Hoover’s Institution

Wednesday, July 27th, 2005

Laurence Silberman opens Hoover’s Institution with some eye-catching credentials:

I recently completed a rewarding year as co-chairman of President Bush’s commission on intelligence, and I propose to discuss our recommendations regarding the FBI in light of my own unique experience with J. Edgar Hoover.

His experience:

I became deputy attorney general in early 1974, after the “Saturday night massacre.” Having seen printed rumors of the “secret and confidential files” of J. Edgar Hoover (who had died in 1972), I asked Clarence Kelly, the very straight and honorable director of the bureau, whether they existed. He assured me that they did not. If they ever did they must have been destroyed.

I was shocked then, when on Jan. 19, 1975, as acting attorney general, I read a front page story in the Washington Post confirming the existence of the files. The story pointed out that the files contained embarrassing material collected on congressmen. When I confronted Kelly, he was initially mystified. He then realized the Post must be referring to files in his outer office, in plain sight, which he had inherited but never examined. Sure enough, they were the notorious secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover.

The House Judiciary Committee demanded I testify about those files, so I was obliged to read them. Accompanied by only one FBI official, I read virtually all these files in three weekends. It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service. Hoover had indeed tasked his agents with reporting privately to him any bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King, or their families. Hoover sometimes used that information for subtle blackmail to ensure his and the bureau’s power.

His point:

The notion that the FBI’s purity would be endangered if its counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations were a more integrated part of the intelligence community seems laughable. If the FBI were to be corrupt, as it surely was under Hoover, no organizational structure would solve that problem. And if it is honorable, as it surely is under Bob Mueller (and has been for many years), then a separate national security service with a close relationship with the new director of national intelligence promises only benefits to the country’s security.

I’m not sure his point naturally follows. But this recommendation makes some sense:

Former Director Louis Freeh initiated the practice of taking new FBI recruits through the Holocaust Museum to show what can happen when the law enforcement apparatus of a country becomes corrupted. I have always thought that sort of extreme example was a bit farfetched for our country, but there is an episode closer to home. I think it would be appropriate to introduce all new recruits to the nature of the secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover. And in that connection this country — and the bureau — would be well served if his name were removed from the bureau’s building.

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