1 Quoted in Demaris, Ovid, The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover viii (New York: Harpers Magazine Press, 1975) (“Demaris, The Director”).Google Scholar

2 Quoted in id. at 130.Google Scholar

3 Quoted in id. at 225.Google Scholar

4 Id. at vii.Google Scholar

5 Powers at ix. As he also points out, however, FBI employees, such as James K. Hall of the Records Management Division of the Freedom of Information Act-Privacy Act Section, and Susan Falb, the Bureau's in-house historian, are extremely helpful to scholars. The present-day FBI does not appear to be deliberately raising obstacles to research on the Hoover era. Powers at ix.Google Scholar

6 Demaris, The Director at vii.Google Scholar

7 See, e. g., Watters, Pat & Gillers, Stephen, eds., Investigating the FBI (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1973); Garrow, David J., The FBI and King, Martin Luther, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: Penguin Books, 1983); Donner, Frank J., The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) (“Donner, The Age of Surveillance”); Sanford J. Ungar, FBI (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1976); Athan G. Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978); id., “The FBI's Stretching of Presidential Directives, 1936–1953,” 91 Pol. Sci. Q. 649 (1976–77); id., “The Truman Administration and the Decline of Civil Liberties: The FBI's Success in Securing Authorization for a Preventive Detention Program,” 64 J. Am. Hist. 1010 (1978); id., “The Presidency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation: The Conflict of Intelligence and Legality,” 2 Crim. Just. Hist. 131 (1980); id., “FBI Surveillance During the Cold War Years: A Constitutional Crisis,” 3 Pub. Hist. 4 (1981); Kenneth O'Reilly, “The FBI and the Origins of McCarthyism,” 45 Historian 372 (1983); David Williams, “The Bureau of Investigation and Its Critics, 1919–1921: The Origins of Federal Political Surveillance,” 68 J. Am. Hist. 560 (1971); Michal R. Belknap, “Uncooperative Federalism: The Failure of the Bureau of Investigation's Intergovernmental Attack on Radicalism,” 12 Publius 25 (1982); and the essays by Percival R. Bailey, Sigmund Diamond, Kenneth Waltzer, Athan G. Theoharis, and Kenneth O' Reilly in Athan G. Theoharis, ed., Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress and the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). For a review of all of the literature on the FBI that had appeared down to the time of its publication, see Michal R. Belknap, “Above the Law and Beyond Its Reach: O'Reilly and Theoharis on FBI Intelligence Operations,” 1985 A. B. F. Research J. 201 (“Belknap, Above the Law”).Google Scholar

8 See, e. g., Kenneth O' Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983) (“O'Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans”); id., “A New Deal for the FBI: The Roosevelt Administration, Crime Control and National Security,” 69 J. Am. Hist. 638 (1982); John F. Bratzen & Leslie Rout, Jr., “Pearl Harbor Microdots and J. Edgar Hoover,” 87 Am. Hist. Rev. 1346 (1982); Michal R. Belknap, “The Mechanics of Repression: J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau of Investigation and the Radicals, 1917–1925,” 7 Crime & Soc. Just. 49 (1977).Google Scholar

9 Many of these abuses were revealed by the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI, which stole a thousand documents from a resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, and released them to the press. Others came from former agent Robert Wall. Also helping to focus attention on FBI abuses was a conference held at Princeton University on Oct. 29–30, 1971, in which scholars, writers, civil libertarians, and former Justice Department officials critical of the Bureau participated. See, O'Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans 217–22, 225 (cited in note 8); Belknap, Above the Law at 202–3 (cited in note 7).Google Scholar

10 Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1972.Google Scholar

11 New York: David McKay Co., 1972.Google Scholar

12 Id. at iii, 1, 7, 254–55, and passim. Google Scholar

13 Id. at 1.Google Scholar

14 Rochelle, New, N. Y.: Arlington House, 1973.Google Scholar

15 Id. at 5–14.Google Scholar

16 Id. at 15–16.Google Scholar

17 Id. at 377.Google Scholar

18 Cited in note 1.Google Scholar

19 Id. at vii.Google Scholar

20 Id. at ix.Google Scholar

21 Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.Google Scholar

22 Theoharis served as a consultant to the Senate's Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (better known as the Church Committee). In that capacity, he helped to assemble the massive documentary record of FBI abuses which that committee published. For a list of his own more important publications criticizing the Bureau, see note 7 supra.Google Scholar

23 At 375–83, 467–72. Perceiving that Sullivan was trying to undermine his authority, Hoover forced him into early retirement.Google Scholar

24 Their explanation of the Justice Department's decision to seek the indictments in this case (which was known as Dennis v. United States, 341 U. S. 494 [1951], when it reached the Supreme Court), differs significantly from that presented by this reviewer, who attributed it in a 1977 book to the sensitivity of the Democratic Truman administration to Republican charges that it was soft on Communism. Michal R. Belknap, Cold War Political Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party and American Civil Liberties 44–53 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). That account, however, was written without access to FBI files. Cox and Theoharis rely instead on Peter L. Steinberg, The Great Red Menace: The United States Prosecution of American Communists 1947–1952, at 95–111 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), which does utilize such material (Theoharis & Cox at 460 n.44). While Steinberg provides support for their version of how and why the prosecutions were initiated, their version represents a fairly expansive interpretation of his evidence.Google Scholar

25 Powers expresses similar views, at least with respect to the situation at the end of Hoover's career. By then, he says, “Hoover's iron discipline had turned the Bureau into an echo chamber…. The assistants on whom he depended for information about the world fed him reports designed to anticipate and reinforce his increasingly rigid fixations and obsessions.” Powers at 380.Google Scholar

26 Quoted in Demaris, The Director 133 (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

27 For a particularly good discussion of the role of the Crime Records Division as a propaganda and publicity agency, see O'Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans 76–82 (cited in note 8).Google Scholar

28 Demaris, The Director 330 (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

29 In 1945 hundreds of classified Navy, State Department, and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) documents were discovered in the New York offices of Amerasia, a periodical specializing in Far Eastern affairs. Six suspects, including the editor of Amerasia, Philip Jaffe, and Foreign Service Officer John Stewart Service, were arrested on espionage charges. The government could not develop sufficient evidence to obtain indictments for that offense, but a federal grand jury did charge Jaffee and two other men with unauthorized possession of government documents. The Justice Department dropped the case against one of these individuals, and entered into plea bargains under which the other two paid modest fines after one suspect learned that the FBI had broken into his apartment. The Bureau had also illegally broken into the apartment of another suspect, tapped the phones of two more, and broken into, bugged, and tapped the offices of Amerasia itself. Theoharis and Cox at 239–42.Google Scholar

30 When Ovid Demaris asked him if Hoover was sincere about the threat posed by the Communist Party, Sullivan replied: “No, of course he wasn't sincere. He knew the Party didn't amount to a damn. But he used the Party as an instrument to get appropriations from Congress.”The Director at 167 (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

31 Among the “invaluable guides to the files” noted by Powers in his essay on sources are “the brilliant investigations of Athan Theoharis [and his student] Kenneth O'Reilly.” Powers at 592.Google Scholar

32 Powers interviewed many of the same people to whom the authors of The Boss talked, but he interviewed a substantial number of them only by telephone.Google Scholar

33 This allegation concerns the ABC television series, “The FBI,” which went on the air in 1965. Without citing any source for this information, Theoharis and Cox report, “Hoover closely monitored the development of the series, vetoing the rumored consideration of Hollywood star Rock Hudson to play an agent because of reports of Hudson's homosexuality” (at 208).Google Scholar

34 As Powers explains, after his conversion, “Hoover directed massive investigations of racial violence in the South and forestalled more violence by disrupting and eventually destroying the South's network of murderous Klans” (at 407). For two explanations of the Director's transformation, see Kenneth O'Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI's Secret File on Black America 160–76 (New York: Free Press, 1989), and Michal R. Belknap, Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South 152–58 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). For further information on the FBI and civil rights, see Kenneth O'Reilly, “The FBI and the Civil Rights Movement During the Kennedy Years,” 54 J. So. Hist. 201 (1988).Google Scholar

35 Compare Powers at 402–3 with Theoharis & Cox at 367–95.Google Scholar

36 Morgan, Richard E., Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent in America 6–7 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Donner, The Age of Surveillance, 241–352 (cited in note 7).Google Scholar

37 See Marro, Anthony, “FBI Break-in Policy,” in Athan G. Theoharis, ed., Beyond the Hiss Case 78 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement 181–349 (Boston: South End Press, 1988).Google Scholar