Is there a Nobel Prize for peephole journalism?:

...LAWRENCE D. HOGAN THIS MONTH Lech Walesa will receive the Nobel Prize for Peace in absentia, fearful that a personal acceptance would lead to his exile from his native land...

...Of course, the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Jerzy Urban long ago turned a deaf ear to that kind of talk-and turned on to "peephole journalism" and to "the stuff that's beyond the pale...

...Perhaps the best commentry on the sort of activity that is an accepted part of the Polish government's modus operandi comes from a person better known for his story-telling skills than for his critiques of gossips, snoops, and character assassins...

...Joseph Stalin is reported to have scornfuly commented when warned about the depth of religious feeling among the peoples he was forcing into his empire...

...You had a father...

...Circumstances may change, but in our modern technologically proficient world the techniques of character assassination remain the same...

...suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it to you proof in hand...

...Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Indeed, from the quantity and detail of information," Anderson wrote, "we expect there was as much voyeurism as sleuthing involved in the investigations...

...Stephen Oates, King's most recent biographer, writing with access to FBI records, tells us that Hoover became so exercized over King's Nobel award that the long standing FBI surveillance dating back well before the awarding of the prize was turned into "an intense crusade to depose and denigrate King under the excuse of protecting national security...

...One can't help but think about a similar sentiment expressed in another context by one of Urban's heroes...

...He was apparently taken aback by the honor conferred on a man he recently dismissed as "not a political problem, a person who has rather less followers than he used to...

...Eugene Patterson and the southern segregationist editor had it right...

...In addition to using vast electronic and counterespionage activities, which treated King as though he were a Russian agent, Hoover and his men expanded their scurrilous monograph on King compiled the year before...

...News stories reaching the West in the wake of the Nobel award reported that Polish authorities had attempted to circulate versions of the most recent tape in the past...

...The letter, privately printed in Sydney, Australia on February 25, 1890, and then distributed throughout the world, ended with the following charge to the Rev...

...Hyde...

...accusations of sexual escapades...

...I will try once again to make it clearer...

...Inflamed with righteous anger, Stevenson, who had recently visited Molokai and had come to know Damien in all that priest's defects and strengths, and to prize, in spite of all its shortcomings, Damien's courageous and effective work with the shunned lepers, took pen in hand to answer the good reverend...

...Polish authorities have institutionalized peephole journalism, and routinely try to peddle stuff that is beyond the pale...

...Oates notes the status of that crusade one year after the world corn-unity, through the Nobel, honored the Atlanta minister for his singular work...

...Official gossips haven't got it so easy in this country...

...It is unlikely that the Polish media will make similar judgments about the unholy hounding of Walesa...

...Worse, it contained lurid information culled from the bugs FBI agents had planted in King's hotel rooms that year...

...I am not making too high an estimate of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance...

...Its silence about the true nature of its government's activities is simply an expected product of the system it serves...

...I will suppose that, in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he who was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath-he who was so much a better man than either you or me, who did what we have never dreamed of-he too tasted of our common frailty...

...Reports last year noted a similar government effort focusing on charges of "sexual escapades," with the evidence again coming from surreptitious recording of private conversations...

...The bureau's ever-widening electronic dragnet had snared King in some compromising situations...

...The revised edition not only belabored the old Communist charge, but accused King of directing SCLC funds into private bank accounts in Switzerland...

...Hell," one of them told Patterson, "I wouldn't print that stuff...

...that you would feel the tale of fraility the more keenly since it shamed the author of your days...

...For just as Lech Walesa has incurred the enmity of those in his government who claim to be the true voice of the Polish people speaking in defense of the best ideals of the nation, so too did Martin Luther King face the hounding of government character assassins who claimed for themselves the righteous mantle of defenders of all that is best in the American national character...

...A similar reaction came from several southern segregationist editors approached by the FBI...

...But I fear," Stevenson wrote, you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow men...

...History repeats itself...

...O Iago, the pity of it.' The least tender should be moved to tears...

...The ingredients are easy to identify-surreptitious taping by authorities...

...Hyde had helped halt a plan to erect a tablet in honor of Father Damien, the famous leper priest of Molokai...

...I will suppose that Damien [read King, or Walesa] faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty...

...and that the last thing you would do would be to publish it in the religious press...

...charges of secreting public funds abroad in foreign bank accounts and of conspiring with enemies of the nation...

...Even while King was delivering his eloquent speech in Stockholm accepting the Nobel that he, like Walesa, richly earned, the hounds of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, under the guise of protecting national security, were sneakily collecting on tape, through a concerted bugging effort, evidence of "indiscretions" and "sexual escapades" that were to be used to discredit the civil rights leader and his movement in the eyes and hearts of the American people...

...The tape recording has the labor leader talking about a million dollars he has sent abroad, with the help of Vatican officials, for his own personal use...

...To spread his lies all that Jerzy Urban, the official spokesman for his government, has to do is to request time on television and in the press...

...Well the man who tried to do what Danien did, is my father, and the father of all who love goodness...

...After all, he owns them...

...What was striking about the aftermath of the announcement of Walesa's Nobel award was the silence of Urban, the government's normally acerbic spokesman, who was reported as unavailable for comment despite repeated phone calls to his office throughout the day...

...Robert Louis Stevenson, he of Treasure Island fame, found himself mightily offended on a February night in 1890 after reading an open letter to the press written by the Rev...

...Hyde, a Protestant divine serving in the Hawaiian Islands...

...and using language clearly unbecoming a man who always has visible on his person the Badge of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, one of Poland's most revered religious symbols...

...Is it growing at all clear to you," Stevenson concluded: "what a picture you have drawn of your own heart...

...The same news accounts that reported the Nobel decision took note of a concerted government campaign, part of an ongoing effort by Polish authorities, to discredit the Solidarity leader among his own people...

...How many divisions does the pope have...

...That's beyond the pale...

...And when reports about the King investigation were picked up and run by American journalists like Jack Anderson, the commentary and interpretation would often as not be a critique of Hoover and his methods rather than a discrediting of King...

...As part of this campaign, Polish national television recently broadcast a program titled Money that purported to present a conversation between Walesa and his brother during the former's eleven-month '' internment'' at an isolated hunting lodge near the Soviet border...

...and he was your father too, if God had given you the grace to see it...

...and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story [about Damien's "sexual escapades"] to be true...

...When the FBI offered its King dossier to Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution, he rejected it, contending that his was no "peephole journalism...

...and catching your government's enemies in compromising situations...

...Lawrence D. hogan is associate professor of history at Union College in Cranford, New Jersey, and the author of A Black National News Service: Claude Barnett and the Associated Negro Press 1919-1945 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press...

...In announcing the award to the Polish labor leader, Egil Aarvik, chairman of the Peace Prize Committee, compared Walesa's receiving the Nobel to that of a previous laureate, the Rev...

...THE POLISH authorities have it easier than their American counterparts when it comes to disseminating the ingredients of character assassination...

...complaining that the same Vatican, through the Holy Father, ruined his chances for last year's Nobel...

...If Hyde had known Hoover or Urban he might have charged Damien with a Vatican-Switzerland financial connection as well...

...Hyde's letter characterized the saintly Damien as "coarse, dirty, headstrong, bigoted, disobedient, and not a man pure in his relations with women," charging that "the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness...

...Each man, Aarvik noted, "furthered the cause of peace through his work in favor of human rights...

...the most incredulous to prayer...

...Aarvik might well have noted that the comparison between the Polish labor leader and the American civil rights leader goes beyond the unquestioned fact that both men deserve to be honored as fighters for human rights and peace...