The Einstein File; J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/good. xxii, 358, [4] pages. Occasional footnotes. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Sources. Index. DJ has wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Fred Jerome is a veteran journalist and science writer whose articles and op-ed pieces have appeared in dozens of publications, including Newsweek and The New York Times. As a reporter in the South during the early 1960s, he covered the exploding civil rights movement, and, more recently, has taught journalism at Columbia Journalism School, NYU, and numerous other New York-area universities. In 2002, he developed and taught a course at New School University, titled "Scientists as Rebels." In 1979, he invented the Media Resource Service, a widely acclaimed telephone referral service putting thousands of journalists in touch with scientists. More than 30,000 scientists volunteered for the MRS, answering media questions in their areas of expertise. But the success of the MRS was before the Internet. "If I'd really been smart," he says, "I'd have invented the Internet, instead." For nearly a quarter century, from Einstein's arrival in the United States in 1933 until his death in 1955, Hoover's FBI, with help from several other federal agencies, collected more than 1800 pages of "derogatory information" in an effort to undermine Einstein's influence and destroy his prestige. The government's most intensive effort came in the early 1950's at the height of McCarthyism and America's Red-scare. "The Einstein File" is the story of that anti-Einstein campaign, but also the story behind it -- the why of the campaign -- providing the first detailed picture of Einstein's little-known political beliefs and activities. A passionate pacifist, socialist, internationalist and outspoken critic of racism, Einstein used his worldwide prestige to denounce McCarthy's congressional hearings, publicly urging witnesses to refuse to testify. The book braids historical events and excerpts from the FBI's Einstein dossier with a story of international intrigue and espionage. For besides abhorring Einstein's politics - and because he abhorred them -- Hoover attempted, for five years, to link Einstein to a Soviet spy ring, which necessarily becomes a profile of Einstein's quite extraordinary, and unusually over-looked, career as a political activist. Although the FBI had released parts of its Einstein dossier in 1983, Fred Jerome was able to obtain hundreds of pages previously withheld or blacked out by the Bureau's censors "for security reasons," pages which reveal, among other things, the extent to which Hoover and his agents went in collecting information on Einstein and his friends and colleagues -- monitoring their phone calls, opening their mail, rummaging through their garbage and even surreptitiously breaking into and searching residences.