The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS (IRE) BOOK AWARD WINNER - The story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists--quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans--that made clear the shocking truth that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation.

"Impeccably researched, elegantly presented, engaging."--David Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review - "Riveting and extremely readable. Relevant to today's debates over national security, privacy, and the leaking of government secrets to journalists."--The Huffington Post

It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists set out to use a more active, but nonviolent, method of civil disobedience to provide hard evidence once and for all that the government was operating outside the laws of the land. The would-be burglars--nonpro's--were ordinary people leading lives of purpose: a professor of religion and former freedom rider; a day-care director; a physicist; a cab driver; an antiwar activist, a lock picker; a graduate student haunted by members of her family lost to the Holocaust and the passivity of German civilians under Nazi rule.

Betty Medsger's extraordinary book re-creates in resonant detail how this group scouted out the low-security FBI building in a small town just west of Philadelphia, taking into consideration every possible factor, and how they planned the break-in for the night of the long-anticipated boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, knowing that all would be fixated on their televisions and radios.

Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public's perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers.

The Burglary is an important and gripping book, a portrait of the potential power of non­violent resistance and the destructive power of excessive government secrecy and spying.

Author: Betty Medsger
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 10/07/2014
Pages: 624
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780804173667


Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 10/23/2014 pg. 61
New York Times Book Review 11/02/2014 pg. 28

About the Author

Betty Medsger first wrote about the Media files as a reporter at The Washington Post in 1971. She is a founding member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and founder of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University, where she was chair of the Department of Journalism. She is the author of Women at Work, Framed: The New Right Attack of Chief Justice Rose Bird and the Courts and Winds of Change: Changes Confronting Journalism Education. She lives in New York with her husband, John T. Racanelli.