The more things change...

ONE MAN VS. ONE GOVERNMENT
By Liam Farrell
News-Post Staff
FREDERICK -- For decades, the most-powerful domestic intelligence agency in the United States watched a Maryland chicken farmer.
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For decades, the FBI's highest-ranking intelligence officials, including its legendary and controversial director, J. Edgar Hoover, personally exchanged correspondence on his life, which was spent investigating the veracity of the government's conclusions on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
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Mr. Weisberg gained notoriety for his books criticizing the FBI and Warren Commission for their investigations of JFK's assassination, and he is well-known for his extensive collection of government files and information, now housed in a library at Hood College.

The FBI looked into Mr. Weisberg long before he published his first book in 1965, however.

In 1939, Mr. Weisberg jeopardized the security of government information by leaking to a communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, and harbored subversive ideological sympathies, the FBI file states.

Throughout the years, government documents contain frequent attacks on the author's character, describing him as a miscreant with delusions of conspiracy.

"If you want your country to be what it's supposed to be, no matter how many times you don't succeed, you keep on trying," Mr. Weisberg told Ms. Derr. "If you want to accept what happened and pretend it didn't happen, you have a right to do it. But I don't want a country that lies to the people.

"I don't want a country in which a president can be gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of an American city and consigned to history with the dubious epitaph of a whitewashed investigation.

"I don't want a country in which federal agents can lie with impunity, including under oath, and only be promoted for it, in which the courts don't work the way they're supposed to work, in which the Congress doesn't and the media don't.

"And I don't think it's going to change right away. I have reason to believe it will but I know that if you don't try you can't succeed."