The real bureau-cracy:

...The most hopeful thing about the new administration is Candidate Reagan's repudiation of military conscription...

...FRANK GETLEINN...

...Perhaps he will move on to get the FBI back within the law...

...The law-enforcement officers were, in fact, law-breakers, and it is little comfort to law-abiding citizens when present-day officers and spokesmen for the Bureau assure us that those practices are no longer indulged in...

...the understanding from the point of view of John Dean was that Gray was to withhold such evidence...

...If Gray was set up, it wouldn't be the first time...

...A new administration is now preparing to take office...

...It is not only possible but highly likely that Gray was really unaware of what his recently convicted agents were doing...

...Among these cheering citizens, it seems, are many of the supporters and spokesmen of the new administration if not its leaders...

...It continues to be reasonable prudence when the schemes turn out to cost twice or three times as much as announced, when the costly devices fail to work at all, and when, if they do work, they are found to be obsolete as soon as the last cost overrun is paid to the last company represented by the last general or admiral recently retired from military procurement...

...the understanding from the point of Gray, according to Dean, was that Gray was to destroy them and, according to Dean, Gray did so...

...The instant reaction of the Nixonites was first to make Gray a patsy by passing him documents taken from Howard Hunt's White House safe so that White House people could say, only lying a little bit, that they had turned the material over to the FBI...

...Perhaps they aren't...

...Yet, by the most skillful lobbying in the history of the Republic and at the same time the most skillful manipulation of the press except possibly that by Joe McCarthy and Salvador Dali, the FBI has long been regarded by most Americans as a collection of heroes defending the nation against its enemies foreign and domestic...

...You don't think of the FBI but that is exactly how the Bureau has been operating almost from its inception, certainly from an early period in Hoover's long reign...

...One would think that government could hardly be more "on the backs" of the people than when illegally breaking and entering, destroying evidence of criminal acts, wire-tapping and in general carrying on as has the FBI these many decades...

...If government, on the other hand, breaks laws on the books by burglarizing citizens' homes and offices, by installing illegal wire-taps on their telephones, that is not government on the backs of the people, it is reasonable prudence...

...When you think of secret police, you think of the Russians, under both the Czars and the Commissars, of the Viennese under Henry Kissinger's beau ideal, Metternich, of the Gestapo, of the Fascists in Italy and Franco's Spain...

...which, to any normal mind, is government on the backs of the people par excellence...

...All the same, Gray did, on the unchallenged record of several Nixon crooks, destroy physical evidence of crime and therefore obstruct justice, and of these obvious criminal acts there has never been so much as a whisper from the Justice Department...

...Today, many Americans of presumed good will cheer on the malefactors...

...It's curious...

...Both cases are highly complicated, much more so than can appear in such a brief summary as that above...

...Actually, if the Bill of Rights is to be taken at all seriously, the FBI has itself been one of the prime enemies of the Republic...

...But there cannot be a bribe-taker without a bribe-giver...

...That sort of illegal breaking and entering, stealing and electronic eavesdropping, with no warrant, hence no presentment of reasonable suspicion of crime going forward before any objective, professional, outside authority, such as a judge, had been practiced for years by the Bureau...

...Also, the present Bureau, by its own boast, has become the leading bribe-giver in the country, or at least the leading profferer of bribes to public officials, namely the targeted Congressmen who have been enduring electoral defeat, forced resignations, indictments, convictions, and sentences, all at the hands of an FBI suddenly gone into the business of bribing public officials...

...If the Declaration of Independence is to be taken seriously, the FBI has systematically engaged in many of the specific acts and at large exhibited the same sort of spirit that, when the British did the same in the eighteenth century, Americans of good will rallied to throw off the yoke...

...If Congressmen are to be tried for accepting bribes, should not the FBI, starting with the director who authorized the whole Abscam test of virtue be likewise tried for giving bribes...

...From the point of view of the FBI, Seberg's crime was sympathy toward the Black Panthers and similar groups...

...The Gray case appears to be subject to two broad interpretations: either he had been set up by the Justice Departmentwhich he himself claimsas a kind of after-the-fact patsy for Bureau practice over many years...

...The Nixonians lived up to their colors, after having thus traduced the nation's leading law enforcement officer and after he had obstructed justice at their behest, by letting him, in the sensitive words of chief thug Haldeman, hang slowly, slowly, twisting in the wind...

...In contrast, for government to install and advocate die most expensive and improbable military schemes to thwart the dread Russians, that is not trying to solve problems by throwing money at them, but, again, reasonable prudence...

...There is an odd philosophical torque here, one as far as I know only really addressed by such fringe figures as Eugene McCarthy and the Libertarians...

...It seems reasonable, but then reason never has been the dominant mode with which the American people have viewed the FBI...

...Second, a few days later, the Justice Department announced that it would probably drop the pending suit against former Acting Director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, Jr., on the grounds of having illegally authorized the illegal entries and other acts, against citizens by FBI agents duly tried, convicted, and sentenced for those acts...

...or, the Department backed down out of sheer awe at going after a Bureau Director, even an acting one...

...It is impossible to read the various crook book accounts of all this and not feel a certain sympathy for Gray, who obviously walked into the robbers' roost that the Nixon administration had become rather like Harold Lloyd arriving to claim his inheritance, a south side of Chicago bootlegging gang, in a movie so old even I don't remember the name...

...Seberg had lost a baby at birth and, according to an almost universally believed story among show business people and others interested, been driven to suicide by rumors circulated by the FBI that the child was that of a black activist with whom Seberg had been friendly...

...It was Gray's fate to arrive on the Bureau's scene as nominated successor to the sainted J. Edgar Hoover just as Watergate was crashing through the breakwaters of the Nixon administration...

...It is a group that has won its victory in part, it is widely thought, because of the popularity of its appeal to get government off the backs of the people...

...This indeed is the ultimate triumph of J. Edgar...

...FRANK GETLEINaw...

...The torque extends to fiscal matters...

...The poor man had, at the outset at least, no notion of the double-dyed villainy of the people he was not merely thrown among but asked to respect as his legally constituted superior officer and that officer's highest agents...

...First, Romain Gary, the French novelist, killed himself after a long period of brooding despair following the self-destruction of his former wife, Jean Seberg, the actress...

...If government attempts to compel a factory-owner to observe elementary precautions for the safety of his workers, that is government on the backs of the people...

...Government on the backs of the people is interpreted, through this torque, as a concept solely to be found embodied in government actions to protect the people from the depredations of business and industry, particularly the poisoning of the water and the air by business and industry and the Selling of products under misrepresentations of various kinds...

...On the other hand, when by universal admission they were indulged in, assuredly no one at or near the Bureau was admitting it and if the question ever came up everyone was denying it as everyone is today...

...For government to give or sell, actually food stamps to poor families is trying to solve problems by throwing money at them...