Of Dangerous Dossiers and Endangered Depositories

DANGEROUS DOSSIERS Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors by Herbert Mitgang (Donald I. Fine: $18.95; 330 pp.) LESS ACCESS TO LESS INFORMATION BY AND ABOUT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT A 1981-1987 Chronology (American Library Assn., 50 Huron St., Chicago, Ill. 60611: $7; 104 pp. )

The federal government is gathering information at your expense, but your chances of getting that information are shrinking. This is the message of two current, very different but finally complementary books: Herbert Mitgang’s “Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors” and the American Library Assn.’s “Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government: A 1981-1987 Chronology.”

The first of these books looks at information that should never have been gathered in the first place, though it continues to be jealously guarded at taxpayer expense. The second book looks at useful information once routinely disseminated but now in danger of being “privatized”; that is, handed over to for-profit agencies that will sell it back to the citizens who paid for it in the first place.

“Dangerous Dossiers” is the story of CIA-FBI espionage against American writers, a story put together by Herbert Mitgang from the government dossiers on dozens of writers, material released to him--albeit in piecemeal, highly censored form--under the Freedom of Information Act. The extent of the surveillance is staggering: 800 pages on John Steinbeck alone. The cost of the surveillance is equally staggering. John Kenneth Galbraith’s file includes the report of a “Full Field Investigation” of him in 1950 that involved agents in Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, Newark, Detroit, Albany and St. Louis, not to speak of England and Canada. Galbraith, an economist, told Mitgang that his file, counting overhead, must have cost the American taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars. “ ‘By a wide margin,’ he said, ‘it was the most expensively researched enterprise with which I have ever been associated.’ ”

By law, Mitgang, a New York Times correspondent and past president of the Authors Guild, could obtain information only on himself and on deceased authors. However, after he published some of his findings in The New Yorker last fall, several writers or artists (including cartoonist Bill Mauldin) who had requested their own surveillance files shared them with him.

There are moments of low comedy in these files. One learned informant characterized Galbraith to an FBI agent as “doctrinaire,” but that word was evidently not in the agent’s vocabulary. Instead, the file refers to “Doctorware,” whom the agent took to be one of Galbraith’s radical mentors; “Doctorware,” later “Dr. Ware,” had a long career in the Galbraith file.

But there is nothing funny about the deeper ignorance of those who thought to protect the country by creating loyalty files on people like Galbraith. The depth of the domestic spies’ ignorance appears with painful clarity in a secret memo sent in 1942 by Archibald MacLeish, then a member of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Cabinet, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. MacLeish wrote:

“As reports on employees in the Office of Facts and Figures come to me through the Division of Investigation at OEM (Office for Emergency Management), I notice the recurrence of the phrase that the applicant is said to be ‘associated with various liberal and Communistic groups.’ This suggests that investigators have been told to consider liberalism as suspicious. Knowing your feeling on this matter, I am sure that no such instructions ever came from you.

“For the sake of our reputation in the history books, don’t you think it would be a good thing if all investigators could be made to understand that liberalism is not only not a crime but actually the attitude of the President of the United States and the greater part of his Administration?”

Hoover replied that the quoted comments did not “reflect any opinions or the policy of the FBI”; but even as he wrote, he was maintaining a file hundreds of pages long on MacLeish himself. MacLeish was then or soon would be librarian of Congress, three-time Pulitzer-Prize winner, assistant director of the Office of War Information, assistant secretary of state, etc., etc.--the very picture of the scholar-statesman and poet-patriot. But as for him, so also for E. B. White, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, John O’Hara, and about two dozen others whose files Mitgang obtained. Once it came about that liberalism--nay, the mere suspicion of liberalism--brought with it a presumption of disloyalty, there were few writers left who seemed entirely loyal. There may be files on hundreds of writers other than those Mitgang had time to inquire about.

The files he did review are monotonous in the way that accounts of abduction in a police state are monotonous. That is, nothing changes but the details, and yet the details make each new account gripping in its own way. There is, to be sure, a difference between prejudicial knowledge in a file and prejudicial action in an arrest, but Mitgang is rightly concerned that these files have been maintained to this day and that “a revised Executive Order, approved in 1986 by President Reagan (an FBI informant in his day, according to Mitgang, citing 1985 San Jose Mercury News report which he says was ‘underplayed or ignored nationally’) . . . erected a higher fence around access to information under the Freedom of Information Act.” In other words, it has become harder to find out whether they have a file on you and, if so, what it contains.

The post-Watergate Privacy Act of 1974 established guidelines permitting an individual to have access to personal information contained in federal files and allowing the recovery of actual damages when an agency acted in a willfully negligent manner. But, Mitgang says, 1983 revised guidelines issued by then Atty. Gen. William French Smith undercut the Privacy Act; and in 1986, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III went a step further, authorizing the government to reimburse Justice Department employees who had been sued in a case involving civil rights violation and had lost. Presumably, this authorization would also cover Meese’s own legal expenses in such a case.

Loss of access to surveillance files is, unfortunately, not the only loss of access that now threatens. “Less Access to Less Information,” the American Library Assn. chronicle mentioned above, comes as part of a press kit containing separate statements of concern from a score of organizations that share the ALA’s sense of alarm. A few of these are liberal “public interest” groups, but most are such mainstream academic bodies as the Assn. of Research Libraries, the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science and the Medical Library Assn.

Joined together as the Coalition on Government Information, these groups claim that the Federal Government is:

1--”restricting the publication and dissemination of information collected by federal agencies.”

2--”increasing reliance on commercial organizations to disseminate government information, which can lead to the dissemination of only that information with strong profit potential in the marketplace.”

3--”attempting to prevent open dissemination of the results of unclassified research at scientific meetings” (a strong supporting statement on this point comes from the American Physical Society).

The information that the Coalition on Government Information is after is not the skinny on such matters as whether Theodore Dreiser had a mistress and whether, when he and she went to a motel, he was impotent (such were the national security questions that animated the government’s surveillance of the author of “An American Tragedy”). No, what the Coalition worries about is the sort of unsexy stuff that only the Council of Professional Assns. on Federal Statistics could love. Dry, utilitarian data, but the taxpayers have paid for it, and why should the taxpayers not have it?

The Coalition voices two concerns with particular frequency: first, a fear that the Depository Library Program is in danger; second, a perception that the Paperwork Reduction Act is being implemented selectively to stop the dissemination of information that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget finds politically inconvenient.

What the Coalition fears might replace the Depository Library Program--a program by which libraries receive printed material from the Government Printing Office in exchange for their services in making it available to the public--is a proprietary program of electronic distribution. The trouble with this, in the resolutely uninflammatory language of the Assn. of Research Librarians, is “the uncertainty of corporate stability or continuity of service; the imposition of proprietary control over the content or use of public domain information; and, the imposition of high, profit-motivated fees for access to information created or collected with public funds. Also called into question is the appropriateness of what amounts to providing a public subsidy to commercial special interests.”

Though the Federal Government still maintains its files on writers once judged subversive (on many, in fact, who are long dead), the gathering of new information has been sharply reduced. Mitgang reports that “From an estimated 160,000 open files on subversive matters in 1975, 12 years later, there were about 25 full investigations continuing in the domestic security area.” Nonetheless, even as money grows scarce for things like the Depository Library Program, money continues to be spent to assemble new “dangerous dossiers.” Mitgang and the ALA both report a continuing attempt by the FBI to induce librarians to spy on patrons; that is, to tell the government, quite literally, who is reading what, especially when the readers are foreign-born. It is sad to hear that our government is willing to offer money for such work, and sadder still to hear that at least a few Americans seem willing to take it.

“Agent ‘T-9’ was Jane Wyman, then wife of Agent ‘T-10,’ Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild. In this internal FBI memorandum between the Los Angeles office of the FBI and Washington headquarters, Mr. Reagan is identified as having ‘seen the light.’ While supposedly representing the actors, he was reporting on their political beliefs to the FBI as an informant.” From “Dangerous Dossiers,” after a report originally published in the San Jose Mercury News.