The Burglary: The Discovery Of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI

I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book.

If you think J. Edgar Hoover, longtime (48(!) years) director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was a great American public servant, you’ll almost certainly disagree. If, on the other hand, you think Hoover was a dangerous autocrat who arguably did more to subvert and distort American democracy than any other single person in the 20th century, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy Betty Medsger’s riveting 2014 book, The Burglary.

That’s true even though Hoover isn’t Medsger’s main focus. As the title indicates, the successful burglary of the FBI’s field office in Media, PA on the night of March 8, 1971 and the amateur burglars who pulled it off—escaping with over 1,000 classified documents, exposing for the first time the FBI’s illegal and unconstitutional activities, evading capture, and remaining anonymous for over 40 years—are.

It’s one of the all-time great David v. Goliath actions: eight nonviolent anti-war activists convinced the FBI was illegally subverting their movement and violating their constitutional rights decided to take on the largest and most revered law enforcement agency in the nation.

And they won.

They got in; they got out; they got away. They spent the next 10 days living their ordinary lives and their nights sorting through the files they’d stolen. In the following weeks, as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, they anonymously mailed packets of documents proving the Bureau’s wrongdoings to journalists and prominent public figures. Then, as they had planned, they disappeared—going their separate ways and vowing to take the secret of this action to their graves.

Medsger—then working for the Washington Post, previously a religion reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer (where some of them had met her)—was one of the journalists who received documents from the Citizens’ Commission and the first to write about it.

Her reporting was the first hole in the previously impenetrable dike of secrecy Hoover had carefully constructed over the decades of his reign. Nobody—not the attorney general, not the president, not the Congress—nobody looked at FBI files, unless Hoover said so (which he only did either to improve the Bureau’s public image or to destroy one of his many enemies).

Over the next few years, more revelations of FBI wrongdoing leaked out leading to the first-ever Congressional investigations of the FBI and other intelligence agencies and to major reforms (many since undone) protecting the rights of citizens and restricting the activities of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The Burglary is several books in one. The first and most enjoyable (which could be titled—if Jimmy Breslin hadn’t already taken it for his Watergate book—How The Good Guys Finally Won) is the story of how Bill Davidon, a mild-mannered physics professor at Haverford, and his co-conspirators—all of whom considered themselves patriotic Americans, some of whom had supported Goldwater for president in 1964—reached the point in late 1970 of deciding to steal from the FBI, and then successfully did so. Parts of it read like a comedy of errors, as both the burglars and the FBI make what seem in retrospect to be laughably implausible assumptions and breathtakingly bold mistakes.

The second is a systematic documentation and history of the FBI’s criminal behavior over many decades:

“Some operations carried out the by the secret FBI were crude. Others were cruel and life-threatening. Antiwar activists’ oranges were injected with powerful laxatives. Agents hired prostitutes known to have venereal disease to infect campus antiwar leaders. Prostitutes were hired in an effort to entrap leaders of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Some plots were designed to destroy specific individuals and institutions—providing an apartment diagram that guided a Chicago police shooter to ‘Fred’s bed’ so Black Panther Fred Hampton could be killed, taunting the Revered Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide.” (p. 342)

A third is the ensuing (and ongoing) political tug-of-war from the 1970s to the 2010s over what legal, political, and bureaucratic restraints (if any) to place on the FBI, the CIA, and the US’ other 15 intelligence agencies in protection of the citizenry’s rights peaceably to assemble and to speak and to dissent from their government’s policies and actions. Medsger’s particularly good at deflating attempts to puff up the public images of “if-only-people-knew-what-we-do-for-them-they-would-thank-us-and-besides-those-dirty-hippies-and-commies-got-what-they-deserved” bureaucrats and politicians like Mark Felt and George H. W. Bush.

Finally, there’s a book about the eight burglars themselves. At the time Medsger was writing, she’d identified seven of the eight (the eighth has since come forward), two of whom requested she not use their real names. Within those constraints, Medsger writes with great sensitivity and perceptiveness, providing insightful portraits of their backgrounds, what led them to the point of nonviolently attacking their own government, and how their lives have unfolded since.

With the recent popularity of movies like The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Judas & the Black Messiah, there’s obviously a market for films about Americans standing up for their rights against their own government. The Burglary has the raw material for at least two. One is about the Media FBI burglary itself. The other is the case of the Camden 28, arrested for breaking & entering a federal draft board, and destroying draft files five months after the Media burglary. By this time, despite the complete absence of physical evidence, the FBI had convinced themselves that John Peter Grady, a leader of the Camden 28, had also led the Media break-in. That baseless belief led them to so aid and abet the draft board raid conspiracy that all 28 defendants were acquitted on all charges. The whole affair ended up contributing to the US government’s decision to switch to an all-volunteer army, and further cracked open to public scrutiny the FBI’s lawlessness.

With the expansion of the national security state after 9/11, The Burglary is a sobering reminder that in politics, no victory—very much including the intelligence and law enforcement reforms of the 1970s that happened as a result of the Media FBI raid—is ever final. Far more importantly, it’s a welcome reminder that victory is possible even in the bleakest of times. Sometimes the underdog wins. Sometimes right beats might. Sometimes good triumphs over evil.

So keep fighting the good fight.