THE FBI, OVERSTATED
Wright, Charles Alan
The FBI, Overstated The FBI Story, a report to the people, by Don Whitehead. Random House. 368 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Charles Alan Wright DON WHITEHEAD is a fine news-paperman, a two-time winner...
...His book suffers throughout from an overly-laudatory approach toward the Bureau and J. Edgar Hoover, and a chip on the shoulder attitude to critics of either...
...All agree that the FBI is a superbly efficient police force...
...Indeed, the only valid criticism which can be made of the Bureau on civil liberty grounds is its use of wiretapping...
...Given this background, one could have hoped for an exhaustive and probing examination of the Bureau and its work...
...Whitehead has produced, rather, a superficial, overly-journalistic restatement of a largely familiar tale...
...At that, Whitehead is perhaps more useful when he rails at critics than when, as too often is the case, he merely ignores criticisms that have been made...
...The book confounds such hopes...
...Whitehead does observe that among "some of the liberals and intellectuals during the Bureau's fight against communism" there has been "antagonism against the FBI...
...His new material is mostly confined to interesting "cops-and-robbers" stories...
...These names do not prove that wiretapping by the FBI is either legal or moral, but they do indicate that the Bureau's policy is not, as some have thought, completely indefensible...
...Thus the liberal rightly insists on constant scrutiny of law enforcement agencies to ensure that they do not cross that line...
...Whitehead offers little that is new on this theme, nor does he break new ground in his accounts of the FBI's role in the great crime wave of the '30s and in the security problems of the last decade...
...Anyone who reads the liberal press knows that such antagonism has existed...
...Objectively examined and presented, it would do much to dispel the liberal's suspicion of the Bureau...
...Its policy in this regard has had the specific approval of such persons as Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Herbert Brownell...
...The reasons for this attitude deserve to be probed...
...The greatest service he could have performed, both to the FBI and to "the people" to whom he directs his "report," would have been to treat his subject fairly and dispassionately, discussing its errors as well as its brilliant successes, and dealing justly on the merits with the criticisms that have been made of the Bureau, rather than either ignoring the criticisms or castigating the critics...
...In his preparation of this book he has had access to much unpublished material in the FBI files...
...The underlying reason for antagonism toward the FBI seems to me to be a fundamental distrust that many liberals have of any police force...
...The record of the FBI under Hoover has been, generally, quite good...
...Most persons who know the facts would agree that, under Hoover, the FBI has had a fine record on civil liberties...
...The broad outlines of the FBI's history—its origins, its early involvement in politics and disdain for civil liberties, and its rehabilitation under its present Director—are already well known...
...Reviewed by Charles Alan Wright DON WHITEHEAD is a fine news-paperman, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize...
...it is not enough merely to assert, as Whitehead does, that such liberals are not "willing to face up to the cold truth" about communism, and that they are thus "jeopardizing the cause of freedom...
...Law enforcement is necessary to preserve a peaceful and free society—as Clinton, Tennessee, has dramatically shown—but the line is shadowy between enforcing the laws to protect the individual and enforcing the laws merely for the sake of authority at the expense of individual freedom...
...But a book, like this one, which overstates the record, drips hero worship from every paragraph, and implies that to criticize the FBI is somehow unpatriotic, can hardly help but strengthen such suspicion...
...This, then, is the fundamental failing of Whitehead's book...
...And he is particularly apprehensive about the FBI, both because its very efficiency makes it a greater potential threat, and because the adulatory tone of virtually all writing about the Bureau makes it hard to know what its real record is...
...The Bureau relies on an Attorney General's opinion that the wiretapping it does is not a violation of law...
...It has scrupulously avoided the third degree and the other brutal tactics which have been, in the past, the shame of too many police departments...
Vol. 21 • March 1957 • No. 3
