The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State. - book reviews

National Review, May 5, 1989 by Richard Gid Powers

The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State, by William W Keller (Princeton, 215 pp., $25)

IF YOU'RE NOT passionate, one way or the other, about J. Edgar Hoover and his war on Communism, you're probably not passionate about anything. For, no matter what your ideological leanings, there's no question that the struggle over Communism has been the great struggle of this century, and that it touches on every other dispute that has divided Americans during the past seventy years. Since Hoover and his FBI, wearing their snap-brimmed anti-Communist hats, were at the center of that struggle at its height, your attitude toward Hoover's Bureau is a pretty good litmus test for predicting your whole outlook on the recent American past.

Now comes William W. Keller, an analyst for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, with The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover. Keller offers a double-barreled thesis. First, that the FBI of the Sixties, the FBI of the Cointel (counterintelligence) operations, was really an "independent security state." (We'll come back to that, but for the moment you will be safe in assuming it is a bad thing.) Second, that those very liberals who stomped all over the FBI during the 1975 Church Committee hearings, defiling its files, flaying alive those of Hoover's lieutenants still among the living, and committing outrages against the memory of Hoover himself (he had died in 1972), were themselves to blame for that independent security state. Liberals, you may ask, responsible for Hoover?

A definition: by an independent security state" Keller means a "state within a state" dedicated to neutralizing ideological enemies of the "parent state," choosing its own targets and employing methods unknown to the officials of the parent state. Another definition is needed, but not supplied: Keller spends no little time dicussing the "Liberal state," the principles behind which he sees as incompatible with the later behavior of Hoover's Bureau. Here he seems to mean the Liberal state of John Stuart Mill: a minimal state, empowered only to defend the rights of its citizens, so that by definition any state action that impinges on individual liberties is presumptively illegitimate. And yet, when he talks about "liberals"-as in the people who, he sauys, were responsible for Hoover-he seems vaguely to mean the sort of people who are conventionally called liberals by themselves, the press, or their enemies: lib erals in popular parlance. but to quote David Mamet, the diference between Liberal and liberal is "No similarity."

Leaving that little difficulty aside, Keller's central idea, that liberals were responsible for the rise of Hoover's secret intelligence state, is fairly simple. In the real world, during periods of extreme danger 9pretty much all the time, some would say), the liberal state has to do things to survive that cannot be reconciled with liberal principles. Conservatives recongnize this but liberals refuse to face the facts. Therefore they need someone like Hoover to do their doctrinal purity.

Unfortunately, Keller takes his argument further. He claims not only that the liberals needed Hoover, but that his power was sustained chiefly by liberal support, that he weakened as liberals began to withdraw that support, and that the FBI's independence and power were finally finished when the "liberal entente" with the Bureau collapsed early in 1971.

Now, no one who knows anything about the history of the FBI, about the history of American Commiunism and anti-Communism, or about American politics will agree for a minute that Hoover and the liberals were secret sweethearts despite all the mudslinging, name-calling, and generally malodorous atmosphere of a half-century of brawls between liberals and the apparently eternal director.

And yet, Keller is onto something both in his basic argument about liberals' refusal to face the facts about what democracies must do to survive in dangerous times, and in his demonstration that liberals did, though not perhaps for the reasons he thinks, support Hoover by willingly handing over to him more responsibility than they later liked to recall.

Anti-Communist liberals (as opposed to the fellow-traveling liberals of the Popular Front or progressive variety) wanted to remove Communists from government and from the labor unions, and to eliminate, or at least curb, Communist influence in other institutions (education, entertainment, and the churches). But they wanted to do so in a restrained, "surgical" way, so as to provide as little ammunition as possible for conservative anti-communists who wanted to broaden the antiCommunist drive into a war on socialism, the programs and record of the New and Fair Deals, and the welfare state generally. Since almost everything the FBI had to do to combat the Communists effectively seemed bound to violate civil-libertarian standards, Keller holds, liberals preferred not to know what Hoover was doing, thus abetting his natural inclination toward secrecy and autonomy.