The origins of his book lie more than four decades in the past. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, I watched Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in the hit TV series The F.B.I. Zimbalist played the role of Inspector Lewis Erskine, an impeccably dressed, engaging, and thoroughly likable agent who never seemed to fail. If you were “wanted by the FBI,” it was just a matter of time before your time was up. (I later discovered that Zimbalist was personally quite friendly with J. Edgar Hoover, who treated the series as a public relations vehicle and—with the full cooperation of the show’s producers—conducted background checks on all actors who played FBI agents.)
Entering high school, I began to read press reports of wiretapping and bugging by the U.S. intelligence agencies, along with investigative stories by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who were syndicated columnists in our local paper. I was a staffer on my high school newspaper and active on the speech and debate team. As a fourteen-year-old, I wrote a speech entitled “Big Brotherhood, 1972”—unearthed decades later by my parents—in which I earnestly contended that America was heading down the path of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. One passage admonished,
Grave threats, today more than ever before, are posed to the right to be alone—the right to privacy—by telephonic surveillance, or wiretapping, and electronic surveillance, or bugging.
But, you may wonder, why shouldn’t our government wiretap and bug suspected criminals who may be breaking the law by murdering, kidnapping, plotting against our government, or any number of other offenses? After all, the underworld isn’t ethical, is it? Shouldn’t we fight fire with fire?”
The answer to these questions must be no. Those who claim to fight injustice’s cause must not lose sight of the fact that in the fervent pursuit of criminals, privacy must be preserved. No justice is achieved when one crime is solved by another. When the government employs criminal methods, it is no more law-abiding than the so-called criminal himself.
I subsequently received three phone calls from FBI agents inquiring about my speech, which I had delivered in various local competitions in high school forensics. Did some dastardly informant, disguised as a forensics coach from a rival school—or heavens, a fellow student!—report on me?
I doubt it. I had ingenuously written to the FBI requesting information to support or rebut my speech, and it is more likely that several months later, some agent had gotten around to reading the letter. I mentioned my research, including references to former attorney general Ramsey Clark and other critics of the U.S. intelligence community, who were making headlines with claims about the government’s infringements on civil rights in the name of national security.
All this occurred in the wake of the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1968, which Clark and my watchdog columnists castigated. My speech cited their evidence that this legislation contained many loopholes that allowed government agencies to wiretap and bug, with little real oversight. I remember one FBI agent questioning me about the following passage in my speech:
Not only are wiretaps and bugs invasions of privacy, but in reality they are often ineffective and inefficient. For what little surveillance accomplishes, it is a waste of law enforcement time and money. The fact that science has developed a dangerous instrument does not mean that mankind must employ it. Science has created the atom bomb. I propose that we exercise the same caution with regard to wiretaps and bugs [as] in the case of the atom bomb.
If we fail to do this, our society may reach “1984” well before we reach that year. Only if society insists on it today will privacy—the right to be let alone—exist in its true form tomorrow.
As the widespread fears since 9/11 about the restriction of civil liberties and the expansion of police power and government surveillance demonstrate, the warnings in Nineteen Eighty-Four (and my little speech!) haven’t lost their relevance.
Yes, the child is father to the man. Government surveillance, Cold War politics—and even George Orwell, NEF, and Big Brother. It’s all there—and now it’s here in this book.
So let me first thank my unforgettable high school forensics teacher, John Buettler, for patiently guiding that nervy young man of yesteryear through several revisions of his speech. We have remained close friends through the years, and I am the proud godfather of one of John’s children, who is now an adult nearing the age of forty.
My other debts are more recent yet no less heartfelt. I thank Edward Alexander, Gorman Beauchamp, Daniel Connell, Maurice duQuesnay, Ethan Goffman, Eugene Goodheart, Michael Kazin, Michael Levenson, Steve Long-staff, Jack Rossi, Jim Sleeper, and Stephen Whitfield for their conversations about the Partisan Review writers in general or this study in particular. I am especially grateful to Morris Dickstein and Alan Wald, who encouraged this book from its inception a decade ago and with whom I have discussed its direction and details.
My last and deepest thanks go to Alan Munton, my beneficent big brother, who read every line with care and made numerous valuable suggestions. Like me, Alan is a student of British literature and a strong admirer of George Orwell. He is also an erudite scholar of the modernist literary movement in twentieth-century European art and letters, above all the work of Wyndham Lewis. It is my blessed good fortune that Alan is not only a generous friend and convivial comrade but also a gifted editor who possesses an encyclopedic mind and an uncanny talent for spotting errors of usage and misinterpretations of evidence. It has been both a pleasure and honor to get to know him better through working with him on this book.
For all these reasons and more, I dedicate this study to Alan.