Transcripts For CSPAN Q A 20140331

Kind of informing was taking place. They were untrained informers. March 8, 1971, the breakin. When did J Edgar Hoover die . May, 1972. Here is some video from the New York Times website. It is by an outfit called retro report that has done a little documentary. It is the greatest heist you have never heard of and one of the most important. Last night, someone broke into the fbi offices, stole some records and mailed copies around to several newspapers. Those records would help bring an end to J Edgar Hoovers secret activities within the fbi. He ordered his agents not only to expose new left groups, but to take action against them, to neutralize them. Many americans were tapped, bug, had their mail open by the cia and fbi. The burglars were never caught. The details have remained a mystery until now. How did you find out about all this . Two different points. At the very beginning and then many years later. The first connection i had was that i was the first reporter to receive and write stories about the stolen files. Two weeks after the burglary, i received a large manila envelope at the Washington Post. It had a return address of liberty publications, which didnt mean anything to me but was slightly intriguing. Inside was a cover letter from the Citizens Commission to investigate the fbi. That is the name the burglars gave each other. What they wrote, something that a commission perhaps appointed by a resident or attorney general, they described the fact that they had burglarized an fbi office, that they had becoming concerned that there were anticivil rights organizations and they saw no way to confront this except by getting evidence of whether such suppression or dissent was taking place. It said that files were enclosed and they hoped that i would make them public. These files had been sent to five people, two members of congress, senator george mcgovern, and three journalists who were not named. I started to read them and that intense paranoia document stood out. I wasnt sure that they were real. It seems like this might be a hoax. As i read, i had been a reporter in philadelphia until the beginning of 1970 and as i read, i saw names of people in philadelphia that were familiar to me. I said, maybe these documents are real. They continued to describe the kind of surveillance that was taking place on campuses as well as in the black communities of philadelphia. The hiring of switchboard operators, postal carriers and various people on campuses. The Washington Post published my first story the next day but not without some difficulty. First of all, we had to confirm that they were authentic. That happened very quickly. The Justice Department and fbi were very much concerned. They wanted to suppress the story. They confirmed its authenticity and said, this must not be published. It is dangerous. And midday, attorney John Mitchell called ben bradley and Katharine Graham, publishers of the paper. More than three times. Each person was probably called twice that afternoon. They tried to convince them that this was a dangerous thing to do, that it would endanger National Security and would also a endanger lives. Charges that make you sit up and take notice. We took that very seriously. In reading the files very carefully, it was evident that nothing in the files was going to endanger National Security. Certainly nothing that would endanger lives. It was a hard decision for Katharine Graham. Two things that are important that are hard to imagine today since we are so used to documents coming out occasionally. One is that this was the first time that a journalist had received secret government files from a source who was outside the government as opposed to an inside whistleblower. A source outside who had stolen the files. That made Katharine Graham pause, the political and ethical issues of that. It also was the first time that the Nixon Administration had tried to force her to suppress a story that they didnt like. Those things were at play as she made her decision. I didnt realize that argument was taking place. I was just writing the story. At 6 00, i finished and found out the story might not be a published. By 10 00 that night, she did make the decision to publish. It was on the front page the next day. One of the interesting things i noticed, one of the authors one of the reporters with you is ken claussen who went to work for the Nixon Administration after that. Back that is right. At that time, ken was covering the Justice Department. A few weeks earlier he had one of the rare interviews that hoover had given in years. He had called attorney general ramsey clark a jellyfish. The story became known i think for that. Also, the beginning of the relationship between ken and J Edgar Hoover. His byline was on the story because he was the crucial link at the Justice Department when i got the files. I described them to him on the phone and he went directly to the fbi. They said, yes, she has the same files that the others received. How soon after that did he go to work in the Nixon Administration . It was may of 1972, i believe. He is now deceased. I understand from a former colleague that one of the first things he did when he was setting up his office at the white house was to place on a counter a photograph of hoover that was signed, with affection from J Edgar Hoover. 1971, you report the story, when and no one knew at the time who the eight people involved in all this you talk about each one of them in your book. You didnt know what their names were. Tell us the story about the dinner you had where you found out for the first time. It was in 1989. Back at the time, the fbi tried very hard to identify the people. They put 200 agents in the philadelphia area and throughout new jersey to try to find them. After a rather intense fiveyear investigation, did not find them. I wasnt looking for them. At the time i receive the files, i was familiar with the fact that there was this huge Peace Movement in the philadelphia area that included the catholic Peace Movement. That the envelope was addressed from that area wasnt surprising. I didnt think about who it might have been but i assumed it was within that movement. As the files cap coming, i just focused on the subjects without thinking about who was sending them. In 1989, i was living in california. I had a trip east and i gave myself a gift of a long weekend in philadelphia to see friends and acquaintances i had known when i worked there in the late 1960s. One of those evenings i was having dinner at the home of john and Bonnie Raines. We hadnt seen each other for a decade. In the middle of dinner, their youngest child mary came down to talk to one of them. John raines said, mary, we want you to know betty. Many years ago when your dad and mother had information about the fbi, we gave it to betty. I was stunned. How had you known them before . When i was a reporter in philadelphia, part of what i did was cover religion. John raines was a professor at the department of religion at temple university. That department was fairly innovative. It was comparative religion. They had many guests coming from other countries with very interesting panels and various kinds of events that i covered. Where were they living at the time . They were living in when i found out, at the time of the burglary they were living in germantown. By the time i found out, they were living in bala cynwyd. I never would have guessed. Here is this lovely family with four children and a dog and a large house in the suburbs. I dont think anyone would have guessed that. Here is a clip of Bonnie Raines talking about this. She was 29 when she broke in. Lets look at this. This is a couple of months ago when you were involved in this event in philadelphia. My role in preparing for the burglary was to go inside the office. After the fact, they realized they had been cased by my face. I did try to disguise my appearance as much as i could. I never took my gloves off the whole time i was taking notes. When i was interviewing the man in the office. It was a pretty crummy sketch. It didnt look very much like i looked on a daytoday basis. They did realize. They spotted her immediately. That woman, as J Edgar Hoover would often refer to her. Find me that woman, was the quote. J edgar, she is right here. [laughter] we have the sketch in your book to show what that was all about. Who did this sketch . It was a Police Artist sketch, an artist for the philadelphia police. Many fbi all the people involved in the investigation were carrying that sketch. They never found bonnie. They almost did see her one day. The fbi came to the raines home and interviewed john. After they left, five minutes later, bonnie came back to the house. They were quite shaken by the fact that they had such a nearmiss. I think the sketch was better him than bonnie gives credit. If they had seen her, they might have made the connection. There was another woman in the movement who looked very much like bonnie. They broke down the door to her home, removed many things from her home and harassed her quite a bit. They thought that perhaps she was bonnie. In 1989, were there many people at this dinner . It was just the three of us. What was your first reaction . What did you say to them that night . I watched their daughters reaction and i could tell that this didnt mean a thing to her. It meant a great deal to me. I waited until she left the room and then said, are you telling me that you are media burglars . They were glowing. They explained that they were. Part of the reason why this is very unusual is that i learned very quickly that evening, they had taken a vow of secrecy. The eight of them. They promised each other they wouldnt reveal this. They also had not been in touch with each other on purpose. Fear of association of one would lead to arrest of the others. I just immediately started asking all kinds of questions. We talked for many hours into the night. Did you take notes . I didnt take notes. I continued to think about it. It was just a couple of weeks until i felt very strongly that this was a very important piece of history that should be documented. I wanted to write a book about it. Max what were you doing in california . I was the head of the Journalism Department at San Francisco state university. I did have one continuous connection with the burglary. I taught journalism ethics while i was at San Francisco state. Each semester, we would come to a point where we would talk about the ethics of dealing with stolen documents. At that time, i would eventually tell them about the time i received stolen documents. I want to show bonnies husband john raines. What are the two of them doing today . Him him him him they are retired. John continued to be a professor of religion at temple. In retirement, he teaches there parttime. Bonnie was an advocate executive director of various childrens organizations in the philadelphia area. She continues parttime to do some of that advocacy. The clip we have is talking about the xerox machine. You have a whole discussion about the fbi trying to find the xerox drum, the copies of that. How important was that to the story . It seemed important to the fbi. It didnt go anywhere in the end. There came a time when they learned from xerox that you could trace a single copy to the machine that it was operated on. There were many markings on copies in those days that defaced them in a way. Some of those markings indicated the model that it was copied on. Him him him other models, it could trace writedown to a particular machine. There were unique markings on each drum of xerox machines. Two of the burglars, john raines and the leader of the group, bill davidon, had made most of the copies in xerox machines in their respective departments. When the fbi discovered from xerox that they could be traced, the fbi was extremely excited. At that point, as soon as they received copies of any files, they started a campaign that xerox cooperated with, that they had agents they got people at xerox to get anyplace with a 660 machine, the model that was used to make the copies, and get samples. They got thousands of samples to the fbi lab to try to connect with machines. Lets show john raines talking about the xerox machine. I took half the files to a xerox machine in the Religion Department at temple university. [applause] we didnt realize that every xerox machine has a fingerprint on the drum. You could trace back a given document to a particular machine. We didnt know that at the time. Two weeks after we had mail the documents, i was in my Office One Day and i saw a xerox car pull up to the curb. Him a guy gets out, came into our xerox machine, removed the drum and left. The great mystery is, who was that guy . You call that a brick in the stomach moment. There were several of those during the story. He got scared to death in his office. Did he ever find out why they were picking up the xerox drum . Was that the fbi . Him it was xerox people doing it. He had every reason to believe that it was not an accident. They came and took his drum. They did in fact go to haverford and take the drum their too. It seems that it was a brick in the stomach moment. So was the day the fbi showed up at their house and interviewed john. That was a couple months later. They didnt know this until i discovered it in the 34,000page investigation of the case. I got it from the freedom of information act. I discovered it just two weeks after they interviewed him. They removed him from the long list of suspects. Another brick in the stomach moment came when, just a couple weeks after the burglary, a knock came at their door. It was the ninth burglar. That was a man who just a short time before the burglary chopped out of the group. They dont recall asking him why or his saying why. He just left. He knew every single aspect of their plans. He came and said, i am thinking of turning you all in. This was a very dramatic moment for them. They talked with him for a while. He said, i think you are going to endanger the country. There is information in those files about missile silos and youre going to endanger National Security. They were very familiar with all the files by that time and they told him that there were no such files. He left and they were still very uncertain. They invited him to come back a few days later. They hired him to paint their kitchen. He and john across from each other in the kitchen, repainted the kitchen even though it didnt need to be painted. They talked all day with john trying to convince him that the files were not going to endanger National Security and were going to inform the public in an important way. He agreed with john that from what he had seen, there were important public documents. He never made a commitment so they never knew whether he would turn them in. His name is not in your book. Do you know who it is . I do. Have you talk to him . I have not. I am not sure where he is. Why not . Do they know where he is . They do not know where he is. After that incident, none of them had any contact with him. How many people raided the office . Eight people were involved. Four actually went inside that night. With their help i found seven of the eight. All seven cooperated in telling the story and five have been fully identified. Mr. Davidon who organized it is now deceased. He died last fall. It was his idea. Bill had been involved in the antinuclear movement. That was his entry into the Peace Movement. He had been protesting a war from the very beginning vietnam. Went to vietnam to see things firsthand and also to see the Peace Movement in vietnam firsthand. In 1969, 1970, there was a deep sense of hopelessness. He was looking for more aggressive nonviolent efforts. He found himself working with the catholic Peace Movement. He had never had any involvement with them before. He became involved to the point that they moved from taking draft files and standing by. Bill came into the movement at the point where they had changed. They were doing burglaries of draft boards. This was a shocking thing to him. He didnt like the idea but he eventually concluded that this was the kind of aggressive nonviolent effort that made sense given how hopeless things were. They were also trying to damage the capacity of Selective Service to operate. He had participated in some of those. As he went from Peace Organization to Peace Organization in philadelphia he kept hearing rumors, the same rumors from very different people, that they felt there were spies in their midst. At first, he thought they were exaggerating, they were imagining. He had somebody who relied on the scientific method, he didnt believe in conspiracies. But he kept hearing it and from very reliable people. Finally, by fall of 1970 he concluded that this rumor probably was true. He was very worried. Worried that as long as it was discussed in terms of rhetoric, it would continue forever. He decided that if dissent was being officially suppressed, that was almost as important to stop as it was to stop the war. The right to dissent was so important. The right to dissent was so important. That is when he started thinking about how to do this. He realized that hoover was untouchable and there was no oversight. It would be impossible to get congress or the attorney general or the president to examine whether dissent was being suppressed. We didnt yet know that they were actively involved. It was this overriding concern that led him to think maybe breaking into an fbi office was the only way you could get the evidence. He thought it was needed in order to convince the public. Keith, he was the lock picker . Lets watch that and then you can explain how he fit into this. One of the locks when i arrived that night was not that tight. Like you see today on a kryptonite bike lock. That takes a special tool to pick. At that moment, my heart just sank. Immediately, i thought a, i am incompetent because i didnt see this lock before. B, the whole thing is off because i cant get through the door. Tell us more about keith forsyth. About half the members of the group were very young. They were people who had dropped out of college on purpose in order to work against the war. Keith had already developed some of his locksmithing skills by taking a correspondence course in locksmithing. Keith developed some of his lock picking skills by taking a correspondence course. And they practiced their skills and planned the raid in the attic. Him he put a piece of wood there where he installed locks like what he thought were the locks on the fbi door from walking by and glancing at them. His goal was to increase his speed. Him every night, they talked him him about what they had observed in casing that night. He stood there and repeated the process over and over again and finally thought he had it down to 30 seconds. When he got there, there appeared to be a second lock, which was incredibly upsetting. All he could think of at that moment was that they had installed a better lock and one that he definitely could not open. What happened shows the qualities of bill as a leader. Keith was very upset and he went out to call the motel where the rest of them were waiting for him to come back. And say ok, the door is unlocked. Keith called them and said i do not think we can continue. Bill said, come back. Bill was a very calm person, even in the middle of a storm. He had keith repeat everything. Him him him him him him keith asked questions about bonnie and what she observed when she was in the office. Then bill started summarizing. We have no reason to believe that they know anything. What is the consensus in the room . Everyone started nodding ok, lets go ahead. Most of the people agreed that without that very calm center, they would have called off the burglary. Him as it was, keith went back with a crowbar this time in addition to his lock picking tools. How long did they plan the raid . Over how long a time . Yes. They assembled first in late december and chose a name. Then they started in early january to plan. One of the first thing they did was choose the night, a very special night. When they started talking about it, it seemed as though no one night was better than any other night. One of them said there was a big prizefight coming up, World Championship, the first time that mohammed ali would be in the ring after being out for five years because of his conviction and refusing to serve in the military. So it was the night of the World Champion fight between ali and frazier. When they fought, they thought no one would be paying attention and that no selfrespecting fbi agent would be in the office. They also thought two other elements. They thought that no local police would be patrolling that him police would be patrolling that night. They would be listening to the fight. That turned out to be true. Also, the fbi office was located in a building. It was on the second floor. The two stories above were residential apartments. There was a hallway that was open so that anyone could not come down and see what was happening at any time. So they thought again that the noise from the fight, if everybody was tuned in, might muffle any kind of burglary noises that might take place. We just showed the picture that you took of the building. How much of that were you able to see when you visited . You were able to walk in and go to any floor. Did you go to the building years later. What is in there now . Him business offices, law offices, real estate offices. How many people worked for the fbi . Him five. Three or four rooms. How much actual material did they take away . They took every file in the office. It was done in the dark. They had no way of knowing what they had. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of the burglary itself. They decided to take this risk not having any idea if they would find anything of value. For all they knew, they were taking out personnel forms. If you stacked the material, how high would it have been . Well, it was 1000 files that they removed. Each of the four people took two large suitcases. One of the suitcases also had a briefcase that they had quickly taken and put in a suitcase. What time of day did they do this . They did it considerably later than they intended to. They intended to do it somewhere between 8 00 p. M. 8 30 p. M. They thought that the fight would begin then. It turned out the delay in the fight getting in matched the late start of the fight, which did not start until 10 45 that night. Him him and nobody saw them. Nobody saw them. The fbi started its investigation the very next morning and went back multiple times. The most remarkable thing is that this was across the street from the Delaware County courthouse. There was a guard station inside the glass front door of that courthouse. It was staffed 24 hours a day. They knew this. They figured out that there was no way to avoid being seen. Any china entered or left that building, that guard standing there might see them. Keith remembers that, in fact, as the people were coming out the door, well lit inside and outside, each of them carrying two large suitcases and putting them in trunks of cars, that there was a guard standing there and looking at that scene. I know from reading the investigation, he was interviewed multiple times and he did not recall seeing anything unusual. I found, by the way, you can go on the internet archives and read this material that the fbi wrote about the investigation, a lot of the files. You mean the medberg investigation . The investigation of there are parts of it that are not placed there by the fbi. It is an independent group called the internet archives. You can get on and read it. I wanted to find that one and you have a picture of it in the book which seems to be one of the two big findings of all of this. Tell me about that. It says cointelpro. Tell us about that. Of all the files that they found, many of them revealed specific actions that the fbi engaged in. Probably the one that had the strongest impact was impossible to tell that it was so important. It was a simple routing slip, a cover on a file of an article from barrons. It was advice to a College Administrator about the need to get better control of protesters on campus, antiwar protesters. The routing slip, in big letters, said cointelpro, which stood for counterintelligence program. We did not know that at the time. The fbi was watching for whether that file would emerge. I knew that it had emerged, because i wrote about what it was attached to. They knew what it was attached to, and it stirred up quite a bit of action in the office the day that the story appeared. They decided they might have to take action because, for the first time, this term, which turned out to be the name of one of hoovers most vicious operations, most powerful operations against dissidents, they knew it was outside the fbi for the first time. At first, they sent a memo out saying, this is out there but has not been reported on. We have to be even more secure in how we operate. I think it was two weeks later that they sent word to all of the offices saying this program no longer has this name. That has been interpreted as saying that he ended cointelpro. What happened was he simply removed the names of it if anyone inquired, they would say that the program did not exist, but it did continue. How big was the fbi at that time and J Edgar Hoover was running it . I cannot tell you the number of the agents. But there were 200 agents working working on the investigation. Do you want me to talk about how we found out what cointelpro was . Yes, go ahead, but i want to read something from your book about what the fbi was doing. The only time we found out about what it was was because of carl stearns, who covered the Justice Department. He was an nbc reporter. A little more than a year after the burglary, he was in the Judiciary Committee office and saw that routing slip on someones desk. He read it and notice the handwriting at the bottom where the agent is instructed to give that article to University Professors and send it with anonymous letters. That piqued carls interest, so under the freedom of information act that no one had been successful using with the fbi, carl applied for the files with which hoover had started cointelpro. He was asking what the purpose was. His case took a long time because the channels kept refusing to provide it. Finally, they were ordered to make that file available for carl. It was then, not until december 1973, that we learned about cointelpro and this massive operation that was designed to do action against dissidents, dirty tricks, harassment. Here is more from the New York Times Short Documentary on the website. It will give people a chance to see carl stearns. Is he still alive . Yes, he is. Did you talk to him for the book . Yes, i did. Lets watch this. Secret fbi memos made public today show that the late J Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the new left without telling any of his superiors about them. Many of them were clearly illegal, burglaries and threats of blackmail were used. The fbi initially defended its actions. The government had been derelict in its duty. Had it not taken measures to protect the fabric of our society. We talked about the followup director, but carl stearns, what is he doing today . He is retired. He was such a crucial building block. Him as i remember seeing what happened back then as a series of crucial Building Blocks that finally led to mass change in the fbi at that time. How much time did you spend writing this book . A very long time. I started on it in the early 1990s, when i was still a professor and administrator at San Francisco state. I was not able to spend much time on it. The 10 years prior to publication, i worked fulltime on it. My intention was to write a book that would tell the story of the burglary and the people and their motivations. How in the world was it possible for people to make a decision to do something that could have sent them to prison for years . I wanted to do more than that. I knew that this would have an impact. I did not even understand the full depth of the impact. I wanted to spend a lot of time doing it for research. There are a lot of little sidebars. One of them, and it is not that important to the overall story except that john raines and Bonnie Raines stayed in a pool house of the shrivers. Michael novak was in the car. What is that about . The summer after the burglary, the shrivers had hired john raines to organize a conference at the Bioethics Center that they just established at georgetown university, which continues to operate. This was going to be the premiere event. John was in charge of organizing a series of panels with very interesting speakers. One day that summer, shriver and john were in the backseat of a car and they were driving along, talking about various things. All of a sudden, Sargent Shriver turned to john and said, i think you had something to do with that thing up in the media. John, as he described it, was utterly shocked. He said, no. No shriver, i do not have the balls for that. Shriver said, i think you do. John decided to leave it at that. This was not a discussion he wanted to pursue. This chapter that i want to read a little bit, chapter 19, called crude and cruel. Some operations carried out by the secret fbi were crude. Look at this, for a moment, from somebody watching who says, i am glad J Edgar Hoover was doing these things because those people were against vietnam and i am a patriot. An look at this, for a moment, from somebody watching who says, i am glad J Edgar Hoover was doing these things because those people were against vietnam and i am a patriot. The vietnam effort was something that our president wanted to do and it was adopted by the congress. Why should he not do all of these things . Well, i think that most people would not believe that an fbi or any Law Enforcement agency should be going about stopping expression of opinions and that is really what we are talking about here in most instances. Where j. Edgar hoover was going after subversives. Subversives rather than lawbreakers, but he had a specific definition of subversives. It is interesting. One of the impacts of this massive effort focusing on subversives was that it defeated this confidence in Law Enforcement to go after the things that americans would expect a Law Enforcement agency to be going after. For instance, despite all of the surveillance that had taken place and the dirty tricks operations where informers were inside movements and doing damage to people, despite all of that, we never had intelligence gathered that led to the stopping of a bomb, any bombings that were planned. The Law Enforcement that was needed was damaged by this focus which was meant to stop movements and destroy individuals. I want to show a piece of video with john raines again from this event that we covered in philadelphia. He shows how, even to this day, how frustrated he is with the system. I wanted to ask if you saw him react this way. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs depending on us continuing to be afraid. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of people out there protecting us. We give each other the gift of safety every time we walk out of the door in the morning. We are the ones who provide a safe environment for all of us. I am not downplaying terrorism. Im just saying there is some kind of strange ideology of fear. You have got to be afraid. If you need us, do not ask us questions. You cannot ask us questions. It is all National Security. Be afraid. Is that the real john raines . That is the real john raines. At the core of his being, he cares a great deal about this. He is very concerned about today and what comes across in those comments. I have heard him speak like that. Were you sympathetic to this position personally . I was certainly sympathetic to the Antiwar Movement at the time. But i was i came from a very conservative background. When i arrived in philadelphia in the beginning of 1967, for the first time, i was starting to learn about things like this. Personally, i would have been completely on the opposite side in the past. I have been learning a great deal. And absorbing it. I was not publicly taking any positions, of course, but i started seeing the world in a much broader way than i had. I do not know if i could find this, but there was a quote that i wanted to ask you about. You said some strong things. It had nothing to do with this story itself. When you are teaching journalism how much of this have you observed over the years . When you are teaching journalism to kids, what would you tell them about this government . You have pretty much whacked george bush and barack obama in the same paragraph. Has this gone on your entire life . Telling the truth that is the fundamental question of i remember when i saw the documentary that was done on stone. It begins with stone saying that all governments lie. At the time i saw that, i remember thinking that is such an extreme generalization. I think it is very important to be specific. In these instances we know about, the weapons of mass destruction was a lie. Do you think that was on purpose . I do not think we know for sure. We certainly know that there was faulty intelligence. I do not think we know for sure whether we realize it was faulty intelligence, but we certainly know that the cia did not know is enough and he did not know enough and that we were really to go to war on what was too weak and what turned out to be false information. What did you think about president obama saying he was going to have the most Transparent Administration in history. A the result is the quite opposite. A tragic situation. For instance, this is a fairly wellknown fact by now,that more whistleblowers have been prosecuted in this administration than all of the previous administrations combined. I think that this is an extremely serious matter today, that there is such a threat against whistleblowers. Him it makes the job of the journalists on behalf of the public much more difficult than it has been in recent years and prior administrations. People are very afraid. They are afraid to be on the phone because of phone records. Technology makes it so much easier to trace the footprints of whistleblowers. And the insiderthreat program that the Obama Administration is operating too, where people are encouraged to report the behavior of their colleagues. You say that J Edgar Hoover did not tell John Mitchell, who was the attorney general at the time of that cointelpro, he had no idea what was in those files and he did not level with the attorney general. That was typical behavior of John Mitchell. Do you mean J Edgar Hoover . I am sorry, J Edgar Hoover with attorney generals. Also the few that did not get them to try to change their behavior. Bill, in 1940, he lied when they told him to discontinue a list of people that could be detained in a national emergency. He lied and did not do that. In this case, it was just habitual behavior. He probably saw no perceived need. John mitchell did not even know that the burglary had taken place until he was asked to defend the fbi and prevent the files from being public. Even when he was calling ben bradley, he did not know. That is right. The reason i know that is from the files in the investigation. He had not read the files and he had not been briefed on them. Yes, he was making the strong claim of National Security and endanger lives. This is a big book, 596 pages. When did you talk about this with your agent . How long ago was it that they wanted to do this book . I got my contract in may of 2012. So you had done all the work before yes. What has been the reaction to your book . The reaction has been generally positive. On publication day, january 7, the fbi released a statement immediately prior to that, when journalists went to the fbi, and acknowledged that the burglary was an important thing for the fbi. That important reforms resulted from it. I thought that was the Biggest Surprise as far as public reaction is concerned. From all the research you have done, what is the biggest change that the fbi has made today as a result of all of this over the years . The biggest changes that took place, i am not so sure that they are still in existence today. But they were certainly very significant changes at the time. Church committee hearings, the first congressional investigation of intelligence agencies took place as a result of the succession of events that started with the burglary. They started in 1975. As a result, significant reforms took place, including the establishment of congressional oversight committees, oversight of intelligence. Such committees have never existed before. In 1974, the freedom of information act was strengthened. In the end, that might be the most important and enduring reform that came out of all this. That meant that it was possible for people to apply and receive files from the fbi. Other federal agencies too, but the fbi had been really recalcitrant. Another important reform, the others were difficult and this one was easy, and that was that and fbi director could not serve for more than 10 years. There was almost universal recognition in congress at that time that the problem developed because one man was there for so a him long that he came to see it as his personal fiefdom. We are out of time. The book is called the burglary the discovery of j. Edgar hoovers secret fbi. We thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] or for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda. Org. Q a programs are also available at cspan podcasts. Him him and your coleman and questions on next, your comments and questions live on washington journal. Talking about efforts to change virginias Mental Health system live at 1 00 eastern. Transaction is a lot less scary, a lot less large and a lot less complicated than some people would like to make it. So when you think about it in the video space, it is not a horizontal deal. We do not compete with Time Warner Cable anywhere. There is a consumer that has a betweencrane buying Time Warner Cable or comcast products. At the end of the debris will have under 30 of the markets of not particularly scary. There is one thing that is appropriate and to discuss it is the implications on the broadband side. I think there is a story there as well, lots of compete consumer impacts. Not a very scary story. I think it is indisputable today that wireless is beginning to be an effective competitor and substitute for at least many uses of broadband. Marketshare is as low as 20 . National share and broadband, not sure what that matters. The issue is local share. In no local market will there be any less choice after the transaction than before. The proposed merger between comcast and Time Warner Cable tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan two. This morning, National Journal Political Editor josh krasuhaar. Later, Emily Etheridge looks at the deadlines and extensions of the Affordable Care act. As always, your calls and can join the conversation at facebook and twitter. Washington journal is next. For most people midnight marks the end of the first enrollment. Want coverage and 2014 have to sign up through an exchange and seek a tax credit. More than 6 Million People have signed up for coverage. All indications are that healthcare. Gov has seen record traffic in these final hours of enrollment. What most of our show focuses on. We want to hear from you about your experience signing up for health exit