Marquette University historian Theoharis (J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime), a leading scholar of the FBI, draws deeply on internal documents to argue that often-illegal FBI investigations subverted the agency's mission of combating Communist espionage while providing extensive background information for McCarthy, HUAC and others. Cold War historians have concerned themselves with the FDR and Truman administrations' putative "softness toward Communism," which, Theoharis argues, is unfortunate for two reasons. One, it's not true: the FBI budget skyrocketed from $5 million to $90 million between 1936 and 1952, and Roosevelt's Attorney General Francis Biddle approved all of Hoover's wiretap requests; Hoover himself assured Roosevelt in 1941 that the FBI had Soviet agents "under constant scrutiny." Second, the argument fails to consider the FBI's various failures in capturing and convicting Soviet spies, its use of illegal wiretaps, the transcripts of which would be inadmissible in a trial, and its role in the "creation of a culture of lawlessness." Spies were uncovered by Venona Project codebreakers and the confessions of Elizabeth Bentley, but the FBI failed to build cases even then, argues Theoharis. And when the major COMRAP investigation documented merely "that American Communists were Communists, not Soviet spies," FBI attention shifted from espionage to influence—not just in government, but everywhere from Hollywood to Colorado classrooms. Though the title suggests a bracing pace and a revelation-filled read, Theoharis's book is more of a studied analysis that seeks to paint a better portrait of the FBI's crucial hidden role in generating the culture of suspicions and blacklists that dominated McCarthyism. (Apr. 5)
