Unless Clint Eastwood has plans for a sequel to his latest movie, J. Edgar, the epic biopic of J. Edgar Hoover falls short of the mark in the honesty-with-history department.
Leonardo DiCaprio did a splendid job portraying the infamous former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However the layers of stage make-up as De Capo ages in the half-century tale are inadequate to cover up the censorship of COINTELPRO from the film.
COINTELPRO’s omission from the movie does a disservice to the audience by deleting such a massive malignancy of federal law enforcement by Hoover. COINTELPRO was simply too over the top to ignore with its national scope and lethal ferocity.
Eastwood’s treatment of J. Edgar Hoover as a quirky, relentless lawman while totally excluding the genuine evils of COINTELPRO under Hoover’s orders from the “Seat of Government” goes beyond artistic license and enters the world of propaganda.
Between 1956 and 1972, twelve different COINTELPROs were conducted targeting thousands of groups and individuals engaged in lawful activity. Hoover used his vast power to conduct a secret crime wave against political dissidents with whom he disagreed.
Noam Chomsky, a long-time COINTELPRO critic is blunt about J. Edgar Hoover’s clandestine counterintelligence operation, “FBI provocateurs repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruptions of meetings and demonstrations on and off university campuses, attacks on police, bombings, and so on.”
Eastwood’s omission overlooked FBI misconduct that included 1,500 break-ins; blackmail; instigation of violence; anonymous threats; wiretapping and a host of other dirty tricks and crimes.
In 1970, Hoover reached a new depth of despicability by personally ordering the withholding of a report from the FBI crime laboratory on the identity of a policeman’s killer in order to make a case against two Black Panther leaders, Edward Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice). Hoover’s plan worked and the two men were convicted and are still serving life sentences while the 911 caller who lured the officer to his death remains at large.
Attorney Paul Wolf, author of the report COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story, has written, “At its most extreme dimension, political dissidents have been eliminated outright or sent to prison for the rest of their lives.” Wolf explained one FBI tactic involved the arrest and prosecution of targeted individuals for “spurious reasons.”
“The FBI made use of informants, often quite violent and emotionally disturbed individuals, to present false testimony to the courts, to frame COINTELPRO targets for crimes they knew they did not commit. In some cases the charges were quite serious, including murder,” says Wolf.
Clint Eastwood didn’t need to make a documentary about COINTELPRO but to not mention even once the existence of such a gigantic corruption of law enforcement while portraying Hoover as the G-Man who always gets his man distorts the truth about J. Edgar Hoover.
Comments