BOOKS

...Part Southern story-teller, part theologian, he weaves a lush and elegant yarn about the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and the antiwar movement that lasted until the 1970s...

...He had spent his boyhood summers at Sol's farmhouse in the Berkshires and remembered that Sol "had taught me how to use a rifle, play the guitar, ride a horse, bid at an auction, paint a barn, row a boat, drive a car, play poker, and regard wealth with suspicion...

...The stories offer sensitive glimpses into several generations...

...Progressive educators, he said, were guilty of "unsound educational quackery" that threatened to produce a Robert Justin Goldstein is a political scientist at Oakland University in Michigan...

...Hoover personally wrote the Government's brief which persuaded the Immigration Bureau to deport Goldman, a decision upheld by a Federal judge who declared that Goldman was an "enemy" of the United States who had done everything possible to "destroy the welfare, stability, and integrity" of the Government...

...A skinny, soft-eyed kid of seventeen, with oversized ears and a runaway shock of dark brown hair, he gazed out nervously across the upturned faces...

...Frye Gaillard (Frye Gaillard is an editorial writer and columnist for The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina...

...Goldman's acute comment in many ways sums up the story of J. Edgar Hoover, and indeed the story of America's consistent inability to live up to its ideals of "liberty and justice for all," especially when those "all" happen to have political and social ideas significantly divergent from those in power...

...He had known government harassment during the 1930s and 1940s and had traveled to Russia and Mexico...

...Rosalynn Carter would like to return to the White House, but the rest of the Carter family scoffs at her wish...

...by Robert Justin Goldstein At the age of twenty-four, J. Edgar Hoover, then special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, began his long crusade against radicals by personally coordinating the 1919 deportation to Russia of Emma Goldman, whom the press had dubbed "the anarchist queen...

...Everything to Gain is a joint report by the former President and Mrs...

...Carter after they returned to Plains, Georgia, in 1981...

...Hoover, suggests historian Richard Powers in his biography, Secrecy and Power, could never overcome his background as a member of the WASP middle class, constantly insecure over the threat posed to its orderly existence in the early Twentieth Century by immigrants, blacks, and, especially, radicals...

...But his narrative is nevertheless peopled with heroes, men and women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, who helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party...

...But there were a handful at least, black and white...

...In his earliest years as a Southern Baptist preacher, Campbell found precious few colleagues who shared his understandings...

...He wrote "Political Repression in Modern America...

...or Clarence Jordan, the gentle Baptist preacher who founded an interracial farming community near Americus, Georgia...

...One of Campbell's favorites in his catalogue of prophets was Kelly Miller Smith, a black minister in Nashville, whose daughter broke the color barrier in the city's public schools, prompting one of those schools to be destroyed by a segregationist's bomb...

...After middle age his personal brand of communism consisted of nothing more outrageous than attending peace rallies and voting for Gus Hall...

...Campbell paints a vivid picture of Kelly Smith's final hours...

...he asks...

...In 1924, he was appointed FBI director after persuading even the American Civil Liberties Union that he was opposed to political witch-hunts...

...Powers depicts Franklin Roosevelt's role in encouraging the FBI to get back into the political spying business in a major way for the first time since about 1920, and he shows Roosevelt's almost total disregard for civil-liberties questions...

...Visionary FORTY ACRES AND A GOAT by Will Campbell Peachtree Publishers (404 Armour Circle N.E., Atlanta, GA 30324...

...14.95...

...If we don't remember and don't learn, we will continue as a society to be unable, as Emma Goldman put it, to reach beyond our present capacity...

...The book is somewhat jerky because the narration shifts back and forth between R. and J. This pattern was adopted after they found it too difficult to write in a single voice...

...Radical in the Family THE OLD LEFT by Daniel Menaker Alfred A. Knopf...

...He checked the pocket watch on the lectern beside him, and then launched into a short, fiery sermon on the first verse of Genesis...

...They left the White House dispirited...

...Secrecy and Power is gracefully written and is based not only on the well-known public record but also on recently released FBI documents and on some of Hoover's personal records...

...In 1919-1920 he not only oversaw Goldman's deportation but also coordinated the notorious Palmer Raids, when about 10,000 supposed radicals were arrested in a single night...

...Thus, Hoover warned in the 1930s that the "cream-puff school of criminology" sought to "turn loose upon us the robber, the burglar, the arsonist, the killer, and the sex degenerate...

...They sold the warehouse, wrote their autobiographies, rebuilt their local friendships, traveled as private citizens, and became active in community groups such as Habitat for Humanity...

...At its core, in the vision and ideals of the prophets who gave it life, the movement was essentially a religious crusade, an affront to the original sin of self-interest, a challenge to everything base in the nature of mankind...

...Hoover's innate fears became deeply entrenched as he gained his first taste of blood and power...

...When he penned "Watch the borders" on an FBI memo that did not leave enough room for him to write marginal comments, terrified FBI agents put offices near Mexico and Canada on alert...

...or John Lewis, the first head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and now a Congressman from Atlanta...

...participation in World War I.) Hoover came to New York to watch Goldman and about 250 other "radicals" depart...

...This neglect by no means eclipses the significance of Powers's contribution but it is a serious oversight, especially in a country that continues to have Pennsylvania Avenue graced with the J. Edgar Hoover Justice Department Building...

...Routine illegalities are ignored or downplayed...

...Partly a memoir, partly a "how to" guide, it is an upbeat account of recreating meaningful lives both as private individuals and citizens of the world...

...or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Ella Baker...

...Both, he says, were finally transformed by cynicism and violence, imitating the worst in the systems they opposed...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY After the White House EVERYTHING TO GAIN Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Random House...

...In his new book, Forty Acres and a Goat, Campbell tells their stories...

...If there are no bombshell revelations, there is much material that helps to fill in some of the gaps left by previous studies...

...An optimistic book...

...The central character in this fine collection of short stories is an aging New York radical, Uncle Sol...

...Hoover insisted on approving the marriage plans of his agents and investigated their fiancees...

...Fresh out of law school, he was given the task of directing the Justice Department's newly established Radical Division in 1919 amidst the hysterical postwar red scare, a time when, as one British journalist noted, the country became "hag-ridden by the specter of Bolshevism...

...Hoover's central role in planning the Palmer Raids is more clearly spelled out than before...

...Campbell spent a little time trying to argue the point, citing the statistics and the anecdotes of change, until finally the Reverend Smith replied with resignation: "But they still don't respect us...

...He is difficult to live with and becomes more crotchety with each year...

...In the splendid sentiment of this hard-headed narrative, in the lushness of the stories and the elegance of the preaching, Will Campbell, the old-fashioned integrationist and renegade Baptist from southern Mississippi, does what he can to keep the vision alive...

...In the 1930s, Powers points out, the FBI's successes in arresting or killing such notorious gangsters as John Dillinger and a subsequent wave of movies glamorizing Hoover and his G-men turned Hoover into a sacrosanct public figure and gave him a platform for what became almost forty years of sanctimonious speeches...

...Hoover's notorious racism, rigidity, and authoritarianism in running the FBI for almost fifty years and the pathetic syco-phantism this created among FBI employees are painted with alarming clarity...

...132 pp...

...But he is not fundamentally pessimistic about people...

...The narrator is David Leonard, Sol's nephew, who teaches at Columbia...

...16.95...

...That, for Campbell, was a major moment of truth, for he realized then, perhaps more vividly than he ever had before, that whatever the politics of the civil rights movement, whatever the changes it had brought about in America (and many of those changes were indisputably significant), the movement was something far more radical than the pursuit of simple justice, or a revolution in the name of equality for blacks...

...they found their personal finances in disarray, and their farmlands and peanut warehouse in debt...

...Powers's study is unquestionably the best Hoover biography available, especially for that part of the American population under the age of thirty, for whom Hoover is only a vague legend as either superhero or bogeyman...

...Campbell sat at the side of his dying friend, who spoke sadly in a much-weakened voice, pronouncing the epic gains of the civil rights movement to be mostly cosmetic...

...She replied, "Oh, I suppose you've given me as square a deal as you could...

...Along with about 1,000 others, she had been jailed for having the temerity to oppose U.S...

...Campbell, it soon becomes clear, is fundamentally pessimistic about the nature of social movements, whatever their purpose...

...As Sol moved into his nineties and became even more cantankerous, David made time to give him companionship and special care...

...Eventually, it was absorbed by the system it opposed, and both it and the system were changed in the process...

...We shouldn't expect from any person something beyond his capacity...

...When the red scare fell into disrepute after 1920, Hoover played down his role...

...Although this subject is by no means ignored, Powers's treatment tends to be largely anecdotal, concentrating on well-known incidents like the Martin Luther King affair, to the relative neglect of any systematic treatment of the scope and nature of the FBI's routine and massive surveillance of legal and peaceful political dissent...

...Despite its many merits, Powers's study will be disappointing in its treatment of the FBI's political spying activities to almost anyone who has made a reasonably serious attempt at Hoover-watching over the years...

...Until the Kennedy Administration, the only black FBI agents were five personal servants of Hoover...

...When he went on vacations, he not only traveled to the same resorts run by rich friends, but he insisted on the same plane seats, the same hotel rooms, the same restaurants, and—above all—that his luggage arrive at his room exactly three minutes after he did...

...generation of iconoclastic morons and criminals...

...Or can there only be a Crusade for Crusade...

...He sees their flaws, and the tendency of those to become magnified by group undertakings...

...Campbell's fear is that something precious was also lost—radical belief in reconciliation, without which every revolution is doomed, destined to recapitulate the sins of the oppressor...

...15.95...

...Apparently referring to the "legal" processes which put the official stamp of approval on what was clearly the Government's decision to deport someone who was viewed as having "dangerous" ideas, Hoover asked Goldman at the dock, "Haven't I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman...

...These were people, in Campbell's estimation, who took their religion and their value systems seriously, raising their voices in a prophetic chorus for change, even when they understood the price they might pay...

...281 pp...

...Powers never mentions that between 1940 and 1966 the FBI illegally opened 130,000 pieces of first-class mail, and the hundreds of illegal, warrantless FBI break-ins and burglaries are referred to only in the most cursory manner...

...Will Campbell has been preaching now for nearly fifty years, ever since a steamy June Sunday in southern Mississippi, when he summoned forth his first sermon at East Fork Baptist, a tiny wooden church near the town of Liberty, hidden away in the bottomlands of Amite County amid stands of pine and shadowy streams of gray Spanish moss...

...King is discussed but Powers fails to indicate that other subjects of FBI surveillance included Albert Einstein, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and John Lennon...

...Campbell was a peculiar young man by the standards of Mississippi, for even back then, in the Depression years before World War II, he had begun to consider a radical possibility: that when Jesus told his stories about the brotherhood of man, he never mentioned the color of anybody's skin...

...Can there be a Crusade for Christ...

...198 pp...

...Thus, although the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 1976 that the FBI had collected "intimate details" about the lives of "hundreds of thousands" of American citizens engaged in legal political activities, Powers nowhere indicates the scope of FBI activities...

...When Hoover was caught illegally wiretapping leftist labor leader Harry Bridges, Roosevelt slapped Hoover on the back and roared, "By God, Edgar, that's the first time you've been caught with your pants down...