February 1, 2012
Drawing on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents and oral histories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Weiner (Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2008, etc.) delivers an authoritative and often frightening history of what has been, in effect, America's secret police. The history of the FBI is easily divided into two periods: the J. Edgar Hoover period and after. In 1924, before he was 30, Hoover took over a tiny, tawdry Bureau and built it into a fearsome empire he ruled as a personal fiefdom until his death in 1972. The Bureau under Hoover did as it pleased and answered to no one. Illegal wiretapping, bugging, black-bag jobs--the organization did it all in the service of Hoover's relentless pursuit of communist subversives real and imaginary. In the process he assembled files of devastating information on thousands of Americans from the presidents on down. Much of this scurrilous information was obtained on the direct orders of presidents and attorneys general, and was supplied to them for their own uses. After Hoover's death, these abuses were reined in, but the Bureau has since endured a series of flawed directors who have proven unable to bring order to its sprawling and insular chaos or overcome a culture of rigidity and bureaucratic ineptitude. Weiner focuses on the FBI's activities investigating and attempting to prevent subversion and terrorism and writes little about the Bureau's pursuit of gangsters and white-collar criminals, which has taken up far fewer resources than the public supposes. A major theme is the difference between investigations intended to support criminal prosecutions and those intended to disrupt potential subversive activity. The former require strict adherence to constitutional safeguards; the latter, however necessary they seemed at the time, have all too often trampled on civil liberties. Striking an appropriate balance between liberty and security remains an ongoing challenge for the FBI. Weiner contributes much new, troubling and thoroughly substantiated information to any serious consideration of that issue. A sober, monumental and unflinchingly critical account of a problematic institution.
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Starred review from April 15, 2012
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner (Legacy of Ashes) has done it again. This history of the FBI is a tour de force, brimming with revelations about how the bureau was created and how J. Edgar Hoover crafted a national spy agency that served many presidents for better or worse. The book benefits from Weiner's exhaustive research, fair-minded perspective in presenting events, and clear writing style. He is greatly helped by recently declassified government documents and interviews, which allowed him to detail the agency's battles with the CIA, the Mafia, and the Kennedy family. While the book is a comprehensive history of the agency, it can be read in tandem with Ronald Kessler's The Secrets of the FBI, which provides a collection of agents' stories of the bureau's investigations, successes, and failures. The books are quite different but both are worthwhile: Weiner takes a more global perspective, while Kessler offers a feet-on-the-ground account. VERDICT Highly recommended for all collections. Weiner's book is so engrossing that even the footnotes make for worthwhile reading.--Harry Charles, St. Louis
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from February 15, 2012
The dilemma of the tug-of-war among the needs of personal safety, national security, and personal liberty has long been acknowledged, even by our Founding Fathers. Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Weiner dealt effectively with this issue in Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2007). Here he tracks the efforts of the FBI to protect us from anarchists, communists, fascists, jihadists, and a laundry list of other subversives during the past century. A skilled and fair writer, Weiner resists the temptation to portray FBI officials as thugs with badges. Still, many of these revelations are chilling, as agency operatives consistently circumvented both the Constitution and statutes as they snooped, wiretapped, and interrogated. Sometimes these methods were, indeed, effective in protecting us from a variety of plots. At other times, the methods, with hindsight, seem malicious and sometimes comically ineffective. At the center of the narrative is, of course, J. Edgar Hoover, portrayed by Weiner as dedicated, often honorably motivated, but almost fanatically committed to building and then preserving the power and independence of the FBI. This is a superb examination of a national institution and forces us to consider the price we pay to feel safer. High-Demand Backstory: The critical and popular support of this author's aforementioned book on the CIA will automatically create buzz for this acount of the FBI, of course intensified by the recent release of Clint Eastwood's biopic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)