ACLU Reveals FBI’s Files on Bernstein

Want to know what pieces the late composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein played at a 1940s benefit for the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee? Or what the performers wore during a Washington rehearsal of his celebrated “Mass”?

The answers--Brahms and boogie-woogie, and some wore hot pants--along with a great many other details, are contained in more than 600 pages of FBI files compiled on Bernstein over three decades.

Bernstein’s liberal political activities--no matter how trivial or well known--were chronicled with the help of informants and news clippings for the ultimately futile purpose of proving that Bernstein was a Communist.

The FBI’s monitoring of Bernstein started in the 1940s during the Red scares that permeated American politics and continued into the 1970s, when the White House was informed of an alleged plot by Bernstein to embarrass President Richard Nixon at a performance dedicating the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

Bernstein, who died in 1990, knew of the files, even citing them as evidence of the FBI’s attempts to discredit him.

“It didn’t seem to rile him up. I think it disappointed him,” said Schuyler Chapin, a longtime friend of Bernstein’s and one of the executors of his estate.

After the composer’s death, Chapin and others in Bernstein’s circles examined copies of the files, which contain numerous passages blacked out by the FBI before they were released.

“My reaction was sadness that we had reached a point in our country that a distinguished artist was being fingered by the FBI because they didn’t like his political opinions,” said Chapin, who is New York City’s commissioner of cultural affairs.

“We’re all curious to know what it is that been blacked out,” Chapin added.

So is the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the files through a Freedom of Information Act request and is releasing them to the media.

“It’s unfortunate the FBI is still trying to withhold from legitimate public scrutiny evidence of what it was doing,” said Allan Parachini, public affairs director for the ACLU’s Southern California chapter.

Parachini, who speculates that the missing information may deal with Bernstein’s private life, said the ACLU will file an appeal challenging the FBI’s deletion of several dozen pages for national security and other reasons.

“It would be hilarious if it weren’t so serious,” Parachini said of the fat Bernstein file. “Clearly the FBI invested thousands of person-hours of surveillance on the activities of Leonard Bernstein and other individuals who should have never come under FBI scrutiny.”

For all their efforts, the FBI did not find much.

“They didn’t actually prove anything that we didn’t know all along--that Bernstein was a sympathizer with liberal causes,” said Humphrey Burton, whose biography of Bernstein was published this year.

The files examine those sympathies at considerable length, recording his membership in groups deemed “Communist fronts,” his hobnobbing with suspected Communists, his “anti-American” comments and his travels abroad.

“Confidential Informant of known reliability advised May 7, 1945, that during an executive board meeting of the American Committee for Spanish Freedom held on March 30, 1945, at 11 Gramercy Park, New York City, it was announced that Leonard Bernstein had consented to dedicate a musical number to a ‘Free Spain,’ ” one entry says.

Informants are even used for obvious bits of information, such as a 1952 observation that Bernstein was assistant director of the New York Philharmonic and was on a national tour.

There are ample references to mention of Bernstein by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which chilled Hollywood and much of the rest of the nation’s cultural community with its hearings in the 1940s and 1950s on the alleged Communist affiliations of major arts and entertainment figures.

Indeed, biographer Burton said Bernstein was denied his passport in 1953 because of his suspected Communist leanings. As a result, Bernstein signed an affidavit swearing that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.

Moreover, a subsequent Justice Department investigation into whether Bernstein had lied in that affidavit found that “the only available evidence linking Bernstein with the Communist Party was based on hearsay rather than personal knowledge.”

That the files would be crammed with secondhand information was typical, said Peter Buckingham, author of “America Sees Red,” a history of anti-radical thought and action in the United States.

“They start snooping around and end up reporting really hearsay in these files,” Buckingham said. “It’s really smear stuff . . . laughable but scary.”

The 1955 acknowledgment that there was no hard evidence against Bernstein did not dampen the government’s interest, however. Joan Peyser, who wrote a 1987 biography of Bernstein, says that Bernstein appeared before a 1956 congressional subcommittee that was concerned that he and a number of other musicians were security threats.

The FBI had little to worry about, according to Peyser:

“Frankly, I found Bernstein to be in many ways to be quite a passive man. . . . He would join the most liberal to radical causes and sign petitions. And yet when he was confronted with it and there was any kind of risk to his career he would try to extricate himself. I don’t have any evidence he was a card-carrying Communist.”

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the files follow Bernstein’s anti-war and civil rights activities, including his wife’s famous hosting of a 1970 fund-raising party for Black Panther Party members accused of plotting to dynamite a police station.

The event, which Bernstein attended and which caused a considerable stir--even in liberal circles--prompted the FBI to recommend that information be given to “a cooperative news media source on a confidential basis” about the criminal background of one of the Black Panthers.