(Art Buchwald) Famed Columnist's FBI File Shows J. Edgar Hoover Was No Fan

Source: CBS News

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Art Buchwald poked fun at the powerful during his storied career - but one frequent target, longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, wasn’t laughing.

Hoover, who ran the federal law enforcement agency for nearly a half century, ordered agents to keep close tabs on the humorist - even having one G-man report on a Buchwald interview in Playboy, the columnist’s FBI file reveals.

Buchwald’s columns - including one in which he suggested Hoover didn’t exist and was a phantom named after the vacuum cleaner company - apparently rankled the FBI boss. Hoover repeatedly referred to Buchwald as a “sick comic,” according to the file, amassed over nearly two decades.

The 239-page file was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows such documents to become public after the subject dies. Buchwald, whose Washington Post-based column was syndicated for decades, died in January 2007.


Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/25/national/main4207013.shtml

No sense of propriety or humanity

Hoover was a real piece of crap.

That could be said of Art Buchwald, too. I can't beleive he's being depicted now as challenging the powerful. Good for him for making a career of that column, but I never read a single one that was the least bit challening, insightful, or humorous.

Buchwald seemed to be a man whose appeal was to people who were afraid of being labelled stupid or a philistine for not finding him funny.

His 'humor' seemed to be similar to the canvas painted entirely in red paint that has gawkers tellin each other how 'deeply meaningful the painting is'

But that still doesn't change that Hoover was a humorless swine who couldn't handle being the target of someone else's humor -- especially 'humor' that was as inoffensive as the vacuum crack.

Oh well. Anthony Summers wrote about the only people who didn't know James Angleton and Frank Costello had photos of Edgar and Clyde Tolson in flagrante delicto were the American people.

jeez...had irony not been invented yet?

If you can find any of his books, get them and read them! A real treat!

And yet he was feared by sucessive presidents who were too afraid to challenge him.

I'd rather have him pissing out than pissing in.

Not sure that these are his exact words.