Inside the FBI: attracting the Director's scrutiny were Communists, security risks, and people who made untoward jokes

National Review, May 11, 1992 by Natalie Robins

Buckley's final reference is a letter Director Kelley wrote him thanking him for a recent pro-FBI column.

Is It Shocking?

Buckley comments: "I've always thought that the essential distinction is widely ignored ... namely, that the FBI is a data-collecting agency, and it's on the basis of the data collection that they get clues. For instance, on fingerprints. In the Lindbergh kidnapping, if they hadn't collected fingerprints for years, they wouldn't have found Hauptmann.... So there's nothing in my file that shocks me....

"I assumed my file would be pretty copious because every third person I ran into in 1969 and 1973 said they had been asked about me ... I didn't know about the Hoover rebuff at all. I don't know what service Hoover suspended because I don't remember receiving FBI service. It must have been disappointing to him that I didn't know I was in Coventry....

As for the 1969 Cointelpro, was Hoover otherwise only using left-wingers? That's fascinating, if I'm the only right-winger whom he victimized like this. So he was just playing games with me! Oh well, I'm not entirely opposed to what would be the equivalent of a CIA-type activity intended to confuse communications among a crystallizing front-people whose intentions were clearly subversive. If you find out they cause riots in Watts or Philadelphia or Washington by intending to burn down a house, and then disrupt schooling, et cetera, then they become enemies of the state. Now, what is licensable activity in situations like that is a fine line and not easy to draw. If an effort was made to confuse, then, and there was prima facie evidence that the people being watched were bent on disruption and maybe even violence, then it is something that wouldn't shock me.

"The idea of being personally victimized is simply an aspect of Hoover's lack of any sense of proportion. My satire, in 1967, was something he should have applauded-even though he was entirely an incidental figure. I was astonished that he should have reacted as he did....

"So, people who don't have a sense of humor should not be in charge of national security-their perspectives are dim, they are not reliable. Hoover was obviously a person without any sense of humor-without any sense of perspective.

"The FBI hasn't interfered in my life, so far as I know. The only thing that Hoover did that I find impossible to rationalize is that business involving Bobby Seale."