"The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist" (St. Martin's Press, 350 pages, dlrs 24.95) - Fred Jerome
That the FBI spied on Albert Einstein has been public knowledge for two decades, but fuller details of its failed effort to prove the famed scientist was a communist agent are described in a new book.
In "The Einstein File," due in bookstores this month, author Fred Jerome says there was never any hard evidence against Einstein. However, Einstein managed to push all the buttons that activated FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's fixation with subversive activity - from pacifism to anti-fascism to "one world" government.
The FBI file on the man Time magazine dubbed "Person of the Century" first surfaced in 1983, when a Florida college professor obtained a heavily redacted version of the 1,400-page document under the Freedom of Information Act.
After 17 years, Jerome's own FOIA requests led to release of the last 300 pages, with only a few names blacked out.
In breezy, ironic and often caustic language, he probes "a dossier replete with far-out allegations ... often anti-Semitic and almost always shrilly anti-Communist." Still, the FBI file turns out to be much ado about little and, except as a footnote to history, perhaps not worth 350 pages.
The author, whose own father was a U.S. Communist Party official who served three years in prison, says that despite some 300 biographies, "the one area of Einstein's life that's been neglected ... is his politics."
Einstein, he says, was neither politically naive nor a closet communist. Instead he comes across as an independent thinker - a sort of left-leaning loose cannon whose views were his own, even if they coincided with those of groups whose activities attracted FBI scrutiny.
Jerome notes that in 1932, Einstein sided with the World Congress Against War and Fascism in condemning Japanese aggression in Manchuria, but rejected the Amsterdam gathering itself as being "entirely under Russian Communist domination."
During World War II, Einstein shelved his pacifism to urge U.S. development of the atomic bomb before the Nazis could do so. The government heeded his warning, yet denied him a role in the super-secret Manhattan Project as politically untrustworthy.
In later years, Einstein supported clemency for convicted atom spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, while denouncing the Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs as another communist "instrument."
The key evidence against Einstein, says Jerome, was an unsigned "biographical sketch" that described his Berlin office in the 1930s as a "letter drop" for communist agents and Russian spy connections. The "sketch," whose origins are unknown but may well have been fabricated by Nazis, Jerome says, concluded that "it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen."
It became the "linchpin" for the FBI's file on Einstein, which dealt largely with the Princeton University-based physicist's activities during the Cold War, the author says.
In those days, Einstein wrote critically of "evil" capitalism and campaigned ardently for disarmament, a favorite leftist cause. It was a time when the Soviets were stealing U.S. atomic secrets, McCarthyist witch-hunts were in full cry and every scrap of information about an individual, no matter how trivial, went into his or her folder at the FBI.
The FBI probe of Einstein took on urgency after atom spy Klaus Fuchs was arrested in February 1950 and Einstein made a radio appeal for an end to the arms race.
Within a day, Hoover ordered agents to start gathering "derogatory information." For the next five years - until Einstein's death in April 1955 - Hoover tried to get the goods on the scientist as a communist agent, only to have one "fizzled lead" after another, as Jerome puts it, and several informants turned out to be frauds.
"The most persuasive argument that Einstein was not involved in espionage is that he didn't share the political commitment to the Soviet Union and communism that motivated virtually all the successful Soviet spies during the first half of the century," Jerome writes.
"He was far too much a maverick, a rebel against authority, and ... not a fan of Stalin's Soviet Union."