Word: hoover
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...Edgar Hoover, who is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party, undoubtedly knows more details about the subject than anyone except those who have been and are not. From the Communist Manifesto to the latest hindsights of a lapsed Marxist, the literature of Communism has largely been professional and confessional, written by insiders. The FBI chief's book belongs to a smaller but useful class of books by those who, concerned with the suppression of Communism, look at it from the outside. Hoover has written a primer-in a sense a how-to-do-them...
...Communist Party numbered only 22,600 members in 1955, but Hoover takes special care to point out: "When the Communist Party was at its peak in the U.S. [80,000 in 1944], it was stronger in numbers than the Soviet Party was at the time it seized power in Russia." Hoover has followed the course of American Communism with the wary devotion of a seething-eye dog. From the time (1919) when he was asked to write a special report on U.S. Communism for the Attorney General, he has not changed but enlarged his mind...
Bill & Phil. Hoover briskly traces the story of Communism from its Utopian-socialist antecedents to the present, via the evil trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Along the way, he makes clear that there is really no such thing as "democratic Marxism," and gives a systematic outline of Communist operations, including infiltration, espionage, front organizations, party discipline, party philosophy-the whole weird mixture of pedantry, conspiratorial byplay, childish incantations and deadly fanaticism...
Unfortunately, the accounts of Communists at work leave them strangely faceless and bearing mostly names like Bill and Phil. Hoover makes it plain that he is sensitive to charges of sensationalism that have been made against the FBI. Perhaps on this ground, he omitted all reference to the Hiss case, on which 263 agents of his bureau were engaged, although the chapter on "Espionage and Sabotage" would seem to call for it (Don Whitehead's The FBI Story, which Hoover underwrote, dealt with the case in some detail). Hoover's conclusion is a convincingly humble plea for Americans...
...book is valuable not only for what it says about Communism but for what it says about J. Edgar Hoover, who, he points out himself, has been pictured by the Communists and others as running a kind of Gestapo. Few Americans love a cop (unless he is a badlands sheriff), but this book should make clear that the top federal cop is calm, intelligent, sane, and genuinely concerned that the duties of the FBI never be abused...