Mitgang, Herbert. Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against
America's Greatest Authors. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988. 331 pages.
For years, journalist Herbert Mitgang has been using the Freedom of
Information Act to track FBI and CIA surveillance of this country's artists,
writers, and academics. As this readable book demonstrates, much of the
"intelligence" government snoops amassed was mere rumor and misinformation.
(The FBI, in particular, seems to have understood virtually nothing about
the work or the politics of the men and women it hounded over the years.)
And the whole project seems, finally, surreal. No one in the dossiers
Mitgang has examined had any political following. Few even had worked-out
political ideas. How can G-men stalking a painter like the late Georgia
O'Keeffe, let's say, possibly make this country more secure? Why all this
surveillance?
The answers emerge from the files Mitgang has assembled. Populist
cartoonist Bill Mauldin, for instance, had an FBI file opened on him after
he helped integrate veterans' housing after the Second World War. Novelist
Norman Mailer's sin was to criticize J. Edgar Hoover in public. And so it
goes. The FBI, alas, has functioned less as a crime-fighting agency than
as a domestic political police. And Ronald Reagan, for one, began his
political career as an FBI informant reporting on fellow actors.
-- Steve Badrich
ISBN 1-55611-077-4
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