Dangerous Dossiers/The Boss:

...Yet Lyndon Johnson, among legions of others, past and present, sanctified him...

...Galbraith, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg...

...He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men...

...If it "hadn't been for Hoover," he wrote Richard Nixon in 1969, he "couldn't have carried out [his] responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief...

...Consider, if you can bear it, that Mann was under steady surveillance by the FBI's Los Angeles bureau, which kept the Washington office informed of his travels abroad, and that headquarters saw fit to inform embassies and legal counselors of Mann's presence in their precinct...

...Mitgang relates the splendid old legend...

...Your first twenty-odd guesses are dead wrong...

...Only now, the better part of a century after the young Hoover, driven by who knows what morbidities, began to compile his "Obscene File" (with its immense possibilities for sexual blackmail of political enemies), together with other secret files kept separate from the "official" ones (twenty-five million of them)-only now is something resembling a full record coming into view...

...he is the consummate bureaucrat, certain that the nation's defining documents-the Constitution and the Bill of Rights-are hopelessly inadequate to the real task at hand, which, as all true patriots know, is to defend the flag by searching out and destroying those who would desecrate, defile, and subvert it...

...He had virtually no life outside and separate from it-no wife, no children, no friends other than his "closest" and only friend (and eventual heir to his estate) and second-in-command, Clyde Tolson, no family to speak of other than the mother with whom he lived until her death when he was forty-three (his ineffectual father, a petty civil servant, lived a substantial part of his life in mental hospitals), no social life, no other compelling interests, and no discernible pleasures...

...Liebling, William Saroyan, Lillian Hellman...

...Alfred Knopf, surely the nation's most distinguished publisher at that time, was a target by reason of the books he published...

...Accordingly, Pearl Buck's dossier contained some 800 pages, Algren's nearly 600, some more, some less...

...Of the hundreds of dossiers Mitgang examined in order to compile this record of FBI infamy, which places us all greatly in his debt, include these among the Nobel Laureates (in addition to Lewis, Buck, Mann): Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck...

...to maintain security...

...The answer is that in varying measure and sometimes for inscrutable reasons all were under surveillance by the FBI and are immortalized in absurd, comic-opera files of forbidden thoughts and sentiments deemed impermissible by the late J. Edgar Hoover, capo in his time of the American governmental netherworld...

...Or is he...

...and evidence of FBI racism abounds everywhere in these files, as it does throughout its history...

...The man who emerges from this study is mad for power, for empire...

...When you have the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance under surveillance, that's pretty wide as nets go...

...If a designated victim is seen (by some informer or some other miscreant seeking to curry favor with the overlord) at a '' suspect'' public meeting (say a meeting calling for peace or racial equality) along with thousands of others, that fact is duly recorded in the dossier...

...citizen in 1944), Dorothy Parker, Nelson Algren, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson...

...Saul Maloff A part from the bare facts that they are all American, all dead, all writers of prose or verse or both, what in the world does this motley gathering, some of whom would not have been caught dead in one another's company, have in common...

...Hoover cast a very wide net: the list of organizations under surveillance at one time or another is almost too long to tabulate...

...And so it goes, dismayingly, in-furiatingly, on and on...

...Capote's file could do no better than note that his name had appeared on the lists of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1960, when the revolution had only recently come to power and only just thrown out the cutthroats who governed for and under Batista, a time when not to favor' 'fair play'' for the new regime was widely felt to be mean-spirited or worse...

...the list of persons is without end...

...As many others were, so too was Sinclair Lewis suspect for thinking racial equality a desirable goal...

...The Boss, by Athan Theoharis (the author of earlier important studies, notably Spying on Americans) and John Stuart Cox comes closest to being an authoritative, definitive history of Hoover and his creature, the FBI, and the closest approach to a biography of the man-an impressive performance in original research and imposing coherence on chaos...

...Those names are merely a random congeries of the dossiers Herbert Mitgang was able to compel from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act...

...To oppose Franco and his generals, though they were declared fascists massively supported by Hitler and Mussolini, was also suspect...

...Their victims deserved better adversaries...

...and in turn was informed by the "liaison representative" in Heidelberg, to cite one instance of Mann's sinister career, that their subject was there to deliver a lecture on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller's death...

...The "boss," as his flunkies called him, damaged and distorted the nation's intellectual, artistic, and moral life in a multitude of ways...

...Indeed in Hoover's astigmatic eyes, opposition to fascism was itself suspect, virtual proof of Communist inclinations if not outright membership in the party...

...these among many others: Dashiell Hammett, Irwin Shaw, A.J...

...Everyone is guilty...

...Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Thomas Mann (remember that the German master became a U.S...

...History and biography are virtually one and the same-the FBI was Hoover's biography...

...You will rely on him...

...Nor have the wounds ever quite healed...

...He is gone now, Hoover is...

...these among "foreign" authors: Auden, Spender, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Ignazio Silone...

...He's the only one you can put your complete trust in...

...If this illustrious catalogue isn't sufficiently depressing to contemplate, just imagine: our very own political purity-police devoted infinite time and public treasure to excavating information, much of it readily obtainable in periodicals and newspapers...

...THE BOSS J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox Temple University, $27.95, 489 pp...

...As depressing in its way is the bleak and everywhere evident fact that the agents who drew up these reports, from the callowest youth and greenest clerk to the emperor himself, wouldn't have known Mann from Lieb-ling, Greene from Ginsberg, and clearly hadn't read the writers they condemned...

...these among painters and sculptors: Alexander Calder, Ben Shahn, Georgia O'Keeffe, Henry Moore...

...Mann's sin was his passionate opposition to Hitler from the beginning, and he not even a Jew...

...The Bureau was (and is) able to employ escape hatches which permit it to withhold some documents (aided by evasive tactics devised by the Reagan-Meese cabal) and expunge all manner of information...

...these among living writers who provided Mitgang with their files: J.K...

...When Clyde Tolson proposed that, as they had spent so much of their lives together, they should buy a burial plot and pass eternity together, J. Edgar, a prudent man with his own money, declined, saying that the price was excessive, considering that he expected to spend only three days under ground...