Federal Bureau of Investigation

Studs Terkel, the renowned historian and broadcaster, once sought a job at the FBI – the agency that would go on to spend 45 years tracking him as a suspected Communist, newly disclosed documents reveal.

The 269-page paper trail spans 1945 to 1990 – covering everything from Terkel’s McCarthy-era blacklisting to his involvement with Paul Robeson and third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace to a birthday party toast he once made.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer died last year at age 96, nearly two decades after the final entry in his file. The dossier was obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, which calls on the FBI to release certain documents to the public once the person has died.

Only 147 of the 269 pages were released by the agency, which said many of the documents should remain sealed because of privacy and other reasons.

From Applicant to Target

The newly disclosed documents show that Terkel asked the FBI for a job in the 1930s – to work on fingerprints – but was never employed by the agency. Instead, beginning in 1945, the feds started amassing a dossier on Terkel, who was born in New York and rose to fame in Chicago.

He promoted the civil rights movement, immigration rights and other causes that drew the attention of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which apparently pegged Terkel as a possible Communist.

Terkel worked for ABC television, hosting a show called “Studs’ Place,” but was forced to quit in 1953 because of the McCarthy-era blacklist. He became a noted radio interviewer – a passion that led to acclaimed oral histories.

He wrote more than a dozen volumes about everyday life and momentous events as observed by ordinary people. Terkel’s books include “Working,” “Division Street” and “The Good War,” which won him the Pulitzer.

Records Search

The FBI documents show agents tried to assemble documents from his birth until he was in his 70s. The effort included several New York FBI agents scouring the five boroughs – unsuccessfully – for Terkel’s birth records. Terkel, who has said he was born in the Bronx, earned a law degree at the University of Chicago and joined the Army in 1942. He was honorably discharged a year later because of his age.

Terkel’s attraction to the life of the American common man and woman was reflected in his politics, and he was frequently invited to speak at events suspected by the FBI of being infiltrated by Communists.

The FBI files record Terkel’s support for Wallace, a former vice president under President Franklin Roosevelt who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Informants also told the FBI that Terkel spoke at events held in honor of Robeson, the actor and civil rights activist.  The informants alleged that Terkel subscribed to the “Daily Worker,” a New York-based communist newspaper.

Even his nights out were monitored. In April 1950, a source told the FBI that Terkel gave a toast at a birthday party for Pearl M. Hart, a Chicago attorney who worked on behalf of immigrants.

Unconfirmed Suspicions

The closest the FBI came to documenting that Terkel was a member of the Communist Party was an allegation by one unnamed source.

A Chicago weekly newspaper, The Garfeldian, published an article disparaging Terkel for alleged Communist ties, and the FBI noted that it knew another newspaper, the Austin News in Texas, was working on a similar story.

In 1955, a memo reached Hoover’s desk recommending that Terkel be removed from the security index, since there had been no evidence of recent membership in Communist Party, referred to in the files as the CP. But this was re-evaluated in 1961, when, agents noted, “an admitted CP member advised that Terkel….was a concealed CP member in 1945.” The report goes on to describe Terkel as “a person whom the CP can always call upon to write articles, entertain and to secure funds.”

Terkel was aware he was being tracked by the FBI, and several accounts of his life recall him joking that his file wasn’t as thick as the one compiled on his wife Ida Goldberg, a social worker and anti-war activist.

Speaking Out

In an October 2007 opinion column for The New York Times, Terkel described his life under scrutiny by the feds as he criticized the Bush Administration’s reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Terkel was one of the plaintiffs in a suit against AT&T, in an effort to stop the company from turning over customer telephone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.

“In the 1950s, during the sad period known as the McCarthy era, one’s political beliefs again served as a rationale for government monitoring,” Terkel wrote. “I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My crime? I had signed petitions. Lots of them. I had signed on in opposition to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and in favor of rent control and pacifism. Because the petitions were thought to be Communist-inspired, I lost my ability to work in television and radio after refusing to say that I had been ‘duped’ into signing my name to these causes.”

Paper Trail Ends

Terkel’s FBI file ends in 1990, when agents in Miami clipped and pasted a Wall Street Journal article quoting his reaction to financier Michael Milken’s junk-bond scandal.

“We live in a corrupt, amoral moment,” Terkel told the paper. “There are a million Milkens, and he doesn’t deserve even a footnote in history. He’s reflective of our society at this time. But he probably won’t be chastised in the history books.

“People have lost their sense of outrage.”

The FBI amassed a dossier on the late journalist David Halberstam for more than two decades – keeping tabs on his reporting, tracking his marriage to a Polish actress and preparing background reports on the Pulitzer Prize winner for other federal agencies, documents show.

The feds appear to have paid particular attention to Halberstam in the mid 1960s when he was a New York Times correspondent in Poland during the Cold War – when that nation was closely aligned with the Soviet Union.

Halberstam married one of Poland’s top actresses, Elzbieta Czyzewska. He was expelled in 1967 for his coverage, including stories that cast doubt on public support for Poland’s Communist leaders.

Czyzewska, who left her homeland and moved with Halberstam to New York, also was tracked by the FBI. Halberstam’s FBI file includes magazine profiles of his then-wife, and stories about him being expelled from Poland.

Many Pages Withheld

Halberstam would go on to become a best-selling author of numerous books, including “The Best and the Brightest,” a sharp look at the leaders who guided the nation into the Vietnam War.

The dossier is 98 pages, but only 62 pages were released by the FBI, which said many of the documents should remain sealed because of national security, privacy and other reasons.

The documents were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, which calls on the agency to release certain documents to the public once the person has died. Halberstam was killed April 23, 2007, in a car accident in Menlo Park, Calif.

In one of the most famous moments of Halberstam’s long career, President John F. Kennedy called Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, to complain about the journalist’s reporting in Vietnam. Kennedy suggested Halberstam be removed from the assignment. The Times refused. Halberstam would go on to win his Pulitzer for his reporting on the war.

The FBI records released do not document Kennedy’s request – but it’s unclear exactly when the agency started the Halberstam file, since more than a dozen of the file’s initial pages were not made public.

Critical of Vietnam Policy

However, in a memorandum dated April 19, 1968, the FBI noted “that articles written by [Halberstam] in the past, including those written about the Vietnamese War, had been critical of the U.S. participation in that conflict.”

FBI agents compiled the dossier through a wide range of methods, from mining telephone company records to reading Halberstam’s articles, including one in Playboy. The file includes stories from The New York Times and notations about his jobs with Harper’s magazine and National Public Radio.

Some of the communications were written by officials the main office of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whom Halberstam once called the century’s “worst public servant.” Hoover’s long tenure at the FBI included building files on hundreds of public figures who had not committed crimes – a practice slammed by many critics.

The first entry in Halberstam’s dossier is dated September 1965. In October 1965, agents probed an anonymous letter that somehow cast Halberstam in a bad light. The details of the letter itself were redacted by the FBI.

‘No Derogatory Information’

The memorandum goes on to note that FBI files had “no derogatory information” about Halberstam. It also cast doubt on the veracity of the anonymous letter. It noted agents should treat the letter with caution, warning the missive could be “a provocation” by Polish intelligence agents or someone with “a personal vendetta” against Halberstam.

The FBI also talked with sources who provided information about Halberstam and his first wife, Czyzewska. On Aug. 11, 1969, the FBI was following a person who telephoned Halberstam. The FBI redacted the name of the person who dialed the number, though it did note that person was interested in Polish theater. The FBI did not listen in on the call, but the New York Telephone Co. told an FBI agent that the call was placed to Halberstam.

FBI Eyed Interview

On Aug. 28, 1971, the FBI weighed whether agents should interview Halberstam. The documents are unclear about why they were interested in talking to him.

The memo notes the FBI’s New York office had “no information which would preclude [an] interview with Halberstam” but would hold off interviewing him pending further instructions from the agency. There is no information from the files disclosing whether agents ever did talk with him.

The FBI prepared some documents about Halberstam for other agencies – documents known as “letterhead memorandum.” One document noted that a March 3, 1966 memo – not included in the dossier released by the FBI – was sensitive, and should not be released to another federal agency “without prior approval from the FBI.”

After Hoover died in 1972, documents concerning Halberstam thin out, though the file was added to at least through 1987. The later internal memos made public deal mainly about whether to declassify records on file.