Alien Ink: The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression

by Natalie Robins

Book Overview

A prize-winning poet and author of Savage Grace traces the FBI's history of treading on the first amendment with accounts of how the organization intimidated writers and hired librarians as spies.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688068855
• ISBN13: 9780688068851
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 495 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Who are the brain police?

I am surprised not to find any reviews of Natalie Robins' "Alien Ink," not only because it was an excellent study of the crossroads of literature and politics when it was published in 1992, but even more so because the issue it then raised has returned, big time, since September 2001 Setting aside the serious issues of disloyalty and tyranny, "Alien Ink" is a superbly funny, often hilarious book. Robins used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the files of over a hundred writers. I laughed out loud at the dumb clucks who investigated the subversive threat of Joyce Kilmer, a woman (as the FBI thought) who had then been dead for 23 years. You can't make this stuff up. Of course, there was a serious side to all this. Not of a serious threat to the nation. Nothing could be funnier than the COINTELPRO operation designed by the Federal Bureau of Morons to create dissention among American Communists. If the Communists had not existed, the FBI would have had to invent them, which, in a sense, it did. J. Edgar Hoover went to his grave knowing nothing about Communism, but he knew what he didn't like: furriners, homosexuals (lot of transference there), blacks, women, Jews, poets, thinkers, adulterers. Being both a moral and a physical coward, he greedily collected information (almost all of it wrong, the files show) about writers, but he was too afraid to do anything to them. Writers under the cloudy microscope of the bureau were not disappeared into concentration camps. At worst, most of the time, even in the McCarthy era, they had trouble getting passports or were harassed in childish ways. Hoover was scared of them because they were smarter than he was and they had the means and access to publicity to fight back. Had Robins sought the files of more obscure Americans -- high school teachers, for example -- the story would be less funny and more grim. Still, malevolent creep that he was, Hoover did writers as much damage as he dared. The files collected are not only of leftists. You did not need to be denounced by some perverted Catholic bishop to get into the FBI's index prohibitorum. You did not even need to be alive. Hoover kept files on his friends, too. Of course, being a friend and (like professional libeler George Sokolsky) an agent of Hoover's was no easy job. She could be a real bitch. All subsequent directors of the FBI -- who have all been tall -- have been grateful for the long reign of the twisted little freak. Every stupid trick the bureau undertook for half a century can be explained away now as part of the regrettable failings of a weird psychotic who somehow inveigled himself into a position of power. Unfortunately, that's not the case. The FBI didn't behave the way it did and does because of Hoover but because all secret political police must behave that way. Although Robins was hesitantly hopeful of better behavior -- especially if the FBI were to be given a legal charter to operate under, which has never happened --