L. Bernstein -- National Security Threat

The release of a 666-page Federal Bureau of Investigation file on Leonard Bernstein is instructive far more for what it tells Americans about the FBI and how it used its so-called intelligence-gathering resources than for what it reveals about the famed composer-conductor’s political activities and associates. As with previous FBI dossiers on well-known figures that have been pried loose from the bureau’s archives under the Freedom of Information Act, the Bernstein file bulges with an indiscriminate and unevaluated accumulation of gossip, trivia and irrelevancies, piled up in stupefying detail. It boggles the mind to consider how many taxpayer dollars and how many hours of work by skilled professionals, spread over three decades, went into compiling this tedious record.

Here is a typical extract. “(A) source of unknown reliability, but who is acquainted with the subject, advised that he believed Leonard Bernstein to be a communist. This source based this belief on the way Bernstein talks . . . (but) source was unable to furnish any specific details pertaining thereto.”

So in 1958 a nameless accuser who claimed to know Bernstein tells the FBI that the man they had already been keeping a file on for about 15 years was a communist, but offers no shred of evidence. And the FBI dutifully adds this slanderous allegation to its record, as it added countless similar anonymous accusations to countless other files. Was the Republic made a whit safer by this obsessive compilation of hearsay and tale-carrying? Can it be shown that communist subversion was in a single instance thwarted by all the snooping done on so many of America’s most prominent literary, artistic and entertainment figures? The Cold War and the domestic red scare that accompanied it in its earliest and chilliest years were not laughing matters. That does not make many of the things done in that period any less foolish.

The usually harmless political naivete of many of the prominent people the FBI spied on was matched by the disingenuous inability of the bureau, under its de facto director for life, J. Edgar Hoover, to distinguish between real and fanciful dangers to national security. Yes, there were communist spies and subversives in the United States. But what threat exactly was it feared that Leonard Bernstein posed? Or John Cheever, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, James Thurber, Gore Vidal or any of the countless others on whom the interested gaze of Hoover and his colleagues fell? The Bernstein file was obtained and released by the American Civil Liberties Union after years of trying. It would be nice to think that the FBI’s delay in giving it up was due to well-deserved embarrassment over its ridiculous inanity.