Mitgang, Herbert. Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988. 331 pages.

For years, journalist Herbert Mitgang has been using the Freedom of Information Act to track FBI and CIA surveillance of this country's artists, writers, and academics. As this readable book demonstrates, much of the "intelligence" government snoops amassed was mere rumor and misinformation. (The FBI, in particular, seems to have understood virtually nothing about the work or the politics of the men and women it hounded over the years.) And the whole project seems, finally, surreal. No one in the dossiers Mitgang has examined had any political following. Few even had worked-out political ideas. How can G-men stalking a painter like the late Georgia O'Keeffe, let's say, possibly make this country more secure? Why all this surveillance?

The answers emerge from the files Mitgang has assembled. Populist cartoonist Bill Mauldin, for instance, had an FBI file opened on him after he helped integrate veterans' housing after the Second World War. Novelist Norman Mailer's sin was to criticize J. Edgar Hoover in public. And so it goes. The FBI, alas, has functioned less as a crime-fighting agency than as a domestic political police. And Ronald Reagan, for one, began his political career as an FBI informant reporting on fellow actors. -- Steve Badrich
ISBN 1-55611-077-4

This book was recently listed at UsedBookCentral.com

Search the NameBase site: While the best way to search for names is to use NameBase, most can also be found here by using only first and last name, separated by a single space, with no quotation marks.
Desktop indexing

Name index for Mitgang,H. Dangerous Dossiers. 1988

try a NameBase search          home page          register