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Entertainment // Books

Hoover was no Einstein / After all was said and done, the FBI had nothing
Reviewed by David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Sep. 15, 2002

The Einstein File

J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist

By Fred Jerome

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS; 358 PAGES; $27.95

Was Albert Einstein an undesirable alien to be deported? Was he a Communist? A Soviet spy?
Yes indeed, J. Edgar Hoover was convinced of all that and more. So for years the powerful director of the FBI pursued a vendetta
against the pacifist,

the civil rights defender, the early anti-Fascist and the witty, popular scientist whose major sin, perhaps, was to support a kind of
one-world brand of socialism.

In The Chronicle last June, investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld exposed the criminal lengths to which Hoover went to topple
Clark Kerr from the presidency of the University of California and nearly destroy free speech on the UC campus.

Rosenfeld's articles revealed the power that Hoover used so ominously. And now Fred Jerome, a journalist and media consultant,
has revealed in fresh detail another effort by the once-formidable FBI director to harass and destroy an enemy.

Like Rosenfeld, Jerome spent years of frustration trying to use the Freedom of Information Act to open up the FBI's files on
 Einstein. And as with Rosenfeld's hard digging, it finally took a federal lawsuit to obtain what Jerome sought.

Even then, parts of the files were heavily blotted out -- "redacted" in the jargon -- but more than enough remained to prove
Jerome's case that Hoover was so obsessed with Einstein he relied on informants who were known as liars and - - before the war --
on Nazi colleagues in Germany, such as Heinrich Himmler, with whom Hoover remained a pen pal until the very eve of Pearl
Harbor.

Einstein's many biographers and scholars have obtained heavily censored portions of the FBI files on Einstein before, but Jerome's
revelations are more detailed than any, and they make absorbing reading. (Today anyone with enough patience can try to read the
fuzzy computer printouts of all 1,427 pages of Einstein's FBI file by logging on to www.foia.fbi.gov/einstein.htm.)

Those files reveal how Hoover's often gullible and sometimes ludicrous but always tireless agents rummaged through Einstein's
trash, tailed him to anti- war meetings, linked him to a subversive Eleanor Roosevelt and interviewed his friends and colleagues --
all to expose him as a dangerous subversive, which of course he never was.

Jerome's research took him much farther than the FBI's files, however, and in the course of the book he also explores what he calls
Hoover's own "far- right leanings and possible pro-Nazi linkages" and comments at length -- from his own left-wing point of view --
on the radical militancy and the bitterly anti-communist climate of the Cold War period.

Hoover was at least selective -- or his agents were -- in compiling the Einstein dossier, for Jerome found one handwritten FBI
comment in an informant's report that ordered: "No dissemination, as report contains no pertinent derogatory information."

The most "derogatory" so-called information that Hoover had, however, came not from his right-wing informants but from U.S.
Army Intelligence, whose files from the 1930s Jerome has also collected. Those files sought to establish that Einstein was in fact a
Soviet spy, and Hoover seized on the Army material to incorporate into his own file on Einstein. The thought is sad,

and frightening.

In a tangled tapestry of hints, unsubstantiated sightings and suggestions of sexual liaisons, the Army's G-2 agents discovered that
between 1929 and 1932 Einstein had received mail from Moscow in his Berlin apartment and that his secretary had "close personal
relationships, probably of an intimate nature," with an international Communist functionary "whom Source cannot identify." Proof,
obviously, of Einstein the Comintern spy, and Hoover was happy to use it.

Some of Hoover's own agents were just as stupidly wrong -- for example, the file warned that right after the war Einstein was
dangerous because he had "complete information" on the atom bomb. It took the Atomic Energy Commission to enlighten the
agents in 1947 that the great theoretical physicist had played no part in the Manhatten Project at all and had contributed nothing to
the development of the bomb.

Because of Hoover's monomania, the FBI pursued Einstein until the scientist died in 1955. But after all those agents, all that time and
God knows how much money, Hoover never pinned anything on Albert Einstein because it was a bum rap from the start.

"The Einstein File" remains a spooky story, though, and well worth reading.

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