The FBI

October 15, 2007
Both a chronological narrative of major events and an examination of the important issues regarding the FBI's controversial operations and policies (e.g., its illegal harassment of organizations and its hiring of relatively few women and minorities), this book carries on a theme of Jeffreys-Jones's (American history, Edinburgh Univ.) "Cloak and Dollar" that intelligence agencies are playing confidence games on the public, exaggerating threats to get more resources and fewer restrictions. Using both secondary sources and FBI case files, the author touches on how American politics and society have affected the organization and the executive branch's efforts to control it. In contrast to other books highlighting FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's prominence, this one gives more emphasis to the efforts of the attorneys-general to guide and reform the bureau. Interest in racial problems and suspicion of African Americans are common threads throughout, making this book a good supplement to Kenneth O'Reilly's "Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 19601972". Suitable for academic and large public libraries.Daniel K. Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2007
Atypically for FBI history, this is not structured around directors of the bureau. Jeffreys-Jones, a historian of American intelligence, instead embeds his survey in the political operating room given to a national criminal investigative force. He further roots the FBI, not in its inception in 1908, but in itsinvestigations of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. Having established his conviction of races centrality to FBI history, Jeffreys-Jones concisely explains the particular political conflict (a Theodore Roosevelt attack on congressional corruption) in which the Department of Justice acquired its Bureau of Investigation.No sooner born, the new detective agency provoked a liberal reaction against its civil rights violations in the Red Scare of 191920, etching a pattern of criticism and reform of FBI excesses that Jeffreys-Jones tracks to the present. The organizations extension into counterintelligence responsibilities also guides Jeffreys-Jones narrative, arriving at the FBIs less-than-stellar performance on9/11. Detached from conventions of praise or condemnation toward episodes and directors in FBI history, Jeffreys-Jones reliably recounts the FBIs history in social and bureaucratic contexts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)