The State - News from Sept. 13, 1988

The FBI kept an 18-year dossier on the late Rep. Phillip Burton, a prominent liberal Democrat, and furnished documents to President Lyndon B. Johnson purporting to detail Burton’s “pro-Communist record,” a newspaper reported. The Oakland Tribune said the FBI had furnished 231 pages of files on Burton, some of them heavily censored, and withheld nearly 400 additional pages, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Burton represented San Francisco in the state Assembly from 1956 until his election to the House of Representatives in 1964, where he served until his death in 1983. The FBI files cover from 1953 to 1971, the newspaper said. The files show that the FBI tried to block the appointment of a Burton aide as San Francisco postmaster, kept Director J. Edgar Hoover informed of the smallest details of Burton’s activities and compiled unflattering information about the congressman’s family, the newspaper said. An FBI spokesman said the files “basically speak for themselves.”