The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier were fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world in Madison Square Garden, eight anti-Vietnam War protesters broke into an FBI office in Media, a small town west of Philadelphia. They made off with every file in the office and, within weeks, sent copies of hundreds of documents to journalists and members of Congress. The public disclosures that ensued revealed a secret FBI that used deception, disinformation and violence against people, including Martin Luther King Jr., who director J. Edgar Hoover deemed subversives-to (in the language of one directive) "enhance the paranoia [to] get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox." Despite a massive manhunt, the burglars, whose leader was a physics professor at Haverford College, were never caught and remained silent about what they did. Until now. Seven of them have been found by Betty Medsger, a former professor of journalism at San Francisco University, who, not coincidentally, was the first reporter to receive a packet of Media office documents and write about them (for The Washington Post). In "The Burglary," Ms. Medsger tells their story-and, with Edward Snowden's recent NSA revelations very much on her mind-celebrates them as American heroes. An often suspenseful narrative of the break-in, the book also tracks the response of the FBI and, most important, reviews the impact of the revelations (which brought to light the unconstitutional and illegal COINTELPRO operations) on the reputations of Hoover and the FBI. The Media documents, Ms. Medsger demonstrates, laid bare an FBI that did not spend most of its time fighting crime but, instead, used its virtually unchecked power to monitor and harass people on the basis of their opinions, appearance, lifestyles and associates (devoting two cases to conservative individuals or organizations and 200 to liberals and radicals).