There was a time and place, it seems so distant, like that
house made of crystal in misty skies, what is now a setting in a video game or
a visual logo of the next new capture-of-all-senses movie producer, when
American citizens cared so much about what their country was doing in places
like Vietnam, Cambodia, East Pakistan and Latin America that a small group of
them took the grave risk of stealing government files to see if their worst
fears were just that, or real. That the dissent they were engaged in had been
hollowed out through the actions of a cynical web of paid informers who sold
their integrity for some false nothing of what was in the national interest and
what was not.
On March 8, 1971, a group of citizens in Philadelphia changed
what had heretofore been known about how the secret police operated in America.
Not Cuba, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Russia under Putin. But the US of A.
One brave reporter stood up and did the right thing. Betty
Medsger of the Washington Post published the first newspaper account on these
files, which were stolen from a small FBI office in Media, Pa., during the
broadcast of the Fight of the Century, between Muhammad Ali and Philly fave Joe Frazier. She then wrote the book.
These burglars were the Edward Snowdens of their day, urged
on by a breathtaking display of social responsibility, revealing what US government surveillance forces are doing to
corrupt democracy and steal into our private lives by taking liberties that
today include hacking into the technological carapaces, where we conduct the
private affairs of our life, but in the days of the Media crime (you really
must read Medsger’s “The Burglary” http://bit.ly/19tadhq)
nothing was known of just how nefarious the FBI had become under its dictator
boss J. Edgar Hoover. How wonderful it is to consider the grace and true civic
power these burglar-heroes showed at a time of crisis, a moment that has
near-vanished from history – and would have had it not been for the amazing
work in this extraordinary document by this courageous reporter.
Next: Running for
Your Life: Chasing Winter Blahs
