Alien Ink: The Fbi's War on Freedom of Expression [Hardcover]

Natalie Robins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1992

A prize-winning poet and author of Savage Grace traces the FBI's history of treading on the first amendment with accounts of how the organization intimidated writers and hired librarians as spies. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this definitive sourcebook on a disgraceful chapter in American history, Robins shows how the FBI far exceeded its proper investigative role to wage war against American writers.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

There's nothing new in the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was paranoid and invasive of people's privacy, but Robins, author of the Edgar Award-winning true crime book Savage Grace ( LJ 7/85), adds a few more nails to the coffin as she provides exhaustive, often petty details of the files Hoover and the FBI kept on writers involved in any "suspect" activity. While Robins's research is admirable--much of the documentation is drawn from Freedom of Information Acts requests--her report lacks the compelling drama of Victor Navasky's National Book Award-winning Naming Names ( LJ 9/15/80). Still, librarians will be pleased to note that Robins includes the FBI's Library Awareness Program as part of the attack on freedom of expression, although she ends with the disturbing note that the program is probably still very much alive. Recommended for extensive collections on the FBI and 20th-century American writers.
- Judy Quinn, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 495 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co; 1st edition (March 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688068855
• ISBN-13: 978-0688068851
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,313,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who are the brain police?, July 25, 2007

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Alien Ink: The Fbi's War on Freedom of Expression (Paperback)

I am surprised not to find any reviews of Natalie Robins' "Alien Ink," not only because it was an excellent study of the crossroads of literature and politics when it was published in 1992, but even more so because the issue it then raised has returned, big time, since September 2001

Setting aside the serious issues of disloyalty and tyranny, "Alien Ink" is a superbly funny, often hilarious book. Robins used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the files of over a hundred writers.

I laughed out loud at the dumb clucks who investigated the subversive threat of Joyce Kilmer, a woman (as the FBI thought) who had then been dead for 23 years.

You can't make this stuff up.

Of course, there was a serious side to all this. Not of a serious threat to the nation. Nothing could be funnier than the COINTELPRO operation designed by the Federal Bureau of Morons to create dissention among American Communists.

If the Communists had not existed, the FBI would have had to invent them, which, in a sense, it did.

J. Edgar Hoover went to his grave knowing nothing about Communism, but he knew what he didn't like: furriners, homosexuals (lot of transference there), blacks, women, Jews, poets, thinkers, adulterers.

Being both a moral and a physical coward, he greedily collected information (almost all of it wrong, the files show) about writers, but he was too afraid to do anything to them. Writers under the cloudy microscope of the bureau were not disappeared into concentration camps. At worst, most of the time, even in the McCarthy era, they had trouble getting passports or were harassed in childish ways.

Hoover was scared of them because they were smarter than he was and they had the means and access to publicity to fight back. Had Robins sought the files of more obscure Americans -- high school teachers, for example -- the story would be less funny and more grim.

Still, malevolent creep that he was, Hoover did writers as much damage as he dared. The files collected are not only of leftists. You did not need to be denounced by some perverted Catholic bishop to get into the FBI's index prohibitorum. You did not even need to be alive. Hoover kept files on his friends, too.

Of course, being a friend and (like professional libeler George Sokolsky) an agent of Hoover's was no easy job. She could be a real bitch.

All subsequent directors of the FBI -- who have all been tall -- have been grateful for the long reign of the twisted little freak. Every stupid trick the bureau undertook for half a century can be explained away now as part of the regrettable failings of a weird psychotic who somehow inveigled himself into a position of power.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. The FBI didn't behave the way it did and does because of Hoover but because all secret political police must behave that way. Although Robins was hesitantly hopeful of better behavior -- especially if the FBI were to be given a legal charter to operate under, which has never happened -- secret political police forces cannot ever change.

One reason is that men of intelligence and decency cannot be recruited. As Robins' selections from their reports make blindingly clear, FBI special agents were uneducated hicks with stunted morals. There is no reason to think that has changed in the past 15 years.

We really didn't need an FBI for the longest time. The only subversives who were killing people were the Ku Klux Klan, and Hoover left the Klan alone as long as it disposed of the bodies discreetly.

Now we have within our borders subversives who really are killing Americans, by the thousands, and we could use a secret intelligence force to root them out and destroy them. Unfortunately, as the daily newspapers show, the FBI is just as bad at chasing real enemies as imaginary ones.

"Alien Ink" is a book to be savored on many levels.