First things first: Tim Weiner’s new book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, is an outstanding piece of work, even-handed, exhaustively researched, smoothly written and thematically timely.
What it is not is a history of the FBI Here’s the thing: for 104 years now the Federal Bureau of Investigation has essentially worn two hats — its traditional law enforcement “arrest a bad guy” hat and its more controversial intelligence hat. The latter is the part of the FBI that from World War I on investigated all manner of political radicals and Communists, compiled lists of Americans to be detained in the event of national emergency and engaged in at least half a century of illegal wiretapping, mail opening and burglaries.
It’s this side of the shop that interests Mr Weiner, a former reporter for The New York Times. This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that Mr Weiner previously wrote an admired history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. So, in a 500-page book on the FBI, this means not a word on Louis Buchalter — no Mafia at all in fact. There are only glancing references to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and a single sentence on the bureau’s Depression-era scramble to hunt down the likes of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. This is like writing a history of the New York Yankees but ignoring Whitey Ford and the other pitchers.
That said, what Mr Weiner does, he does very, very well. This is certainly the most complete book we are likely to see about the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operations, from Emma Goldman to Osama bin Laden. The problem with some FBI histories is that they come off as a list of unrelated cases. Where Mr Weiner excels is in connecting the dots. He identifies his themes, almost all involving the conflicting demands of civil liberties and civil order – “the saga of our struggle to be both safe and free,” as he puts it – and rigorously pursues them. As far back as 1941, for example, he finds echoes of the contemporary debate over military tribunals in the FBI case against a group of Nazi saboteurs who, after a peremptory trial before a secret court approved by President Franklin D Roosevelt, were executed within weeks of their arrests.
Illegal wiretaps and burglaries were the FBI’s key weapons almost from the beginning. Time and again, going back to the 1930s, this or that court would rule such procedures illegal. Time and again, J Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s director from 1924 until his death in 1972, simply ignored the law. A string of presidents, from Roosevelt to Richard M Nixon, knew exactly what the bureau was doing and refused to stop it.
Illegal activities were so ingrained that Hoover himself, after an embarrassing court disclosure in 1966, ordered them stopped and was ignored. Even after his death, Hoover’s successors continued to defy the courts.
Another weakness of some FBI books is their portrayal of Hoover as either a Machiavellian villain or, worse, a figure of unassailable power. He was neither. Mr Weiner does a superb job at charting the ebbs and flows of Hoover’s power, chronicling in detail his relationship with presidents over 40 years.
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For each, Hoover wooed the new president by opening his dossier of gossipy secrets, and almost to a man, the president was immediately hooked. Only Harry S Truman, and to a lesser extent John F Kennedy, consistently resisted Hoover’s charms. And only Nixon made any serious effort to replace Hoover, after the director, near the end of his life, wouldn’t go along with committing crimes far worse than his own.
In Enemies one can vividly trace the rise of Hoover’s power. It was World War II that fuelled the FBI’s growth; between 1939 and 1945, as the bureau tried in vain to capture Nazi spies across Latin America, the number of its agents more than tripled, as did its budget.
The postwar rise of anti-Communism, bringing to power Hoover diehards like Nixon and Joseph R McCarthy, did the rest. Hunting Commies, after all, was Hoover’s true life’s work — the one thing, other than his reflexive bureaucratic defensiveness, that obsessed him from his first radical raids in 1919 into the 1960s. When the Communist menace finally faded, so did Hoover. He had lost his raison d’être.
The last third of Enemies is well-worn territory. Mr Weiner adeptly traces the FBI’s slow recovery after the scandals of the 1970s and especially its dismal record tracking Al Qaeda and Middle Eastern terrorists. His choices are consistent with his aims, focusing exclusively on intelligence matters. But this leads to a decidedly uneven narrative; just as there is almost nothing in the book about the 1930s, the 1980s are left aside.
In the end, though, you don’t really mind. Mr Weiner tells you upfront what interests him, and he does an excellent job bringing home the goods, showing how the FBI in the last two decades has slowly returned to working within the rule of law. “These principles once might have seemed self-evident,” he concludes, “but the FBI had violated them time and again in the past.”
ENEMIES
A History of the FBI
Tim Weiner
Random House; 537 pages; $30
©2012 The New York Times News Service