Dangerous Dossiers

Herbert Mitgang's courageous book is still very topical. His exposure of FBI practices of secretly policing authors and their writings shows how intelligence services (and the establishment which controls them) are obsessed with free speech (free trade in ideas). Writers, playwrights and artists figure here only as examples for those practices. There were surely other victims. Sometimes, the author's emotions are comprehensively running high with expressions as 'an alien police state' or 'a ... sinister ... level of humiliating absurdities'. But he discovers that even librarians were asked to keep an eye on borrowers and that words like 'culture' or 'freedom' seemed to raise a red flag in the FBI. Nobel Prize winners ought to be watched by Big Brother. Some authors were even hounded to their grave. The whole book exposes the FBI as a secret government engaged in criminal behaviour composed by an interlocking network of official spies, mercenaries, opportunists and profiteurs. What is even more astonishing is the fact that in most cases the informants hadn't even read the works of the authors on whom they were spying! Herbert Mitgang stresses rightly that government files are constitutionally dangerous to the US values of individual independence (the right to be let alone). Robert Sherwood's quote summarizes perfectly the dilemma:'If our national security is to be rated above the security, the civil liberties, the dignity of every individual American, then our national security is not worth defending'. This is a most necessary book for the defense of individual freedom.

This book discusses the FBI's program of targeting authors as possibly subversive to the USA-- authors such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, EB White (Charlotte's Web) and others. It also discusses how the FBI tried pressuring the American Library Assn into maintaining reading lists of its patrons but the Assn refused. Some universities do this and have been doing it. This book a frightening account of an agency with broad police powers and the capability of labelling anyone as an enemy of the state for expressing ideas.