Review by Choice Review
Journalism professor Medsger has written a riveting account of a little-known burglary that precipitated fundamental changes in the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the then unquestioned ability of FBI officials to limit access to FBI records. She bases her book on unprecedented interviews with the participants in this 1971 burglary of the FBI's Media, Pennsylvania, resident agency, combined with research into relevant FBI records and extensive reading of the secondary literature. Medsger offers a gripping account of the planning and execution of this burglary, how the perpetrators succeeded in escaping discovery in the resultant intensive investigation launched by FBI officials, and how their public dissemination of the pilfered FBI records precipitated the needed congressional and media inquiry into the reality of FBI operations and their adverse impact on government accountability and the rule of law. This masterful survey has particularly contemporary relevance in light of recent revelations about the National Security Agency's heretofore secret and massive surveillance programs. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. A. Theoharis emeritus, Marquette University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
ON A MARCH EVENING IN 1971, eight antiwar protesters burglarized an F.B.I. office in Media, Pa., just outside Philadelphia, with astonishing ease. A few weeks of elementary surveillance had shown them the vulnerability of the target: There were no cameras to elude, no alarms to disconnect. Because the building contained residential apartments, the group chose the night of the first Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali heavyweight championship fight, an ideal distraction. It turned out that the Pennsylvania office, like so many others across the country, had almost no physical protection. Security was largely symbolic, resting on the bureau's carefully buffed reputation for efficiency in tracking down America's "most wanted" criminals, from bank robbers to atomic spies. Put simply, no one messed with J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. That fantasy ended with the break-in. Calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars not only stole every file in the office, they also circulated the worst of them to journalists across the country. The reporter Betty Medsger received a batch in her mailbox at The Washington Post. Though nothing she read even remotely compromised national security, there was plenty of material guaranteed to embarrass the F.B.I. Would any newspaper dare to print a critical story of the bureau based on pilfered files from an unknown party? Actually, yes. At The Post, the executive editor Ben Bradlee insisted that the information be disclosed as a matter of journalistic responsibility. A few days later, the piece ("Stolen Documents Describe F.B.I. Surveillance Activities") appeared under Medsger's byline on Page 1. But public interest soon faded. The headlines grew smaller - partly because the burglars were never caught (thus no spectacular trial), and partly because the story was pushed aside by larger ones, like the release of the Pentagon Papers and the fallout from another burglary known as Watergate. While the impact of the break-in is widely recognized by scholars today, the vanishing act of the participants made the full story impossible to tell. Who were they? How did they so easily disappear? At 596 pages, "The Burglary" answers these questions in meticulous detail. One of Medsger's early reporting jobs had been in Philadelphia. Returning there several years ago, she dined with two old acquaintances who told her, without prompting, of their role in the burglary. With their aid, Medsger found and interviewed all but one of the other burglars. There was no legal danger; the statute of limitations on their crimes had run out decades before. The group, ranging in age from 20 to 44 at the time of the break-in, had included three women and five men, four of them parents of small children. Two were professors, two more worked in social services, and one was a graduate student. The others were recent college dropouts. All had deep roots in the anti-Vietnam War movement. The plan they concocted was loosely modeled on the draft board raids of the radical Catholic peace movement led by Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, though the group itself consisted of four Jews, three Protestants and only one Catholic. By burglarizing an F.B.I. office, they hoped to find evidence of their worst fears: "That the government, through the F.B.I., was spying on Americans and suppressing their cherished constitutional right to dissent." Though Medsger doggedly portrays the eight as ordinary Americans fed up with the war and government deceit, their politics surely went deeper. Indeed, the statement they prepared for reporters following the burglary is almost a caricature of the eye-glazing radical manifestoes of that era, with its ritual condemnation of "war profiteering," "institutional racism" and the concentration of "great economic and political power . . . in the hands of small cliques not subject to democratic scrutiny." For this group, it appears, the war was but a symptom of a more malignant disease. The stolen material included the secret case histories of thousands of Americans. Much of it was malicious gossip about things like sexual deviance and race-mixing, two of Hoover's favorite subjects. Had this been all, the F.B.I. very likely would have weathered the storm. Its public relations machine was enormous, and the officials charged with overseeing its operations were themselves wary of what fay in the files. Hoover had served for almost 50 years, under eight presidents, because nobody dared fire a man who, in Richard Nixon's words, could "pull down the temple with him, including me." But there was more. As Medsger shows, the most important stolen document was a routine routing slip containing the word "Cointelpro." The term meant nothing to the burglars, for good reason. Cointelpro was among the F.B.I.'s most carefully guarded secrets, a huge program of dirty tricks and illegal activities designed to "expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize" groups deemed subversive by the director. It would take several years for other journalists to piece together the scope of Cointelpro, whose targets ranged from the Ku Klux Klan to the Black Panther Party. Enraged by the burglary, Hoover ordered one of the largest manhunts in F.B.I. history, with 200 agents descending on the Philadelphia area. Medsger's account of what followed superbly reinforces the point that, for all its files and informants, the bureau hadn't the faintest idea of how to penetrate a culture vastly different from its own. The burglars went about their lives, hiding in plain sight. Some continued to support the peace movement. Two were later arrested for burglarizing a draft office in nearby Camden, N.J., without being successfully linked to the Pennsylvania break-in. And some were actually contacted by the F.B.I. before being crossed off as suspects. Tracking down New Left radicals proved a lot harder than cornering John Dillinger. The eight drifted apart after the burglary. One of them turned to even more radical activities, which included the sabotage of Army munitions. Others tended to their families and their jobs while remaining vaguely attached to progressive causes, and a couple moved far across the political spectrum. One proudly voted for Ronald Reagan. These personal stories, impeccably researched and elegantly presented in "The Burglary," are the best parts of an engaging but overstuffed book. Medsger spends hundreds of pages drawing a familiar and relentlessly hostile portrait of the F.B.I. (though it's still fun to recall Hoover's ban against hiring agents with "pear-shaped heads" and his puzzled response to a list of names that included a much-heralded French Nobel Prize winner: "Find out who Sartre is," he demanded). Medsger's frequent hyperbole - describing the burglary, for example, as "perhaps the most powerful single act of nonviolent resistance in American history" - is also unsettling. (Move over, Martin Luther King Jr.) And her concluding remarks, in which Edward Snowden imitates the Pennsylvania burglars by blowing the lid off the National Security Agency's mass surveillance program, may strike some as imprecise. The problem is that, unlike Snowden, these burglars committed a serious felony on the suspicion that a government bureau was engaging in nefarious activities; they had no evidence in hand. Would their actions have been equally heroic had they come up dry? Where Snowden and the Pennsylvania burglars do converge, however, is in their decision to evade capture. Throughout the book, the burglars are portrayed as devoted followers of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. But one of the tenets of such behavior is to take responsibility for the act. I don't recall Thoreau adding: "Catch me if you can." The current debate in America over government surveillance of its citizenry has a long and controversial history. It didn't begin on 9/11, and it doesn't need technological wizardry to succeed. For those seeking a particularly egregious example of what can happen when secrecy gets out of hand, "The Burglary" is a natural place to begin. DAVID OSHINSKY holds a joint appointment in the history department and the department of medicine at New York University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 9, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
In 1971, somebody burgled an FBI office in Pennsylvania, stole secret files, and sent them to journalists. One of the recipients, Medsger revisits the story because she has discovered who the burglars were (the FBI never identified them). Organized by a college teacher, they were a small group of academics and students whose act Medsger recounts with sympathy for their audacity and antiwar motivations. In discursive detail, Medsger recounts the protester-burglars' movements, from casing the building to publicizing the purloined documents (with interludes of their worries about their fates if caught), and follows the course of the futile FBI investigation into the caper. Besides dramatizating the incident, Medsger pursues its historical significance the documents' revelation of extensive domestic surveillance by the FBI into the congressional investigations of the 1970s. Medsger also discusses J. Edgar Hoover's appointment in 1924 and NSA activities in the present. Though it could have been more tightly organized, this work encapsulates an important event of interest to readers of the history of the antiwar movement.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When a huge trove of classified documents was stolen from the Media, Pa., branch office of the FBI in 1971, Medsger (Women at Work) was one of the first journalists to cover the story. Four decades later she has tracked down the perpetrators, whose identities had never before been revealed, and written the definitive account of what she calls "perhaps the most powerful single act of nonviolent resistance in American history." The burglary revealed to the public how the Bureau served as "secret judge, secret jury, and secret warden" in its efforts to "intimidate people from exercising their right to dissent." The richly detailed narrative flows seamlessly from the planning and commission of the break-in to the FBI's bungled investigation to the explosive aftermath of the files' release. In its zeal to bring the perpetrators to justice, the FBI provided much support for the Camden 28, mistakenly believed to have committed the Media burglary as well, to rob a draft board-an attempted sting that became instead a watershed moment for the antiwar movement when the defendants were acquitted by jury nullification. Medsger concludes by following up with each of the plotters, most of whom have since enjoyed quiet lives since, unlike those who have appropriated classified files more recently. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The 1971 burglary of an FBI office in Media, PA, set off a chain of events leading to the investigation, and attempted reform, of the Bureau itself. This detailed history of that time period presents the burglary as an exemplar of civil disobedience, ably setting it in politico-historical context. Medsger covered the burglary as a reporter for the Washington Post, and her personal involvement lends credence and added weight to the narrative, which is extremely topical post-Snowden. The author (Winds of Change; Women at Work) occasionally repeats or leaves out details, the former presumably for dramatic effect and the latter presumably because she assumes readers know who the Watergate Plumbers were. This is unfortunate, as the events in question-the burglary in particular-are compelling enough on their own merits not to require deliberate narrative flourishes, and a history that takes such pains elucidating intricacies should not lose readers on account of leaving some out. VERDICT Students of American history and civil rights will be momentarily gratified to learn that, in the past, revelations of massive, secret government spying motivated good citizens to action.-Ricardo Laskaris, York Univ. Lib., Toronto (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ambitious, meticulous account of a successful burglary of the FBI, during a different time of controversy regarding governmental surveillance. In 1971, Washington Post reporter Medsger was surprised to receive pilfered FBI documents from "The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI." While the break-in at the FBI's satellite office in Media, Penn., had garnered minimal attention, the release of the documents to journalists and politicians caused a national furor. At the time, bitterness over Vietnam fueled suspicion among activists of covert governmental harassment. Several disciples of the Catholic peace movement came together as the "Commission" and hatched the audacious plan following similar actions at draft boards, which combined subterfuge with a commitment to nonviolent resistance. The deftly executed burglary soon became longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's "worst nightmare," in that the documents revealed that the FBI had aggressively harassed leftists, blacks and civil rights activists since the 1940s and kept tabs on many others, although Hoover's inner circle had long claimed "there were no FBI files on the personal lives of government officials or other prominent people." As the files were released to the Post and elsewhere, mainstream outrage prefaced that which greeted the impending Watergate scandal. Remarkably, the burglars were never caught, though Hoover's FBI pursued them doggedly, even interviewing an activist who'd quit before the burglary without realizing his significance. Years later, Medsger found they'd generally lost touch with each other and their radical past: As one told her, he was shocked to see in a documentary that "somebody apparently thought that our little action was that important." Yet, as the author points out, comparisons to post-9/11 America and recent revelations about the National Security Administration are inescapable. Medsger captures the domestic political ferment of the 1970s on a large canvas, though the narrative's extreme detail and depth occasionally make for slow going or repetitive observations.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
