Replies

Wallace:

Contrary to your second sentence, we DO have the story by Smoot's superior concerning the reason for the dispute (i.e. his SAC and the Inspector Gearty's 50+ page report). I summarized it in my Dan Smoot blog report. It is also available in exhaustive detail from Smoot's Personnel File.
Originally, I intended to copy extensive excerpts into my blog but I subsequently decided that it would be too boring to recount all the details....The bottom-line, however, is that Smoot lied about his status and he inflated his credentials so that his admirers would consider him as some sort of "expert" in internal security matters.

Yes, Smoot fired Medford Evans -- but not for any political or philosophical disagreements. Evans was fired for "financial irregularities". Evans had a history of being fired from his jobs. Sometimes for alcohol related problems. Prior to becoming a paid employee for the Birch Society and the Citizens Councils of America, Robert Welch suggested that Birchers form a front group to protest the firing of Evans. According to Welch, Evans was fired exclusively because of his "anti-communist" convictions. This, too, was a lie -- which even fellow Birch members acknowledged in private conversations.

With respect to this portion of your comments:

"Neither Hoover and his senior FBI staff nor Robert Welch, Dan Smoot, and their co-thinkers were entirely driven by a zeal for the truth. All were human and prone to their own particular conceits. Hoover may have been more realistic relative to the threat posed by the Communist Party, USA, and its network of sympathizers than was Welch. However, as former New Leftists turned conservatives like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh have pointed out, the influence of Marxists in American society was not so much a case of robotic dupes taking orders from CPUSA headquarters or Moscow (or from some shadowy organization) but of well educated people with an agenda to transform society to their worldview successfully insinuating themselves into academia, the arts, etc., through networks of like minded people" ...

What most partisans don't seem to recognize is that Hoover's personal opinions, as recorded in handwritten comments on FBI memos, (while often colorful and caustic) were, nevertheless, largely irrelevant because the FBI functioned as a fact-finding INSTITUTION which received data from a huge assortment of independent sources --- including hundreds of informants located within subversive and legitimate organizations as well as local and state law enforcement agencies, state and national legislative committees, Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence, CIA, IRS, veterans organizations, friendly media, etc. etc.

With respect to McCarthy: Hoover initially ordered his subordinates to provide covert assistance to McCarthy but later rescinded this instruction because he thought McCarthy was reckless. In this regard, Hoover came to the same conclusion as Whittaker Chambers, whose letter to conservative book publisher Henry Regnery 1/14/54 summarized his concerns as follows:

"All of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come."

FBI security informant Herbert Philbrick told a Boston newspaper reporter that:

"He [McCarthy] harmed the cause of anti-communism more than anybody I know."

And in 1952, Philbrick observed:

"According to the Communist leaders, McCarthy has helped them a great deal. McCarthy's kind of attacks add greatly to the confusion, putting up a smokescreen for the Party and making it more difficult than ever for people to discern who is a communist and who is not."

FBI Supervisor, Robert J. Lamphere, supervised the investigations of some of the biggest espionage cases of the cold war, including those of the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs and Kim Philby plus he was intimately involved, in conjunction with Meredith Knox Gardner of the Army Security Agency, in using deciphered Soviet cables to build espionage cases.

Lamphere wrote in his personal memoir that:

"McCarthy's approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States, particularly in regard to government employment of known Communists."

He also said: "McCarthy's star chamber proceedings, his lies and overstatements hurt our counterintelligence efforts."

With respect to your closing comment about Dan Smoot:

"However, these personal flaws cannot be conflated to presuming him a huckster or a patriot for profit."

As pointed out in my Smoot report, the Bureau concluded that Dan WAS a "professional anti-Communist" whose motives were self-promotion and lurid, sensational accounts of communist infiltration into government as a means of earning a living.

With regard to the FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover era, the agency was far more monolithic in his era than now, and there was a great deal of micromanaging that took place, even down to whether the agents would wear hats. The FBI did have a wide network of informants and many analysts, but you can be sure that whatever was produced reflected the director's outlook even if he personally did not read the analysis. As much as Ted Turner was CNN and Henry Ford was Ford Motors, J. Edgar Hoover was the FBI.

Hoover was a mainstream conservative and rejected the Birchers as much as William Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Russell Kirk, et. al., did, for the same reason: their unprovable and seemingly incredible charges of Communist infiltration did a disservice to the overall conservative cause. In other words, Hoover had an agenda. I am sure Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their Attorneys General knew the agenda, but then again, liberal Democrats were not displeased at Hoover or Buckley going after the Birchers. Hoover also did not mince words about his enemies, from John Dillinger to Abbie Hoffman. If he was harsh about Welch and his associates and co-thinkers, such harshness was not uncharacteristic of the public pronouncements of the longtime FBI chief.