Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds
In November I [A.E. Hotchner] went out West for our annual pheasant shoot and realized how wrong I was. When Ernest and our friend Duke MacMullen met my train at Shoshone, Idaho, for the drive to Ketchum, we did not stop at the bar opposite the station as we usually did because Ernest was anxious to get on the road. I asked why the hurry.
“The feds.”
“What?”
“They tailed us all the way. Ask Duke.”
“Well … there was a car back of us out of Hailey.”
“Why are F.B.I. agents pursuing you?” I asked.
“It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”
…Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.
In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.
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If everything could be “bugged” 50 years ago, imagine how much the government knows about each and everyone of us now. I suppose Google knows everything about us.
I would posit that there is far too much data for any amount of humans to go through.
Then again, one could say that the Gov’t has a computer that picks up all sorts of key words, to that I would still posit that those keywords were put in by a human. Too many keywords equals too many hits. Too few keywords and you might miss the big one. Etc..
My point is they would like to, but they just don’t have it yet.
Hard to sympathize with such a useful idiot when it comes to the issue of a State harassing him, considering the fact he was one of Stalin’s stooges during the Spanish Civil War. However, he had many, many health problems and personal issues that would lead many to suicide.
I agree about the part about his health problems. Karen Kwiatkowski had a radio program, American Forum, where she had a whistle-blower explaining that suicide is not uncommon among many former government employees turned whistle-blower. Tapping communications wasn’t even part of the process. If they can get former, upstanding citizens to commit suicide, it would have been pretty easy to push Hemingway over the edge.
The stooge part is still common today. Look at Greg Palast and Oliver Stone on Chavez or the various Hollywood elite on Castro.
I did not mean to imply Palast, Stone, and others are spies. I meant they somehow find a way to ignore the crimes of dictators and politicians.
I never knew Hemingway was willing to be a Soviet spy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy
Useful idiot …….. you mean of course the homosexual Hoover.
The bastards. All these years the establishment has portrayed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. God what a tyranny.
Say what you like about his political affiliations, but the dude could write—like Cezanne could paint.
The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlPgm2vAsJ8
Hemingway realised he’d backed the wrong horse in Spain.
@billy was there a right (as in correct) horse to back in the Spanish Civil War?
Was there a right (as in correct) side during world war two ?
Was?
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