized politically than ever.
Tim, in your research, did you feel that there was a legitimate communist threat at any time in the 20's that would have justified any sort of law enforcement scrutiny or was this a truly fringe group in the US who may have contained some radical individualized elements? Being someone who works in a bureaucracy on a daily basis it has been my observation they respond to events by consolidating power and growing larger to support the additional responsibilities. This is not to inpune the motives of those in the organizations, it just seems to be the nature of the beast.
You are right about the nature of the beast. But as you read the book you will see that the beast started growing a brain before World War Two....slowly.Hoover saw Soviet Communism as a mortal threat to the United States from 1920 until the day he died.
He believed -- and this is no metaphor -- that it was like the Spanish Influenza that rose up from the killing fields of World War One, spread around the globe like a toxic cloud, and killed millions.
The Communist Party of the USA was Hoover's target from the day of its foundation. But the US government could only attack them for their words, and their ideology, not their deeds. It was anarchists, not communists, who were planting bombs in Wall Street and Washington.
As you see in ENEMIES, the FBI and the US government could not figure out the differences between the anarchist bombers and the ideologically incendiary communists.
Hoover also could not foresee that the Soviets would establish an underground espionage organization in the US as soon as FDR and the Senate recognized the Soviet government and allowed Stalin to open embassies and consulates in the US in 1933. Where there are embassies, there are spies.
Hoover and the FBI did not grasp what was happening until 1945, and they did not begin to catch up with Soviet espionage until 1950. So the KGB had a long head start on the FBI. By 1945, this was a real threat. Soviet spies stole the secrets of the atomic bomb -- and the nuclear bomb -- and they had penetrated the US government, including the Justice Department and the FBI.
So even paranoids have enemies...which is a central theme of the book.
A note to all you Good Readers: I will be on vacation from June 29 to July 15, far off the grid in Ireland. With permission from our moderators, and keeping the no-spoilers principle in mind, feel free to post questions here on chapters ahead of schedule -- or on big issues raised in the book. Thanks from your obedient servant.
Mod
It would be best for folks to post just questions that deal with whatever week's assignment we are on or questions from previous weeks' assignments and if the questions pile up that is fine until you can rejoin us after July 16th. As you correctly stated, we try to keep the no spoilers principle in mind (smile).
However, big issues that relate to the book and are issues that you raised are fair game. But referring to chapters ahead of the reading schedule might spoil it for some of our slower readers.
Have a great time in Ireland; I love the UK and the British Isles and Ireland very much. I hope this is purely a pleasure trip.
Thank you letting us know your schedule, Tim.
Through the decades I find the relationships between Hoover and the numerous U.S. Attorney General’s to be quite interesting. U.S. Attorneys serving in the field are confirmed by the U.S. Senate and therefore at times politics can also enter into the approval process. Question - At the field level don’t most U.S. Attorneys in the communities maintain good working relationships with FBI agents?
Mark, they have to, or the office fails. FBI agents are the lead investigators for federal crimes. If the prosecutors don't like the cases they bring to present to grand juries, they won't be prosecuted. If the field agents don't trust the prosecutors, justice will not be done.
Question: Hoover agreed with the AG that the information found on any wiretap would not be used in court. However, how could he get arrests without using some information on the wiretap?
Byran, which AG are we talking about here? Over time Hoover played different tunes to different Attorneys General.
Tim wrote: "Byran, which AG are we talking about here? Over time Hoover played different tunes to different Attorneys General."I believe it is Robert Jackson. Jackson was upset that you can't go to trial with the wiretap evidence. It got me thinking how you get the suspect arrested, fruit of the poisonous tree kind of thing.
This story plays out in Chapter 11. Hoover informed Attorney General Jackson in no uncertain terms that Jackson would have American blood on his hands unless the FBI was allowed to keep its unfettered powers to spy on Americans and aliens alike. (We'll see the reprise of this argument taking place in Chapter 45.)Hoover won this battle with the full backing of FDR, who ordered him to keep on wiretapping, the Supreme Court (and the Attorney General) be damned.
Jackson -- later the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg and a great Supreme Court Justice -- was appalled.
If you look at the endnotes for page 88, you will see this extraordinary comment from Bob Jackson's successor as Attorney General, Francis Biddle:
"[FDR's order] opened the door pretty wide to wiretapping anyone suspected of subversive activities. Bob [Jackson] didn't like it much, and, not liking it, turned it over to Hoover without himself passing on each case."
Jackson washed his hands of it. That gave Hoover autonomous power to tap at will -- with or without the Attorney General's knowledge.
Of course, it's true that illegally acquired evidence was useless in an open trial. But as we will see, trials were not always Hoover's goal. The FBI could use the poison fruit in other ways against its enemies.
Makes sense, thanks Tim.
I have a general question, Tim, about communism and socialism as it relates to dictatorships versus democracies. Why do you think Hoover and U.S. administrations since associate communism with dictatorship rather than democracy? While it's true that the there are communist dictatorships--such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Korea--there have been socialist democracies in Europe. Aren't communism and socialism economic systems rather than political types of organization, and why do you think this perception as described above exists? Would a communist democracy be considered an oxymoron?
Cynthia, Hoover's mind was made up about Soviet Communism by 1920. He saw everything connected to communism as part of a global conspiracy against America. His fixations extended to labor unions, the civil rights movement, and antiwar/pacifist groups.Hoover did not see a dime's worth of difference between communism and socialism as it was practiced by political parties in the USA. And by the time he understood the depth of Soviet espionage in America (a slow realization that dawned in the five years after World War Two) he believed that anything and anyone connected to Moscow was part of the plot against America.
Perhaps in some imaginary world there might be a communist democracy. The Book of Acts in the Bible describes such ideals. But I don't believe there ever has been a communist democracy on Earth.
The European Social Democrats opposed the cold war Communist Parties of the USSR and Eastern Europe. Here in the United States (whether the Tea Party likes it or not), our own ideals led us to create Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- all models of socialism in a democractic society.
A representative democracy can withstand elements of socialism. But a communist dictatorship cannot withstand elements of representative democracy.
Communism as practiced in the 20th century was an economic disaster; as a political system, it was fatally flawed as a framework for organizing a government. Today not even Russia or China subscribe to communism as an economic system (the Chinese system has been called "Market Leninism;" the Russians practice oligarchy).
Putin's Russia is closer to a classic fascist ideal. The Chinese Politburo's system of state control today might still owe something to Chairman Mao. But not much. Whether China remains a dictatorship or not will be the most important question of world politics in our lives.
Thank you for this insightful answer to my question, Tim. As you said, there are socialist mechanisms in the United States and elsewhere. I've often wondered whether communism failed in the 20th century because it was practised by authoritarian governments and that it might work differently in a democratic context.
I continue to wonder whether Communism could exist on Earth within the context of a democracy--although it won't occur in our lifetimes.
Tim wrote: "Cynthia, Hoover's mind was made up about Soviet Communism by 1920. He saw everything connected to communism as part of a global conspiracy against America. His fixations extended to labor unions, t..."It’s apparent your former reporting and correspondent qualifications shine on.
Questions:1. Did Hoover know about these home burglary tactics to get names or other pieces of information?
2. Did Hoover say why he opposed the mass detention of Japanese during the war?
Did Hoover know about these home burglary tactics to get names or other pieces of information?Absolutely. He saw it as a necessary and indeed vital technique.
Did Hoover say why he opposed the mass detention of Japanese during the war?
He clearly wanted to quarantine people on the basis of their political ideologies, as opposed to their race or nationalities.
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Russell Baker (other topics)Tim Weiner (other topics)
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