WAHINGTON REPORT: Closing the Bureau Drawer

...The FBI ought to be a prime target, number one on the list, to parcel out to the states, perhaps with a data bank kept on here as a tool of the state bureaus, perhaps not, depending on how uppity it got...

...Granted all that, do we still need the FBI...

...Underneath it all, apparently, good old J. Edgar had a lot in common with Jimmy Hoffa...

...The building on Pennsylvania Avenue, of course, is unfortunate...

...The FBI has been apparently burglarizing itself as well as the Socialists, thus cashing in the honest-government insurance policy it was created to provide...

...Palmer did not quite invent the Red Scare, but he was certainly the first American politician to try to parlay it into the presidency...

...The question has been asked about the CIA and the answer at the moment seems to be, yes, we still can, at least for a little bit...

...J. Edgar got his start working for Wilson's Attorney-General, A. Mitchell Palmer...

...namely, when somebody tells you he is a rip-snorting anti-Communist out to save you from the dread peril of the godless atheists, put your hand on your wallet...

...Even though he never will serve time for crime, Richard Nixon, of course, takes the prize in the field: by far the most successful practitioner of anti-Communism as political snake-oil, by far the most ambitious and, on balance, most successful anti-Communist looter of public till, grifter off the private gull...

...With all that background-we have touched above on only a few random highlights-it is heartening rather than the reverse to learn that in all probability the super-agents at the FBI have been leeching off the ordinary agents, looting the welfare funds just like any old-style union gangster...

...It looks like a prison and a tough one, too...

...The big political word these days, in both parties, is decentralization, giving more of the government back to the states...

...Castro, after all, had committed the ideological sin of closing the U.S...

...Thanks to the assiduous teachings of Dr...

...This makes things easier all around...

...We'd be in a police state is what we'd be in...

...We know the gag-lines and how the story turns out...

...FRANK GETLEIN...

...His bureau used computers, of course, but if the old maniac had been brought up on computers, understood them the way he did baseball and horse-racing, say, we'd be in trouble...

...free enterprises of brothels and casinos in Havana...

...It has performed its historic task, given us a lot of laughs over the years, but we don't really have to watch that number all over again...

...At least for now...

...If all those anti-Communists were crooks, it would have required an Einstein of sociology to explain why the nation's oldest established institution of anti-Communism wasn't crooked, too...

...After all, Howard Hunt, in training to be a CIA burglar against the United States Constitution, did, at least, do something or other against the dread Castro...

...It is a distinguished roster, when you think of it...

...That's fair enough...

...Is nothing sacred...

...We really can't afford another J. Edgar...

...As a memory of the FBI, we might rename it for the man who made it all possible by making the bureau the communion of saints we so astoundingly thought it: John Dillinger...

...With all the sociological studies and surveys going on in this country, most of them at government expense one way or another, it is astounding that somebody hasn't at least applied for a grant to figure out why it is that the cause of anti-Communism attracts so many crooks...

...Probably not...

...The idea was that the bureau would be above political influence: in a sense it was, of course, the influence all working the other way...

...The real estate deals alone showed a class you don't get in J. Parnell Thomas...

...As a nation, we no longer think the Blue Cross is a Communist conspiracy...

...Poor old J. Parnell Thomas and Tom Dodd, whose finest hour was being considered, inexplicably, for Lyndon Johnson's running mate in 1964, raised their voices against the Red Peril, lowered their fingers into the till, got caught at it, had up for it and punished, Parnell to the pokey, Dodd to reprimand by his peers in the Senate and retirement in a kind of gentle disgrace...

...Joe McCarthy should lead the list, not merely because of all those wildly false charges, but even more because of his shady dealings in sugar and the now-forgotten Lustron House...

...or, one of several remaining mathematical alternatives, why so many folk who begin as anti-Communists end up in jail...

...Politicians can even advocate an adequate health insurance plan without being denounced as agents of the Kremlin...

...At any rate, all these strands have now been wound up...

...Dodd's great contribution to the social phenomenon of anti-Communism as embezzlement was a word: he described what he had been up to as a "commingling" of funds, conjuring images of the Missouri entering the Big Muddy, Julia Child running up a cassolette, anything, in fact, except pocketing the pilferage and sidling out the door...

...Short of a direct nuclear hit, there doesn't seem much to be done...

...Why not pack it in...

...or, contrariwise, why the cause of crookedness attracts so many anti-Communists...

...We get such a kick out of the vision of "our guys," as we rather naively think of them, outwitting "their guys," in the purlieus of Berlin, Lisbon, Havana, Vienna, Istanbul and Constantinople that the rather more realistic vision of Richard Helms hunched over his little tea-kettle steaming open Bella Abzug's letter to her constituents is a small price to pay...

...What has been true about the majority of individual anti-Communist legislators, orators, what you will, is now revealed as apparently true about the premier anti-Communist institution in the country...

...He didn't make it, but he set the precedent to be followed by many others, finally fulfilled by Nixon...

...While the CIA was doing the dirty on Bella's mailings and similar matters, the FBI was inventing conspiracies against Kissinger among others, operating a burglary ring against the Socialists and, most telling of all, conducting a financial rip-off against its own agents...

...Alleged, alleged, alleged, of course, and everyone's innocent until proven guilty, a precept the FBI would be more convincing invoking now had the bureau ever remotely honored it in its PR treatment of hundreds of authentic criminals, imaginary conspirators and people guilty of having social ideas in advance of those of J. Edgar Hoover, which didn't take an awful lot of advancing to be...

...Somehow, it all fits in with everything we know about anti-Communism in America...

...The reason it is good to find out that the G in G-Man stands for Gimmee is that it completes the pattern, shows there is order in the universe and life has a meaning...

...Kissinger even the likes of Jerry Ford can recognize what the rest of us get from the front page, that there is no such thing as "Communism": there's a whole bunch of them...

...Incidentally, the whole fashionable notion of "Sun Belt" politics takes on a different shade of sunlight when you remember that our Sun Belt has its terminals in Key Biscayne and San Clemente...

...Palmer's anti-Communist drive for the presidency has been completed by Nixon, will almost certainly never be attempted again...

...The cream of the jest about the FBI these days is the internal rip-off, the charge-alleged certainly not yet proven,-that high-ranking officials were stealing money from low-ranking agents in the golden age of J. Edgar, who selected the high-rankers and told them good hunting...

...The new development also completes the inner pattern of the FBI itself...

...Interior arrangements might need change, but in spirit, certainly, the J. Edgar Hoover building is perfect for the purpose...

...On the other hand, nearby Fairfax County is threatening to make the District government get its prison for young people, Lorton Reformatory, out of the County...

...Hoover, having organized Palmer's raids against radicals-and incidentally against the Constitution-was tapped for the FBI when it was created in the wake of the scandals of the Harding administration...