Subscribe"Hoover, influenced by his work at the Library of Congress, decided to create a massive card index of people with left-wing political views. Over the next few years 450,000 names were indexed and detailed biographical notes were written up on the 60,000 that Hoover considered the most dangerous. Hoover then advised Palmer to have these people rounded up and deported.
On 7th November, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested in twenty-three different cities. However, the vast majority of these people were American citizens and had to be eventually released. However, Hoover now had the names of hundreds of lawyers who were willing to represent radicals in court. These were now added to his growing list of names in his indexed database.
Hoover decided he needed a high profile case to help his campaign against subversives. He selected Emma Goldman, as he had been particularly upset by her views on birth control, free love and religion. Goldman had also been imprisoned for two years for opposing America's involvement in the First World War. This was a subject that Hoover felt very strongly about, even though it was never willing to discuss how he had managed to avoid being drafted.
Hoover knew it would be a difficult task having Goldman deported. She had been living in the United States for thirty-four years and both her father and husband were both citizens of the United States. In court Hoover argued that Goldman's speeches had inspired Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President William McKinley. Hoover won his case and Goldman, along with 247 other people, were deported to Russia.
Hoover's persecution of people with left-wing views had the desired effect and membership of the Communist Party, estimated to have been 80,000 before the raids, fell to less that 6,000. In 1921 Hoover was rewarded by being promoted to the post of assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation. The function of the FBI at that time was the investigation of violations of federal law and assisting the police and other criminal investigation agencies in the United States."*
“Even though [Hoover] was dead, his bureaucratic wars continued as though he were still alive. The most immediate battle was over the notorious store of damaging information that Hoover had collected over decades.
The legendary secret files were uppermost in the minds of Clyde Tolson, the upper echelon of the Bureau and the many private and public citizens who had been the subject of Hoover's probing investigations into their secrets, weaknesses and morality.
Minutes after hearing about Hoover's death, Clyde Tolson was on the phone to Helen Gandy discussing the disposition of Hoover's very sensitive files. A bit later, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst called Assistant to the Director John Mohr and told him to secure Hoover's private office. Mohr did what he was told and changed the lock on the door.
Mohr did not burden Kleindienst with the knowledge that none of Hoover's files were kept in his office. The controversial files were kept in Miss Gandy's office. She and others were organizing those files so that some would be destroyed and others culled out for special purposes.
There was a document called the ‘D list’ which, in case of Hoover's death or other cataclysmic events, specified the destruction of certain files, films and audio tapes. Shortly after Hoover's death, the ‘D List’ was circulated to a few key FBI officials.
The next morning, L. Patrick Gray III came to visit John Mohr. He wanted to know immediately where the secret files were kept. Mohr denied that there were any secret files and Gray became very upset. Within a few hours, Gray would be appointed acting director of the FBI by President Nixon.
The announcement of Gray, an outsider with no experience in law enforcement, was a huge shock to the employees and management of the FBI. Gray had been a submarine commander and Nixon's military adviser. He had also held several posts within Nixon's administration.
When Gray met Miss Gandy that day, he noticed that she was packing up things that she was removing from her file cabinets and drawers. Gray said that she explained that she was disposing of Hoover's personal correspondence, per his wishes, and packing up Hoover's personal papers on investments.
What he did not realize was that he was permitting her to continue the destruction of Hoover's most secret files. Miss Gandy also kept a special index to these files on index cards. Many of the most controversial files were deliberately mislabeled. The file on Richard Nixon appeared under Obscene Matters.
The next day on May 4, Miss Gandy handed over some twelve boxes to Mark Felt, Deputy Associate Director, to keep in his office. Over the coming week, another thirty-two file drawers were transferred by Miss Gandy into cardboard boxes which were taken to Hoover's home.
All in all, there were 167 folders. Three of them concerned Bureau officials and disappeared. The remaining 164 files represented some 17, 750 pages of material, spanning fifty years. Just over half of these folders had derogatory material, much of which was of a sexual, moral or ethical nature.
Curt Gentry in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets describes the nature of the files: ‘....their contents included blackmail material on the patriarch of an American political dynasty, his sons, their wives, and other women; allegations of two homosexual arrests which Hoover leaked to help defeat a witty, urbane Democratic presidential candidate; the surveillance reports on one of America's best-known first ladies and her alleged lovers, both male and female, white and black; the child molestation documentation the director used to control and manipulate one of the Red-baiting protégés; a list of the Bureau's spies in the White House during the eight administrations when Hoover was FBI director; the forbidden fruit of hundreds of illegal wiretaps and bugs, containing, for example, evidence that an attorney general (and later Supreme Court justice) had received payoffs from the Chicago syndicate; as well as celebrity files, with all the unsavory gossip Hoover could amass on some of the biggest names in show business.’”
"Since his death in 1972, there has been an increasing fascination with Hoover and the immense power he wielded as director of the FBI....Gentry, who coauthored Helter Skelter, has based his account of Hoover on more than 300 interviews and on access to previously classified FBI documents. Beginning with a behind-the-scenes description of Hoover's death and the search for his 'secret files' that is novelistic in technique, Gentry paints a portrait of Hoover as the 'indispensable man,' with many provocative revelations about his political dealings. This is a chilling look at the darker side of American politics, especially concerning Hoover's enemies list and his relentless investigation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s personal life. The book's lively readability is balanced by lengthy footnotes and by an extensive list of source notes and interviews, and it will be in demand in both academic and public libraries."
"In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.
The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.
America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: 'We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,' and, 'casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.'
....The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years."
"The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been criticized for overcharging the Pentagon for its work in Iraq.
KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, company executives said. KBR, which announced the contract last month, had a similar contract with immigration agencies from 2000 to last year.
The contract with the Corps of Engineers runs one year, with four optional one-year extensions. Officials of the corps said that they had solicited bids and that KBR was the lone responder."
"The Einstein File begins with a request by J Edgar Hoover in 1950: "'Please furnish a report as to the nature of any derogatory information contained in any file your bureau may have on the following person.'
That person was Albert Einstein, and the request intensified a secret campaign to discredit him.
Hoover was worried about Einstein's liberal intellectualism and his dabbling in politics, something that has been forgotten today. It has been overtaken by Einstein's absent-minded professor image.
...The files reveal that for five years J Edgar Hoover tried, and failed, to link Einstein to a Soviet espionage ring."
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posted by delmoi at 2:51 PM on December 22, 2007