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A review by clarks_dad
Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner
5.0
Current events have peaked my interest in everything from Watergate to the history of the FBI. I'd seen Weiner's Enemies cited by a number of media outlets as a definitive modern history of the institution, so I was excited to jump right in and see what history tells us about the FBI's current role in partisan squabbling. I have to admit, I was a bit surprised by a lot of what I found and simultaneously disheartened and assured by our present situation given some more historical context.
The book can be divided into two major parts –The Hoover Era and Everything After the Hoover Era – that follow a single theme centered around the Fourth Amendment as its sanctity is alternately violated or fetishized depending on the way the political winds were blowing and whether or not Americans felt afraid enough to tolerate violations of their civil liberties. The short of it is, according to Weiner, the FBI has mostly not been a faithful steward of our rights and has regularly relied on extraconstitutional methods to obtain evidence or to persecute individuals the bureau believed were dangers to American political and social stability. They often behaved in this way at the explicit direction of presidents of both parties.
For a long time, the arbiter of what preserved America and made her safe was one man: J. Edgar Hoover. The first half of the book reads almost like a biography. It should. Hoover fought for the creation of the FBI and then ruled over it like a feudal lord using its resources to protect his interests and advance the interests of various presidential or congressional patrons from FDR to McCarthy and Nixon. He served presidents of both parties with equal faith and what bought his loyalty more than political ideology were promises of independence and funding for his beloved Bureau. The more power and independence promised and delivered, the more Hoover tried to fulfill the wishes of that president. What was most remarkable to me about this era of the Bureau was the ambiguity of its mission. Born in 1980, I've always associated the FBI with law enforcement. That's not the way Hoover originally envisioned its mandate, however. In his mind, the FBI was an intelligence agency, focusing at times on finding and eliminating terrorist or espionage threats from Communists to Nationalists (and the occasional Civil Rights organizer). He was loathe to pursue the mob and white collar crime barely seemed to register to him. He viewed the CIA as a competitor and regularly sought to undermine it and supplant it with the FBI. In the meantime he approved thousands of black bag jobs, warrantless wiretaps, and authorized the collecting and storing of useful information about political rivals for the future.
After Hoover, the FBI struggled to regain its reputation, stature, and a clear sense of purpose. To this day Congress hasn't fully defined in legislation the legal mandate of the Bureau. After Watergate and a string of other controversies (including the revelation of the COINTELPRO program), a string of directors struggled to change the culture at the agency and set it on a legal footing that didn't involve presidential authorizations to engage in extraconstitutional behavior. It wasn't until the tenure of Robert Mueller that it seems to have found that footing. As Weiner recounts, Mueller set up over the course of his tenure a legal framework where the FBI could seek and get classified wiretaps against hostile powers through normal (judicial) legal channels. The culture of the agency changed. Where once it was common to engage in breaking and entering, the FBI found itself in a position to bear witness to and reveal to the rest of America abuses in detention and interrogation that became common at black sites throughout the Iraq War and the War on Terror. It was FBI agents who reported abuses at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the agency finally seems to have very recently discovered a backbone when it comes to protecting and defending the constitutional rights of citizens. Well...I guess that last bit depends on who you're asking these days, but clearly its behavior is far more constrained than it was in Hoover's day.
Overall this was a phenomenal work of history that relied on thousands of documents and interviews. Weiner spins an excellent narrative for an agency that has a hundred year history in everything from counterintelligence to mob-busting. The success he has lies in his discipline. Weiner always finds a way to turn the events he's narrating back to the central theme of privacy and the fourth amendment's protections as a way of grounding the story and preventing it from straying too far afield. A very helpful piece for those perplexed about the Bureau's sudden intrusion into our politics. It's not really that new. What's new is that we're actually hearing about it.
The book can be divided into two major parts –The Hoover Era and Everything After the Hoover Era – that follow a single theme centered around the Fourth Amendment as its sanctity is alternately violated or fetishized depending on the way the political winds were blowing and whether or not Americans felt afraid enough to tolerate violations of their civil liberties. The short of it is, according to Weiner, the FBI has mostly not been a faithful steward of our rights and has regularly relied on extraconstitutional methods to obtain evidence or to persecute individuals the bureau believed were dangers to American political and social stability. They often behaved in this way at the explicit direction of presidents of both parties.
For a long time, the arbiter of what preserved America and made her safe was one man: J. Edgar Hoover. The first half of the book reads almost like a biography. It should. Hoover fought for the creation of the FBI and then ruled over it like a feudal lord using its resources to protect his interests and advance the interests of various presidential or congressional patrons from FDR to McCarthy and Nixon. He served presidents of both parties with equal faith and what bought his loyalty more than political ideology were promises of independence and funding for his beloved Bureau. The more power and independence promised and delivered, the more Hoover tried to fulfill the wishes of that president. What was most remarkable to me about this era of the Bureau was the ambiguity of its mission. Born in 1980, I've always associated the FBI with law enforcement. That's not the way Hoover originally envisioned its mandate, however. In his mind, the FBI was an intelligence agency, focusing at times on finding and eliminating terrorist or espionage threats from Communists to Nationalists (and the occasional Civil Rights organizer). He was loathe to pursue the mob and white collar crime barely seemed to register to him. He viewed the CIA as a competitor and regularly sought to undermine it and supplant it with the FBI. In the meantime he approved thousands of black bag jobs, warrantless wiretaps, and authorized the collecting and storing of useful information about political rivals for the future.
After Hoover, the FBI struggled to regain its reputation, stature, and a clear sense of purpose. To this day Congress hasn't fully defined in legislation the legal mandate of the Bureau. After Watergate and a string of other controversies (including the revelation of the COINTELPRO program), a string of directors struggled to change the culture at the agency and set it on a legal footing that didn't involve presidential authorizations to engage in extraconstitutional behavior. It wasn't until the tenure of Robert Mueller that it seems to have found that footing. As Weiner recounts, Mueller set up over the course of his tenure a legal framework where the FBI could seek and get classified wiretaps against hostile powers through normal (judicial) legal channels. The culture of the agency changed. Where once it was common to engage in breaking and entering, the FBI found itself in a position to bear witness to and reveal to the rest of America abuses in detention and interrogation that became common at black sites throughout the Iraq War and the War on Terror. It was FBI agents who reported abuses at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the agency finally seems to have very recently discovered a backbone when it comes to protecting and defending the constitutional rights of citizens. Well...I guess that last bit depends on who you're asking these days, but clearly its behavior is far more constrained than it was in Hoover's day.
Overall this was a phenomenal work of history that relied on thousands of documents and interviews. Weiner spins an excellent narrative for an agency that has a hundred year history in everything from counterintelligence to mob-busting. The success he has lies in his discipline. Weiner always finds a way to turn the events he's narrating back to the central theme of privacy and the fourth amendment's protections as a way of grounding the story and preventing it from straying too far afield. A very helpful piece for those perplexed about the Bureau's sudden intrusion into our politics. It's not really that new. What's new is that we're actually hearing about it.