Q&A with Tim

[Bryan]

Thanks, Tim, I guess race and nationality were not as volatile in Hoover's mind. Communism was the great evil.

[Natacha]

I posted the following in the chapters 13-16 section, but thought I'd post it here as well:

I'm curious as to why Chase National bank would want to work in alliance with the German government? What would it stand to gain from such an understanding? Did Chase share in Nazi views?

[Phil]

Question:

On pp. 125-126, you wrote that Donovan's plan for the OSS to set up an office in Moscow and the NKVD to set up an office in Washington would have had, at least according to Donovan, significant advantages in the fight against Hitler. What would these advantages have been? Wouldn't it have been better to set up a liaison office somewhere in Europe, perhaps in Britain, where the OSS, the NKVD, and British intelligence would have been able to work together, and was such an alternative ever proposed?

[Clayton]

I enjoyed reading these chapters on Hoover but I keep feeling that there is something missing. I keep wondering what makes the man capable of such chameleon behavior. He seems to get along with almost anyone no matter what their politics or religion. This is probably the wrong place to post this but was just wondering if anyone has any thoughts as to what religious training Hoover had undergone as a youth if any. Did he have any party affiliation? In what ways was he influenced by his Mother? The animosity between Hoover and Truman was fascinating. What I do not understand is why Truman put up with him. I just keep thinking about how Truman relieved General MacArthur of command without a moments hesitation. I can not imagine Truman being bluffed by Hoover. He must have been serving a very useful purpose to get away with all the stuff he did. It seems that he was almost truly above the law.

[Bryan]

Question: What was Hoover's "American way of life." I believe you mention capitalist, but are there other elements that Hoover held dear and saw the Communists undermining?

[Natacha]

Question: I'm wondering—amidst all that entails tracking down suspected enemies—how and who gets the time to draft the several hundred to thousand-pages long reports that are constantly submitted by Hoover? Given the nature of the reports, I’m deducing they would have to be done by someone in Hoover’s circle in order to ensure secrecy?

[Tim]

Natacha wrote: I'm curious as to why Chase National bank would want to work in alliance with the German government?

It was a highly profitable business conducted at arms length -- and to an outsider it looked like nothing more than a currency exchange. The scheme was halted after the US got into the war.

[Tim]

Phil wrote: On pp. 125-126, you wrote that Donovan's plan for the OSS to set up an office in Moscow and the NKVD to set up an office in Washington would have had, at least according to Donovan, significant advantages in the fight against Hitler. What would these advantages have been?

Realistically, there were few. Donovan, idealistic and impractical as he was, thought that an intelligence liasion could be conducted in a gentlemanly and diplomatic way. He did not grasp that the Soviets saw liaison as penetration. He did not apprehend the essential elemets of counterintelligence.

[Tim]

Clayton wrote: Wondering if anyone has any thoughts as to what religious training Hoover had undergone as a youth if any. Did he have any party affiliation?

Hoover's parents were Scottish Presbyterians. He himself spent more Sundays at the racetrack than in church. Hoover was, clearly, deeply conservative and more comfortable with like-minded presidents. But he served one president at a time.

[Tim]

Bryan wrote: What was Hoover's "American way of life"?

Hoover was born in 1895 in Washington D.C, a segregated and conservative southern city. The Civil War was only 30 years in the past. The way of life he sought to preserve was an Anglo-Saxon and Christian America. Many people feel the same way today.

[Tim]

Natacha wrote: Who gets the time to draft the several hundred to thousand-pages long reports that are constantly submitted by Hoover?

That's what the FBI did at headquarters: write reports. Hoover's FBI was a pyramid of paper.

[Tim]

Good Readers: Keep those questions coming! We are getting into the heart of the book now. Tim

[Clayton]

Tim, how much intelligence gathering was used by the FBI in the early days of the AFL or CIO. Did he have much influence with the President and Congress as to their feelings towards the labor movement in this country. I know that FDR was pro labor but were the other Presidents influenced negatively by Hoover's mania for searching out communist?

[Tim]

Hoover believed from 1920 onward that the labor movement was essentially communist. He was for the bosses, not the rank-and-file. It took him until the late '50 and the early '60's to change his tune, and only when he saw that crooked labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa were racketeers. Hoffa and his ilk served the bosses -- especially mob bosses -- and helped themselves to the working man's pensions funds, rather than serving the workers.

[Rodney]

Tim, in your research was or is there ever a penalty or sanction for always having bad or incomplete information to a President or congressional committee by someone like Hoover or was the fact that he was correct on the threat of communism giving him a pass?

[Tim]

The closest case I can think of offhand came in 1977, when the former Director of Central Intelligence, Richard M. Helms, was fined $2,000 by a federal judge on a charge of "failing to testify fully" before a Senate committee. Helms had been asked flat-out in 1973 if the CIA had backed a coup against the freely elected socialist president of Chile, and Helms falsely denied it. Helms had, on one hand, an oath to testify truthfully; on the other hand he had a oath to keep the CIA's secrets. Hoover deceived Congress often but he died before the political templates shifted during the 1970's. In the Reagan administration, during the 1980's, skillful liars gave false testimony on the Iran-contra imbroglio, and they managed to avoid slammer time, but it was a very close call.

[Natacha]

So I'm a bit confused as to what happened to the Freedom Riders in chapter 28. Did the plan to harm the demonstrators go through as a result of Hoover's refusal to protect them?

[Tim]

It did. The bus was firebombed and the Freedom Riders, reporters, and Justice Department officers were assaulted by the Klan and their henchmen.

[Mark]

Question Do you feel that Hoover fully bought into the “Domino Theory” regarding Communism and Vietnam? It appears to me that in this instance he might have taken a bit of a backseat to presidents and the DOD, who were actively leading the charge and pushing for involvement.

[Jason]

I have a few questions for you:

(1)Tim, I was wondering if you could outline what an FBI file looks like. Do they keep only information that seems pertinent or is just a sprawling log of daily activities, conversations, etc. for a person of interest? Doting on the idea of this massive collection of information, how much of a garbled mass was the bureau's information system before and after the digital age computerized everything? I suppose what i mean is: have they adapted to the times in organizing all their information and becoming technologically adept (taking into account how behind the times they have been in the computer world)?

So that's question one. Question two deals with Hoover's alchemy in turning every agitated or unseemly minority into a Communist. How valid do you think Hoover's assessment of MLK as Communist (all associations with Davison taken into account)? And also Hoover's index on homosexuals: Hoover throws together a correlation between the conspiracy that communists and homosexuals conduct, acting out their lives in private against the projected societal norms. Do you think it was an ailing in his judgment system that aided him in popularity that he called every fringe characteristic a mark of Communism, or do you think his judgments were sound? Specifically, with homosexuals?

[Jason]

Also, I can imagine that if JEH was alive today he would be at your neck. Do you think so? Are you paranoid about your status in the intelligence community? Do you believe they have a file on you?

[Tim]

Mark asked: Do you feel that Hoover fully bought into the “Domino Theory” regarding Communism and Vietnam? It appears to me that in this instance he might have taken a bit of a backseat to presidents and the DOD.

Hoover, from 1920 onward, saw Soviet Communism as a deadly virus that had to be quarantined lest it infect and kill American democracy. Hoover was no military strategist; he certainly deferred to Eisenhower's judgment on such questions. He agreed with Ike -- as did most American leaders of the era -- on the dubious and now disproven domino theory.

[Tim]

Jason asked: What does an FBI file looks like? Have they organized their information and become technologically adept? Do they keep only information that seems pertinent or is it just a sprawling log?

Sprawling log is closer to the mark. An FBI file on a criminal or an intelligence target can contain all manner of uncorroborated hearsay and third-hand rumor. That is why the release of "raw" FBI files can be so damaging to a decent person's reputation. The FBI is still struggling to master information technology; it has wasted billions on systems that don't work.

[Tim]

Jason also asked: Why was Hoover so quick to see communism as the evil agency behind the struggle for civil rights (including rights of blacks, gays, and other minorities)?

This may be only an educated guess, but Hoover saw communism as Evil with a capital E...a dark and satanic force, the devil in disguise. Therefore every political movement that threatened the established order of White Anglo-Saxon Christian American and its Puritan heritage was a manifestation of communism.

[Tim]

Jason also asked: I can imagine that if JEH was alive today he would be at your neck. Are you paranoid about your status in the intelligence community? Do you believe they have a file on you?

I am not paranoid at all (though I acknowledge that even paranoids have enemies). I know there are at least several FBI files on so-called "leak investigations" into stories I wrote while covering secret intelligence and military programs for The New York Times. I also know that very little usually comes from leak investigations.

[Jason]

I would like to get your opinion on social network sites like this one, but especially facebook. What do you think of these catalogues of our personal inventory? do you feel that it is foolish for people to lay their lives down so nakedly, for the sake of privacy and the ability to withhold potentially vulnerable, or politically damaging insights about themselves?

Or do you think that creating public profiles will reshape the ways in which we carry ourselves (being less inclined to have secrets), essentially upsetting the ways in which Hoover orchestrated things: intimidation people with their secrets, like he did Kennedy, MLK, or Adlai Stephenson--and so many more!

[Bryan]

Question: Could you go into a little more detail about Hoover and the Warren Commission and why he had trouble with it. Was it because it showed the FBI in a bad light, since the bureau missing Oswald's recent activities.

[Rodney]

Tim I was amazed by the knowledge that an FBI informant was in a car that pulled up and murdered two people. Do you know if there have been other incidents such as that and in today's world do you feel that being an informant would have saved this person from prosecution?

[Natacha]

In chapters 29-32, there is a definite focus on MLK's activities. Although Malcolm X had violent tendencies, I wonder if he was perceived as a lesser threat than MLK?

[Tim]

Bryan wrote: "Could you go into a little more detail about Hoover and the Warren Commission and why he had trouble with it. Was it because it showed the FBI in a bad light?"

Bryan, Hoover knew that a deep investigation as to why the FBI failed to track Oswald after he re-entered the US would reveal, as he wrote, "gross incompetency" by the Bureau. Hoover was not having any of that.

[Tim]

Rodney wrote: "I was amazed by the knowledge that an FBI informant was in a car that pulled up and murdered two people. Do you know if there have been other incidents such as that?"

FBI undercover informants -- when the operations work as planned -- can prevent terrorist attacks before they happen. But they too rarely go as planned. Later in ENEMIES you will see what happened in the case of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

[Tim]

Natacha wrote: "In chapters 29-32, there is a definite focus on MLK's activities. Although Malcolm X had violent tendencies, I wonder if he was perceived as a lesser threat than MLK?"

Hoover thought Dr. King was the most dangerous man in America precisely because his Ghandian tactics of nonviolence gained him national and global acclaim. Malcom X only became dangerous to the established order when he too embraced nonviolence. He was assassinated (by the Nation of Islam's thugs) not long after.

[Bryan]

Thanks Tim. Why didn't Congress investigate FBI techniques during the late 60s.when some of the court cases came out.

[Tim]

Congress did not get the spine to investigate the FBI until after Hoover died and Nixon fell. The Congress of 1974 was probably the most liberal in history; the Watergate cases led directly to investigations of the FBI and the CIA by the Church Committee in 1975.

[Bryan]

Tim wrote: "Congress did not get the spine to investigate the FBI until after Hoover died and Nixon fell. The Congress of 1974 was probably the most liberal in history; the Watergate cases led directly to inve..."

Thanks, Tim. It shows you how influential Hoover was in Congress, too, not just on the president.

[G]

It is difficult to be objective when you have lived through something as monumental as the downfall of the leader of the free world and the organization that gave him power, but do you think the people who brought this about had a choice, no matter the consequences as seen from the future? I am not suggesting decisions were made that were for the 'greater good' - certainly self-aggrandizement was involved - but these were not ignorant people. They knew what they were doing. I just finished chapter 36 so this is my frame of reference.

[Phil]

Questions: When Hoover died, why was Gray appointed acting director of the FBI, rather than Felt? Was it because Nixon thought he could control Gray? Did he not regard Gray's lack of qualifications as a potential source of problems? I would have thought it obvious that only an FBI veteran would be able to fill Hoover's shoes, even if only on an interim basis.

[Tim]

G wrote: "It is difficult to be objective when you have lived through something as monumental as the downfall of the leader of the free world, but do you think the people who brought this about had a choice, no matter the consequences as seen from the future?"

As Nixon said the night before he fled Washington: "I gave them a sword." He had obstructed justice, suborned perjury, and run the White House as if it were a racketeering organization. Had he toughed it out, had he not fled, he would have been impeached and, conceivably, indicted, tried, convicted and imprisoned on many feloncy counts. His flight allowed President Ford to pardon him for any and all crimes against the United States.

[Tim]

Phil asked: When Hoover died, why was Gray appointed acting director of the FBI, rather than Felt?

Nixon saw Gray -- with reason -- as a puppet, a stooge, a lackey who would do anything the President commanded. Tragically, Nixon was right.

[Bryan]

Thank you Tim, great responses. And to let Gray's nomination go under was a sad event, quite vindictive.

[Bryan]

Question:When Kelley closed most of the intelligence investigations, do you have a sense that the non-subversive American cases were shut down, as well? Were their legitimate cases going on that fell victim, like counter-terrorism?

[Clayton]

Another thought that comes to mind is did the FBI use sources such as the Southern Poverty Law Center to help in any way to fight domestic terrorist?

[Tim]

Bryan asked: When Kelley closed most of the intelligence investigations, were there legitimate cases going on that fell victim, like counter-terrorism?

You bet there were. We are soon going to see counter-intelligence and counter-intelligence fall victim to a sense of fear inside the FBI that agents would go to jail for the tactics used up through the Nixon era.

[Tim]

Clayton asked: Did the FBI use sources such as the Southern Poverty Law Center to help in any way to fight domestic terrorists?

There were few such resources (outside the FBI's old nemesis, the ACLU) back then. The idea of "domestic" or home-grown terrorism vanished from the FBI's radar screen in the 1970's...until groups like Aryan Nations and The Order started surfacing in the mid-1980's.

[G]

Not very weighty, but where is or was Mikes Tavern? (p333)

And with regard to the FALN what resources did the FBI have (other than shoe leather) to track them? Especially given the crackdown by the Supreme Court on illegal wiretapping. They were exceptionally successful and I assume it was because of a confluence of anger at the governments invasion of privacy at that point and the lack of technology to track insurgency.

[Bryan]

Question: Why did Reagan pardon Felt and Miller?

[Tim]

Bryan asked: Why did Reagan pardon Felt and Miller?

In the name of national security, to protect the FBI from embarrassment, and to revive the Nixonian principle that "if the President does it, that means it is not illegal."

[Tim]

G asked: Where was Mike's Tavern? And with regard to the FALN what resources did the FBI have (other than shoe leather) to track them?

Mike's was a police bar in Chicago. And the FBI got a Federal judge's approval for court-authorized surveillance of FALN suspects.

[Craig]

Question: Anyway we can get a film review from you? Have you seen Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar and if so, care to offer a review for us?

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Tim, I think that Craig probably is asking about the authenticity of the film in terms of the character of J. Edgar and whether you feel that the portrayal was accurate. As most films go, most of them really are stretched for entertainment value.

You do not have to feel obligated to comment on the film or give a review; since the purpose of these threads is to discuss your book.