FBI Targeted Arthur Goldberg for Detention, Files Show

The FBI once suspected former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg of being associated with Communists and even considered the possibility of “custodial detention” for him before World War II, according to a newspaper report.

The possibility of detention and a 1941 letter from then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover listing Goldberg as being “closely associated with Communist leaders in Illinois” are among 800 pages of FBI files obtained by USA Today, the newspaper reported in Monday’s editions.

Goldberg served in the Army during the war and later was secretary of labor under President Kennedy before joining the Supreme Court in 1962. He became ambassador to the United Nations in 1965 and died in 1990.

While the newspaper report notes that Goldberg was never a member of the Communist Party, it says Hoover was suspicious of him because of his work with organized labor and as an organizer of a conference on constitutional liberties.

Goldberg was among thousands of people targeted for possible detention as national security threats, the report says. That was never carried out, though many Japanese were held in detention camps in a separate program.

*

According to the newspaper, Goldberg held a meeting in 1955 with Louis Nichols, then the assistant director of the FBI, specifically to respond to derogatory information about him contained in the FBI files.

The files indicate that Nichols was convinced that much of the earlier information on Goldberg was incorrect, the report says.