The church was the Community Church of Boston one of the most well-attended protestant churches in the city. But in an edict from Washington, the FBI's directory, J. Edgar Hoover, ruled that the church was a front for Communism. In a directive to his Boston office, he brusquely ordered his agents to find what he needed to prove it, according to recently declassified FBI files.



The Boston FBI had been reluctant to continue the investigation. They had begun in 1941, on a tip. They had infiltrated an informant into church activities, monitored church services and the events held by community organizations that rented church facilities. They could not substantiate their original suspicions that the minister, Rev. Don Lothrop, was a Communist. And, during five years of investigating they tried to close the case twice. The second time they tried, September 1946, Hoover harshly rebuked them and said he wanted the evidence he knew they were missing.

Shortly after Hoover's order, my mother showed up at the church. She was British, had been in the county for a short time, and had an accent that stood out. A attractive target for the FBI's informant at the church.

When my mother ran and hid my father and I went with her I was a few months old. The immigration service got involved also. Then, as now, the immigration service cooperated with the FBI. The INS mounted an aggressive search for us across New England and even into Canada. They looked for ten years. The FBI kept looking for us at for least 20 years, when they last questioned one of my father's sisters about him.

What keeps our country feeling safe from a brutish government is not just a constitution and the laws and rules that flow from it. Part of what helps keep us feeling safe is the belief that our politicians and bureaucrats are good and will not violate traditional American values of honesty and fair play, of how we do things in our country.

When fear presses down on the public, as fear of terrorism is doing now, politicians and officials may assume the public wants them to ignore some of the traditional rules. That's what happened a few decades ago. And, when it happened, when the officials stopped doing things as Americans expect them to be done, it helped tear my family apart.

The fear in those days was of Communism. Like Islamic fundamentalism, it was taken to be a powerful malicious international force intent on destroying the American way.

Then, like today, fear was used to scare the public into acquiescing to the surrender of individual rights. Then, the government seemed to be untethered from the constitution as it illegally broke into homes and offices, bugged conversations and tapped telephones and infiltrated organizations that had not violated the law. It also investigated hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom the FBI gave labels such as controversial or subversive, without defining what those elastic characterizations meant.

This all became clear in 1975 as America calmed down and as a Senate investigating committee headed by Senator Frank Church revealed that the government had trampled American principles for decades.

The Church committee found that under the banner of national security FBI investigations were massive and grew steadily wider from the 1930s to the 1970s. By 1972, for instance, there were more than half a million domestic intelligence files. The committee reported that some people were investigated simply because they opposed government policy.

The committee found that the U.S. Army had monitored ?virtually every group seeking peaceful change in the United States.? And that at least 26,000 people were on an FBI list of those to be swept up and detained in the event of a ?national emergency?.

William Sullivan, who ran the FBI's Intelligence Division for ten years, told the committee, ?... never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ?Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral??.

These are very disturbing facts. They tell us that we should not be surprised if today, with public fears again high, officials once again go against the way we think things should be done in America. Especially with the suspicion that the fear is being manipulated. After all, the president scared the country into going to war.

My family kept running. Before long the family included my two sisters. We dodged at the faintest threat, even the imagined ones, running in Texas, Mexico and California. No, they never got us. But the effort helped crumple our family. My sister Mary and I thought all the moving was simply because our parents were crazy. We got away from them as far as we could, as soon as we could.

The FBI continued trying to find something to support Hoover's view of the Community Church of Boston. They tried for 31 years. In that time they salted the congregation with informants, they followed the minister, intercepted his mail, bugged church meetings and leaked defamatory information about the minister to the press?knowing the information was not true They never filed a charge. Tellingly, they closed their investigation four months after Hoover died in office. It's what can happen when government officials stop acting the way Americans feel is just.

There is a difference between then and now. Today, my family could not have stayed ahead of the government: we would have been caught. Now, the government has much more invasive powers. Which makes it all the more important for those powers to be handled fairly.