MEMO FROM THE EDITOR
MEMO from the Editor Scoundrel Time Again According to articles published this fall in The Nation and The New Yorker, the FBI and sundry other U.S. intelligence agencies—the CIA, the Immigration...
...Well, they've done away with those committees...
...But just about when the articles on the surveillance of poets, playwrights, and novelists were published, another, more recent FBI caper came to light...
...There's a certain irony in the fact that some of the writers who were, as it turns out, unwitting subjects of FBI surveillance were also cheerleaders for the system of repression that claimed them as victims...
...Reagan's nostalgia for HUAC, and his conviction that the restoration of a measure of political freedom and decency in America was something "the Soviets were able to do in this country," are widely shared on the Right...
...The librarians, The Times noted, are upset, resenting the attempt to turn them into Government informers and worrying about the privacy and academic freedom of library users...
...The magazine articles were based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and the thought police didn't bother to issue a denial...
...The notorious COINTELPRO program of the 1960s and early 1970s, which aimed to disrupt and destroy the resistance to the war in Vietnam, no longer exists under that name, but despite repeated denials, the tactics are obviously still in use...
...policy toward Central America...
...However, the FBI was quick to stress that while it might have strayed into the dirty business of shadowing writers in the past, its operations now are pure as the driven snow...
...intelligence agencies—the CIA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the intelligence branches of the State Department and the military services—kept at least 134 American writers under surveillance over a period spanning several decades...
...That rationale, or something like it, is presumably also invoked to justify the FBI's harassment and intimidation of activists in the Sanctuary Movement and others who dissent against U.S...
...As we brace ourselves for a possible new onslaught by the peddlers of political paranoia, it's worth recalling who were the real scoundrels of scoundrel time...
...In his recent interview with Arnaud de Borch-grave, the obsessively reactionary editor of The Washington Times, President Reagan grew positively misty-eyed when he recalled the good old days of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...The real scoundrels weren't the right-wing politicians, the police spies, or the fear-mongers in the media...
...Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer and Elizabeth Hardwick, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, John Dos Passos and Kay Boyle were among those suspected of being subversives or spies, and therefore had their comings and goings—and their writings-chronicled in Government dossiers...
...Even card-carrying members of the local public library...
...An FBI official, on the other hand, called the effort "a preventive system aimed at stopping espionage before it hurts us...
...the liberal politicians who suddenly perceived a "threat" so severe that it justified enacting police-state measures...
...The files on authors were discontinued eleven years ago, an FBI spokesman insisted...
...That shows the success of what the Soviets were able to do in this country with making it unfashionable to to be anticommunist...
...the liberal judges who sent dissidents to prison...
...All that, it seems, is not enough...
...They should have remembered that in a police state, everyone comes under suspicion...
...Well, maybe...
...In these twilight months of the Reagan Presidency, we're likely to witness some serious attempts to revive the climate of hysteria and fear that marked the early years of the Cold War—the period the late Lillian Hell-man aptly characterized as "scoundrel time...
...The real scoundrels were the people who knew better but didn't have the guts to resist: the liberal academics who turned their backs on radical colleagues...
...the liberal publications that joined the clamor for conformity...
...they, after all, were merely doing what came naturally to them...
...Remember," the President said, "there was once a Congress in which they had a committee that would investigate even one of their own members if it was believed that that person had communist involvement or communist leanings...
...The New York Times reported that Federal agents have been calling on librarians, asking them to "watch for and report on library users who might be diplomats of hostile powers recruiting intelligence agents or gathering information potentially harmful to United States security...
Vol. 51 • December 1987 • No. 12
