CONTROVERSY: A Few Answers, Please

Bernard DeVoto is a historian and ex-Harvard lecturer who makes his real money by writing slick-magazine love fiction (usually under the pen name of John August) and gets his prejudices off his chest, with none of the historian’s usual judicial balance, in Harper’s Magazine. A few weeks ago, in Harper’s, he proposed a public campaign of passive rebellion against J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“I like a country where it’s nobody’s damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with . . . where no college-trained flatfeet collect memoranda about us,” wrote DeVoto. ” . . . If it is my duty as citizen to tell what I know about someone, I will perform that duty under subpoena … I will not discuss anyone in private with any government investigator.”

To this, Harper’s editors added an admiring little note about “Horatio” DeVoto and the hope that every devoted reader would line up behind him.

Last week G-Man Hoover disposed of DeVoto with a passing blow (“I do not care to dignify Mr. DeVoto’s compilation of half truths, inaccuracies, distortions, and misstatements”) and swung on the editors. In a letter to them, published in the current Harper’s, he asked:

“Would the editors . . . advocate that a citizen refuse to testify before the secret proceedings of a Grand Jury? . . . Would the editors deprive an applicant for a government position … of their endorsement? Does the editorial admonition mean that Harper’s advocates protecting a foreign agent against the security of the U.S. … Does Harper’s advocate the view that a person decline to furnish facts to an investigator that would establish the innocence of a person unjustly accused? Does Harper’s believe that the government of the U.S. should employ members of the Ku Klux Klan or of the Communist Party, by urging persons possessing such information not to communicate it to an investigator when interviewed? . . .”

The editors replied “To each and all of Mr. Hoover’s questions we would of course answer ‘no’ . . .” The difficulty was, they said, that FBI information was often irresponsibly used by congressional committees. This, they added meekly, was “through no fault of Mr. Hoover’s or of his Bureau’s, so far as we know.”