J. Edgar's Accounting

MASTERS OF DECEIT (374 pp.)--J. Edgar Hoover--Holt ($5).

Edgar Hoover, who is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party, undoubtedly knows more details about the subject than anyone except those who have been and are not. From the Communist Manifesto to the latest hindsights of a lapsed Marxist, the literature of Communism has largely been professional and confessional, written by insiders. The FBI chief's book belongs to a smaller but useful class of books by those who, concerned with the suppression of Communism, look at it from the outside. Hoover has written a primer-in a sense a how-to-do-them-down-yourself book. It does not claim the philosophic depth of Theodore Draper's The Roots of American Communism (TIME, March 18, 1957), which argued that the party was to some extent a native heresy grafted onto the root stock of American radicalism, but it is valuable as a sober piece of accountancy by an official whose job, among others, is to help protect federal property --including the Constitution.

The U.S. Communist Party numbered only 22,600 members in 1955, but Hoover takes special care to point out: "When the Communist Party was at its peak in the U.S. [80,000 in 1944], it was stronger in numbers than the Soviet Party was at the time it seized power in Russia." Hoover has followed the course of American Communism with the wary devotion of a seething-eye dog. From the time (1919) when he was asked to write a special report on U.S. Communism for the Attorney General, he has not changed but enlarged his mind.

Bill & Phil. Hoover briskly traces the story of Communism from its Utopian-socialist antecedents to the present, via the evil trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Along the way, he makes clear that there is really no such thing as "democratic Marxism," and gives a systematic outline of Communist operations, including infiltration, espionage, front organizations, party discipline, party philosophy--the whole weird mixture of pedantry, conspiratorial byplay, childish incantations and deadly fanaticism.

Unfortunately, the accounts of Communists at work leave them strangely faceless and bearing mostly names like Bill and Phil. Hoover makes it plain that he is sensitive to charges of sensationalism that have been made against the FBI. Perhaps on this ground, he omitted all reference to the Hiss case, on which 263 agents of his bureau were engaged, although the chapter on "Espionage and Sabotage" would seem to call for it (Don Whitehead's The FBI Story, which Hoover underwrote, dealt with the case in some detail). Hoover's conclusion is a convincingly humble plea for Americans, particularly intellectuals, to restate the faith of their fathers. He does not mention the plain fact that a great many of these intellectuals have wanted the same thing the Communists themselves wanted--Utopia --but failed to see the secret policeman who lurks behind all schemes to legislate the world into goodness.

Top Cop. The book is valuable not only for what it says about Communism but for what it says about J. Edgar Hoover, who, he points out himself, has been pictured by the Communists and others as running a kind of Gestapo. Few Americans love a cop (unless he is a badlands sheriff), but this book should make clear that the top federal cop is calm, intelligent, sane, and genuinely concerned that the duties of the FBI never be abused.

In his simple, straightforward way, Hoover perhaps gives more true answers to the "problem of Communism" than many of his more sophisticated critics. His contempt for the addled notion that Communism is essentially a response to economic inequalities is soundly based. As he sees it, there are two faiths at war in the world, and his notion that only a true faith will defeat a false one may be so plain and old-fashioned as to be right.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.