The FBI Asked Him To Help Find Him

IN JULY 1975, I asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send me whatever records they had accumulated on me. On May 14 of this year, many letters and lawyers' bills later, I received 157 pages from the FBI "taken from our files identical with Mr. W.H. Ferry."

A highlight of the ten months between request, which was made possible by the Freedom of Information Act, and compliance (partial compliance, as it turns out) was a letter from Director Clarence M. Kelley saying they were having trouble locating my file, and would I please help them? What were my date and place of birth, prior addresses, employments, additional identifying data? This was needed, Director Kelley said, because "it is not possible to make an accurate search of central records based on [our] limited information." All they knew about me was my full name and present address. What a discovery for interstate car thieves, Mann Act violators, absconders from national banks! It would seem that even should felons leave their names at the scene of the crime, the FBI couldn't do anything until they furnished "additional identifying data." I complied, told them about everything including the scar on my right little finger and the slight limp from a football injury.

At last, many months later, comes the big package from Washington. I made notes:

• There are no good marks on an FBI report card. Mine has mostly D's with a hint that these would be F's if their search had not been so "discreet." Once in a while a grudging C. But surely someone must once have said a kind word about me? If so, the FBI is not interested.

• Much is scratched out, which is at first irritating but soon laughable. The idea is to protect the Bureau by not disclosing methods used to obtain information wiretaps, opening mail, and such - and by not identifying sources. This is done crudely, probably by someone bored by page after page of monotonous prose. Silly slips recur. An example: in mid-1962 Director Hoover wrote a Congressman his gratitude for "kind comments" concerning the FBI and the Director himself. The name of the Congressman is blacked out. Attached, however, is the reason for the gushy Hoover letter - a two-page excoria- of W.H. Ferry in the CongressionalRecord by Congressman Francis E. Walter, then chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

• About nine-tenths of these 157 pages come from endless repetition of the public record: newspaper stories, public testimony in Washington, the CongressionalRecord, published essays and speeches.

• Nothing appears so to agitate the Bureau as a suggestion that it is not perfect and that Director Hoover possibly was mortal, and subject to mortal failings. Hoover and the FBI had the power, for many years unchallenged by all right-thinking and Red-fearing Americans, to avenge any slight from any direction. We are now beginning to learn how often and how viciously this power was used. Now we know that the FBI incited murder (the case of the Black Panthers), wrote dirty anonymous letters (the case of Martin Luther King), maliciously degraded and slandered citizens (the case of William Albertson), all under Hoover's direction and with his approval.

• The ego of the man! An astonishing amount of Bureau time seems to have been devoted to caressing Hoover's self-image of infallibility and vigilance. My file contains many letters from citizens to Hoover which state nothing that could conceivably be considered "information" but which simply damn me and praise the Director.

• Whatever prompted 157 pages-plus of FBI interest? Evidently no suspicion of a crime committed or about to be committed by me. There are a good many mutterings about Communists, but most of the zippy parts of such paragraphs are inked out. The commotion called the Ferry file was almost entirely produced by public criticism I made of the FBI in 1956, 1958, and 1962. I thought then, as I think now, that the FBI under Hoover was a vastly overrated force; that he was an ineffectual spy-swatter; that he did great harm to the nation by .his strident and unproved assertions about the domestic "Communist menace." Each time I put forward these opinions the Bureau was galvanized into activity.

My FBI record ends abruptly in 1962, aside from a brief reference to a brochure I edited in 1968. This is a mystery. The years 1964-1972 took in rebellion on the campus, civil rights north and south, and, most important of all, Vietnam. These were the years when I, along with thousands of others, did my best to change bloody bad policies and to bring down the Administration, if need be. In this period I did my utmost to persuade anyone who would listen that we were engaged in the foulest enterprise in 20th-century U.S. history - Vietnam

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This was the season of protest marches, demonstrations, teach-ins, emergency committees, arrests, sit-ins, letters to the editor. The Bureau instructed agents "that appropriate steps be taken through all available and logical informants and sources to learn of proposed demonstrations and to identify all subversive individuals and organizations involved." No civil rights, anti-war, pacifist, or student groups were to be ignored.

But I was apparently ignored, for there are - at least so far - no items in my FBI folders for that period. Some possible conclusions:

• The Bureau is just as inefficient as I've always considered it, and has just mislaid the files;

• The Bureau is holding out and will give up more of its precious secrets only when compelled to do so.

This last is the conclusion I come to. because I know from friends that records on me exist from this turbulent period. They have seen them, and have described some of the "undigested information" they include. So much for the "sanctity" of Bureau records. FBI reports of dirty talk, neighborly backstabbing, rumors of sexual indiscretion, bickering among allies were all readily available to the right people - that is, to friends of the Bureau.

Congressman Walter could only have obtained the information on me with which he filled two pages of the CongressionalRecord from the FBI; even the language in many places is the same. And where else would columnist David Lawrence have got enough trivia about my background to occupy two columns? Names are blacked out in my files "to protect the privacy of individuals." Where was that respect for privacy when friends like Walter and Lawrence asked to see something choice?

The FBl's expertness in uncovering the unessential and ridiculous is shown in this revelation: "Previous Arrests: 1934, speeding, Detroit, $5. 1940, parking, Detroit, $1. 1941, parking, Concord, New Hampshire, $1."

This tabulation appears three times in the files before me. I had a more vivid arrest record than that, but the Bureau was apparently not able to dig it out.

There's a Dartmouth angle, too. The College is mentioned in each of the dozen or so biographical resumes. The FBI finds in the New York Daily News morgue "a photo of six individuals on the 1930 Dartmouth football team. Subject was one of these." There is also a version of my unsuccessful effort in 1953 to persuade President Dickey and the Trustees that they should resist the witch hunt into New Hampshire colleges that was started up by the then New Hampshire attorney general.

You may say, this is all dull stuff, what's the point? Just the right question. What was, or is, the point of keeping dossiers on millions of Americans who have broken no law, unless you include speeding and parking of treating as traitorous anyone willing to say aloud that he thinks something is foul and should be stopped? This country was founded on faith and confidence and hard work, and appears likely to founder on distrust, suspicion, and police work.

Labeled a "violent pacifist" in his FBI file W.H. Ferry '32 has been a newspapermanand, from 1954-69, vice president of theCenter for the Study of DemocratInstitutions. In a document in Dartmouth'sfile on him he lists under aluminiactivities: "criticism of the College.''