SUPERMAN

...SUPERMAN by JAMES A. WECHSLER In some distant year American civilization, if there is one, will examine with mingled humor and disbelief the legend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who for so many years has occupied the .role of supreme sacred cow of our country and of our century...

...Hoover, I suspect, lies not merely in the dossiers he has accumulated...

...But Mr...

...Hoover, I have never subscribed to the devil theory of him or his works...

...The corollary of that point is that any problem of home-front Communist activity lies in the realm of espionage and sabotage—and that should be a matter for quiet, effective counter-intelligence, not literary production...

...he values his relations with the Southern contingent in Congress and the Southern police agencies...

...Hoover's tenure, the FBI has collected so many dossiers on so many men, and especially those in strategic Congressional and government places, that it exercises a quiet blackmail over nearly all its prospective critics...

...Above and apart from all these matters, I revert to the initial question: How has so unexciting a man been allowed to impersonate superman for so long...

...Almost every political man has some private vulnerability, and there has long been a widespread sense in Washington that Mr...

...The other mildly notable point is Mr...

...There are two inadvertently interesting things about the volume...

...His legend of invincibility has been adroitly cultivated by able press agents...

...I know he could long ago have earned more money by leaving the government and becoming, say, baseball commissioner, or chairman of almost any board...

...How much journalistic and political cowardice has made this hoax possible...

...But, since it bears Mr...

...I believe he works hard and long...

...It is also true that he has built up a corps of journalistic mouthpieces, including such weighty observers as Walter Winchell and Fulton Lewis, Jr., who are prepared to move into action against any man who dares to question the infallibility of the leader of the G-men...

...Yet they are unsatisfying...

...the FBI has long resented civil rights assignments—although some FBI agents have carried them out with distinction when the Department of Justice insisted upon action...

...But it primarily reflects the frailty of those in public and journalistic life who should have prevented the spread of the myth before it became confused with reality...

...There is, of course, a theory that the answer is simple: In the years of Mr...

...it rests on the weakness of politicians and editors alike, in whose nervous imaginations he has assumed the dimensions of superman...

...Hoover's name, it will soon be on the shelves of libraries throughout the land, inflicted upon many college freshmen as compulsory reading and treated by most of the press as one of the memorable tracts of our time...

...It is in fact a turgid primer that perhaps reveals something about the cliche mind of the author and his unknown ghost, but throws no trace of new light on the difficult, complex problems confronting the world in this time of atomic peril...

...Thus at times he sounds like Adlai Stevenson, warning that "the revolution of rising expectations is not a Communist-inspired revolution" but a "natural reaction against poverty and misery...

...Hoover has tried to remain above that battle...

...Hoover's banal effort to remain on good terms with civil libertarians and "do-gooders" even as he helps to incite the passions of the know-nothings...

...Communist Party, to suggest that the dwindling membership figures of this battered body are somehow proof of its vitality, and that we are in grave domestic peril from this enfeebled thing...

...His agents have performed many distinguished deeds...

...These reflections are largely occasioned by the appearance of another book under Mr...

...He has repeatedly refused to appear on "Meet the Press" plainly because he has no gift for spontaneous, unrehearsed exchange and dreads the possibility of a verbal lapse...

...There will be critical students writing theses on how he managed to beJAMES A. WECHSLER, editor of the editorial page of the New York Post, is the author of five books: "Revolt on the Campus," "War Propaganda and the United States," "Labor Baron," "The Age of Suspicion," and "Challenge to the Beat...

...By the few intimate accounts available, he is an insecure, generally uninteresting character, afflicted with an obvious paranoia...

...For J. Edgar Hoover is not a powerful, dramatic demagogue with any great resources of rhetoric...

...The case against him is that he continues to distort the true nature of our problems by magnifying the miniscule menace of local Communism and diverting us from the large world...

...he laments "reckless charges against individuals and false statements about the nature of Communism and the extent of its penetration into our national life...

...Hoover's cynical avoidance of any serious discussion of the civil rights conflict in the United States...

...If it had been written by a poor professor of political science at some university, it would be lightly dismissed as a small exercise in the repetition of known facts and the affirmation of jingoist fallacies...

...Perhaps these are the real clues...

...witch and intimidate our society to a degree almost unrivaled, and how, when his agency bungled its surveillance duties so badly in the Soblen case (as it had some years earlier in the Eisler case), there were literally no voices in the Congress and so few voices in the press demanding that he be at least subjected to certain routine questioning...

...He demands a degree of subservience and reverence from his subordinates that is the familiar mark of a frightened bureaucrat...

...Hoover has taken pains to find it...

...Perhaps he employs two ghostwriters rather than one, and allots different pages to each...

...The strength of Mr...

...Hoover's signature...

...To put it bluntly, how has he beaten the rap so long...

...One is Mr...

...The book, unfortunately for the author, appeared at a time when the battle of Mississippi was in its most violent stage, and when Communist propagandists throughout the world were exploiting our greatest domestic crisis since the Civil War...

...Critical as I am of the absurd adulation accorded Mr...

...It is called A Study of Communism, and by the time this appears it will have been heralded in many places as a modern book of revelations...

...Yet only a few pages earlier he has been desperately trying to resurrect the corpse of the U.S...