Tag Archive

FBI

Watching the Detectives

TPMMuckraker, the investigative journalist wing of (Brown History PhD) Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo blog empire, has obtained most of the late John Hope Franklin’s FBI file through a FOIA request. The nearly five-hundred pages of material were apparently the result of a series of background checks conducted when Franklin received a number of presidential appointments. Executive summary: colleagues universally praised him; J. Edgar Hoover suspected him of Communist ties for having his book positively reviewed by The Daily Worker, praising a book by Herbert Aptheker, saying nice things about W.E.B. DuBois, and so forth. Excerpts from the file can be found Read more