Most of those who cast their ballots for McCain did so, I maintain, with little sense of his flawed character and thin legislative record. Thanks to the manipulations of the Northeastern press corps, McCain’s brittleness, evasions, inconsistencies and hypocrisies were concealed from an electorate that had barely if ever heard of him before the publication last fall of his ghostwritten autobiography, which implicitly offered his early experiences in a Vietnamese prison camp as a credential for the presidency.

I have consistently argued in this column, which has opposed McCain from the start, that there is no necessary connection between being a prisoner of war and governing the nation and, furthermore, that McCain completely lacks the administrative and managerial skills of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as military commander of the fractious Allies during World War II.

If there were any principles left in journalism, at least a dozen high-profile print, Web and TV reporters would have been fired outright or put on probation by now because of their gross mishandling of the McCain boomlet, which they effectively created to disrupt the campaign of Gov. George W. Bush.

The strategy succeeded because of Bush’s own weaknesses and immaturity as a candidate. If reporters actually believed McCain was ever shooting “straight talk” at them, they’re fools and patsies. But if they were playing a cunning game to help the Clinton-tarred Democratic Party, they’re amoral goons who have corrupted democracy and compromised their own profession.

When the strutting McCain started shrilly proclaiming, “I’m Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star!” every rise-of-Hitler red light should have gone on in the dull media mind. It’s frightening in national security terms to think how easily a seething megalomaniac like McCain could gain credibility through the collusion of the press corps. The TV camera has always shown that McCain’s still stuck in adolescence, sulking in the shadow of his dictatorial Darth Vader father, whom he has delusively projected into the scowling faces of the big, bad Republican establishment.

Only the pussy-whipped princelings of a press terrain soaked with feminist cant could mistake a stunted Uriah Heep like McCain for a “real” man. Ironically, liberal journalists’ blindness or malice has enormously strengthened their arch foe, Rush Limbaugh — whose radio show was the one reliable place, day by day amid the saccharine swill, to hear the refreshingly tart truth about McCain. After the McCain fiasco, Limbaugh’s cultural indispensability as an ideological counterweight should be acknowledged by every honest observer across the political spectrum.

The shocking ineptitude of Bill Bradley’s campaign has mortified many Democrats like myself who were praying that he could and would tap the intense anti-Washington sentiment in the country and win the presidency with rousing bipartisan support. Bradley’s humiliating withdrawal from the race last week will not change my vote for him (partly motivated by distrust of Al Gore) in next month’s Pennsylvania primary.

But it’s pretty clear that a basketball player will never make it to the White House until he or she takes time out to study football, the pagan language of modern American warfare. Didn’t Bradley even learn chess, for heaven’s sake? Gore knocked Bradley’s pieces right off the board. Whether Gore the epicene lie-monger can mobilize the disaffected Bradley Democrats remains to be seen, particularly if alternative candidates get on the ballot this fall.

There’s not much to report on the Hillary Rodham Clinton front this week, except for two intriguing letters from Salon readers. Roy Hill responds from Fort Smith, Ark., to my puzzlement at the odd silence of his fellow native Arkansans about Hillary’s touted achievements in that state:

In Arkansas, Hillary was always seen as a bit of a carpetbagging Yankee albatross around ole Billy’s neck. In fact, public dislike of her was an issue in more than one gubernatorial campaign, and she started calling herself Rodham-Clinton, instead of just plain Rodham, in a deliberate effort to soften her image more to the liking of traditional, Junior League, tea-and-cake types who held positions of power and influence in the state.

Hillary seemed to stay out of the spotlight and away from taking credit for policy decisions, which does not mean that she was not involved. She took steps to stay in Bill’s shadow and to soften and magnolia-ify her image, especially when he lost the governor’s office to Republican Frank White.

And as for the “Silence of the Hams” down in Razorback land, let’s just say that Hillary was never really “one of ours” to begin with, and as a group, we don’t really much care where she lands, just as long as it is far away.

Oh, dear, I couldn’t help visualizing Hillary here as a giant pterodactyl menacing Manhattan (see “One Million Years B.C.,” starring Raquel Welch in her famous fur bikini). Get out the umbrellas, you native New Yorkers! Peter Borregard, writing from El Cerrito, Calif., sharply observes about Hillary’s diner dust-up:

Actually, when H.C. stiffed the waitress, she was displaying that she is a woman of iron principle. When H.C. was pushing her notorious health care initiative, she said she opposed medical savings accounts because if people had control over their own health care dollars, they wouldn’t spend the money wisely.

This is consistent with her idea that the government should get and spend all the money, except of course for H.C. and her friends. Thus, when she didn’t tip the waitress, she was actually doing the waitress a “favor” and preventing this working class ignoramus from having money to spend unwisely.

Nice thrusts, Mr. Borregard! Until my party confronts these harsh truths — that Great Society Democrats have become robber barons flying the flag of fake populism — the Republicans will win the economic debate. It’s American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, not Democratic stewardship, that produced this booming economy. Democrats owe their recent political successes, including the survival of the tottering Clinton regime, mainly to the chaos and leadership vacuum in the Republican Party, which often seems overrun by clods, trolls, grouches and buffoons.

We’ll see if Hillary, who’s mostly been mouthing cautious platitudes, will continue her cheek-by-jowl affiliation with Eve Ensler (author of the ravingly anti-male play, “The Vagina Monologues”), whom Hillary handpicked to serve on her exploratory committee for the Senate campaign. In a hilariously scathing piece in the Feb. 11 Wall Street Journal, Christina Hoff Sommers quotes Ensler on women’s “vagina brain” and describes the spread of virulent Ensler propaganda to campuses. According to the New York Times, Hillary has promised to write the foreword to Ensler’s next book.

If anyone is in doubt about the lunacy of this painfully outmoded branch of feminism, please glance at the three foaming-at-the-mouth protest letters against Sommers’ article that were published by the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 25. The screechy yet ponderous and amazingly stupid letter from Ensler herself must be seen. What a dreary, pedestrian, unliterary mind! It’s early Kate Millet all over again.

Sommers has triumphed anew by flushing the feminazis out of the cupboard, where they still crouch like cobwebby pouter pigeons ready to get their tiny claws into women students. I can’t wait for Sommers’ new book, “The War Against Boys,” a deeply researched project that will be published by Simon & Schuster in June.

David Bensey chides me for my continuing references to David Koresh’s Waco property as a “ranch”:

It is not correct that the property was a “ranch” before Koresh acquired it. Koresh did not found Mount Carmel. It was begun in 1934 by Victor Houteff as an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The theological traditions of the group can be traced to the early 19th century. Koresh didn’t show up until 1981.

The Mount Carmel complex is best described as a church camp, a “retreat,” a religious commune or perhaps a seminary. It certainly was not a ranch in the sense that they were engaged primarily in animal husbandry. Neither was it a “bunker,” “fortress” or “compound.” Nothing about the complex suggested any military design. Most of it was constructed with wood stud walls, with sheetrock on the inside and wood siding on the outside. Such a structure will not stop a rifle bullet, and it obviously was not designed to do so.

The significance of all this is to correct the common belief, created by the mainstream press and the government apologists, that Mount Carmel was some sort of armored bunker, built and designed to resist attack by heavily armed government troops. It is implied that the formidable nature of the complex justified sending a company of light infantry to attack the church camp on the first day of the disaster. In fact, the flimsy structure of the Mount Carmel complex was less well designed to resist attack than the typical YMCA building.

Thanks, Mr. Bensey. Many readers have voiced support of my persistent attacks on the major media for their refusal in 1993 to challenge the Clinton administration’s irresponsible actions at Waco. David G. Wrone writes from St. Louis:

David Koresh could easily have been arrested on one of his frequent trips outside the Davidians’ complex. He often went jogging by himself and was a regular patron of local businesses. As the local sheriff repeatedly stated, the BATF could have nabbed him miles from the women and children — but of course chose to send an armed mob of thugs to his front door (after notifying local media so as to ensure the dramatic video footage they intended to present to Congress during their budgetary hearings).

With unflagging assistance from the national media, the feds smeared Koresh as a child molester, illegal gun dealer and general menace to society. They lied. It is no crime to worship in a manner that contrasts sharply with that of mainstream America. It is no crime to own firearms. It is no crime to raise one’s child without first reading a Donna Shalala biography.

No, these were not crimes. But try telling Koresh and his followers that. But why bother? Even had they not been broasted alive, after being gassed by their own government, they were just “zealots.” Right? At least that’s what Bill Clinton told me.

Charles Booker endorses this position:

I have yet to see any convincing evidence that Koresh was engaged in anything illegal, certainly nothing that warranted such violence and murderous intent. The state child welfare authorities had on a number of occasions conducted on-site investigations of child abuse allegations and found no credible evidence.

Koresh was legally selling weapons under a federal firearms license. The charges of manufacturing automatic weapons rests on very questionable evidence provided by the FBI, which had admittedly falsified evidence.

The BATF and FBI lied (and later admitted to it in court) to the governor of Texas in order to get the armored vehicles and helicopter. The agents falsely claimed drugs were manufactured in the compound. The FBI prevented firemen and Texas Rangers near the site until the fire had consumed most of the evidence. They also used bulldozers to pile burning rubble over exit doors.

I see very little honorable or admirable in the behavior of the FBI, BATF, the national media or our federal court system. Koresh is certainly not a hero of mine. I think his theology is nuts. But that does not alter the fact that he was apparently doing nothing wrong, when he and his followers were subjected to a murderous attack by heavily armed thugs in the pay of the government.

While I have no way of factually corroborating these allegations, Mr. Booker, I fully agree with your assessment of the Waco disaster. Given the excesses by government agencies, followed by the massive coverup, liberal Democrats are on shaky ground when they argue that law-abiding citizens have no foreseeable need for arms in modern society. Ronald Brady adds this testimony to my warning that civil disorder can quickly follow a severe climatological disturbance:

When Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida, law and order would have collapsed, except that many people who were not in law enforcement took it upon themselves to go around packing firearms. I think of these individuals as being the militia as described in the Second Amendment. It was the actions of these people that prevented widespread looting in the aftermath of that hurricane. Of course, this did not get reported in the mainstream press.

It’s a premise of all my work that civilization is a frail structure through which the forces of barbarism can break at any time. Although I’m not a gun owner, I strongly suspect that liberal hostility to guns often springs from a sentimental misinterpretation of reality. Tim Hartin, who began our long-running gun debate, writes again on this matter from Mount Horeb, Wis.:

I was delighted at the way the anti-gun responses in your last column proved the very point I was trying to make: namely that support for gun control is an emotional/cultural/class issue that has nothing to do with the facts.

There is almost no correlation between the level of gun ownership in a nation and the level of criminal violence in that nation. In the U.S., we have guns and violence, but guns were not used in nearly three out four violent crimes, and 99.8 percent of firearms will not be used to commit a crime in any given year. In Switzerland, they have an assault rifle in every house and little violence. In England, they recently confiscated all the guns, and were rewarded with a crime wave.

In the U.S., there is a direct correlation between gun control and violent crime. Almost without exception, jurisdictions with gun control have higher crime rates than jurisdictions without gun control. The historical record shows that when gun controls are loosened, crime goes down, and when gun controls are tightened, crime goes up.

Gun controllers continue with their crusade in the face of these facts, demonstrating 1) that they are not rational on this topic and 2) that they are not really trying to reduce crime or violence but are instead after something else.

I speculate that their motives are an unhealthy mix of the following:

1) Fear of the unknown (guns). 2) Fear of those unwashed “others” who might own guns. 3) Insecurity about their ability to protect themselves, with or without a gun. 4) Childlike desire for some big, burly father figure to protect them. 5) Childlike desire for a soft, pink, fluffy world with no sharp corners, threats or dangers. 6) Sublimated fear of penises/male power, as embodied by phallic guns. 7) Deep denial about the roots of violence in human nature and, by extension, their own capacity for violence. A self-righteous belief in their own moral superiority.

When the Second Amendment was passed, a “militia” was commonly understood to be a group of armed citizens, such as those unofficial groups that resisted the British during the early days of the Revolutionary War. The old concept of a militia is best preserved today in Switzerland, where every male of military age belongs to the militia and keeps a fully automatic assault rifle in his house.

Thanks, Mr. Hartin, for yet another eloquent litany on this explosively controversial issue, which the media (with help from a whiny President Clinton) are already maneuvering front and center for the presidential race. As I’ve indicated in the past, I firmly agree with this view of the Second Amendment as the crucial recourse of private citizens against government tyranny, which world history shows can arise with stunning speed.

I’m very grateful for a just-arrived letter from John Coates, who notes of a column of mine from over a year ago that the great sociologist Erving Goffman (from whom Michel Foucault shamelessly pilfered) was not, as I said, American but in fact Canadian. This flabbergasted me, since Goffman’s entire career was spent in the United States. Sure enough, it turns out that Goffman (like Marshall McLuhan) was born in Alberta and received his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1945. He received his graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, where he began teaching.

As a fan of Goffman from my college days, I wish I could have cited his Canadian roots in my Feb. 17 lecture at Fordham University, “The North American Intellectual Tradition,” the Second Annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture co-sponsored by the Canadian Consulate.

While the excerpt published in Toronto’s Globe and Mail did not mention Goffman, the original lecture did. I traced Goffman’s classic 1956 work, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” back to Thorstein Veblen and noted that both Veblen and Goffman were invoked in the pioneering work of Norman O. Brown.

I called Brown’s 1959 book, “Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History,” one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century and declared, “It is what Michel Foucault longed to achieve but never did.” Throughout the lecture, I denounced the fatiguingly idolized Frankfurt School (notably Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno) for their “overschematic” and yet “imprecise” system of thought, which I find completely useless for analyzing the age of media or culture in general after World War II.

Finally, my top pop moments of the past three weeks:

1) Ava Gardner, with her moist red lips and bright green dress, lip-synching “Lovin’ That Man of Mine” in “Showboat” (1951), broadcast by Turner Classic Movies. This is the hypnotic scene that, when I saw the film at its first release (I was 4), turned me into a lifelong idolater of pagan goddesses.

2) Audrey Hepburn flouncing charmingly about as Holly Golightly (“Quel rat!”) in one of the seminal films of my adolescence, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), also broadcast by Turner Classic Movies. Like Kim Novak in “Bell, Book and Candle” (1958) and Hayley Mills in “The Parent Trap” (1961), Hepburn represented a physical and spiritual freedom that was electrifying in that cloistered, conventional era.

3) Bo Derek being interviewed last week on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Derek’s mediocre acting career as a simpering, vapid Southern California blond did not prepare one for her amazing warmth and natural intelligence. Even her diction has Euro-class. How centered she seems! Derek has matured beautifully in ways that Madonna, for example, hasn’t, despite the latter’s still-manic claims of magical transformation by motherhood.

4) Congratulations to Maxim for yet another sensational cover photo. The March issue, with its blazing red headline, “Return of the Ultra Vixen!” fairly lit up the sky from 500 feet away at airport newsstands. Maxim’s talented art directors sure know how to feature a bust: The smoldering Jenny McCarthy in her bursting black-vinyl brassiere and short shorts looks like a bold ship’s figurehead — the Winged Victory of Samothrace on a midnight pirate raid. Month by month, Maxim is driving the last nails into the coffin of American Puritanism.

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.

The distinction between entrapment (which is illegal) and a sting (which is legal) now appears to be a much eroded line in the sand. As Perlstein’s piece points out, it is up to a jury once arrests have been made whether law enforcement set up a trap or a sting. In previous decades, defendants have been acquitted in cases of entrapment; but not in recent years:

Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them when offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)

One of the most famous recent cases of FBI infiltration — which is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone article — hangs over anarchist networks worldwide. Brandon Darby, the once trusted activist and organizer-turned-FBI-informant and now writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, is the dirtiest name to utter in anarchist circles. Darby infiltrated groups organizing protests around the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Darby fed the FBI information, which helped them seize riot shields made by a group from Texas. Enraged by the seizure (but still viewing Darby as a comrade) two young men from Austin, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, bought the materials for and constructed Molotov cocktails with the thought of using them against state vehicles. The two, however, decided overnight that this was a bad idea — and left the devices at home, with no intention of using them.

Darby passed information about the Molotov cocktail plans on to the FBI, and McKay and Crowder were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. While Crowder accepted a plea deal without trial for a two-year prison sentence for making the devices, McKay went to trial, arguing Darby entrapped him. The trial ended with a hung jury. Before the retrial, however, McKay retracted claims of entrapment and agreed to accept a plea deal (and serve a four-year prison sentence, for making the Molotovs and perjury).

Perlstein notes that “the State is singling out ideological enemies” – and if federal sting targets are much to go by, the State’s position is clear: anti-capitalists, environmentalists and Muslims are threats; racists are not. We can respond by decrying FBI activity, and by arguing that their targets are not real threats. Or, we can take patterns of FBI activity more seriously and ask why anti-capitalists are more threatening than white supremacists. This line of questioning can likely be reduced to two questions, chanted again and again up and down the country when protest front lines are faced with lines of police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)

You will learn that the Bureau has served first and foremost as a secret intelligence service reporting to the president of the United States. In its first incarnation under J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled the Bureau for 48 years, the FBI was the president’s secret intelligence service. Today, 40 years after Hoover’s death, we still live in the shadow of his legacy. How do you run a secret intelligence agency in an open and democratic society? How do you balance national security and civil liberty? How can we be both safe and free? These are questions that Hoover struggled with, and that we struggle with still.

Your prize-winning book about the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” was called “a credible and damning indictment of U.S. intelligence policy” by Publishers Weekly. What are the counts in your indictment, if you agree with that assessment?

I certainly agree that “Legacy of Ashes” is credible, because every assertion is documented. There are about 200 pages of endnotes, and about 80 pages of endnotes in “Enemies.” When I say something, I back it up. But “Legacy of Ashes” is not an indictment of the CIA. The CIA and FBI are reflections of who we are as Americans. We are the most powerful nation on earth. We project our power across the globe, and in order to do that we need good intelligence. When intelligence fails, war happens and people die. When intelligence succeeds, war can be prevented and lives can be saved.

America is not very good at gathering intelligence, but we’re getting better. It’s understandable, because Americans have only been at it in a serious and concerted way since World War II. The British have been at it since Queen Elizabeth I, over five centuries. The Russians have been at it since Peter the Great. And the Chinese have been at it ever since Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War,” so 26 centuries.

I want my books to serve not as an indictment but as a warning. If the U.S. doesn’t strike the balance correctly between security and countervailing concerns, we may lose our rights and our liberties, and we may not survive as a free republic. We have made many mistakes, the consequences of which can be measured in blood and treasure, but we are improving – particularly over the last three years.

Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen, beginning with Sun Tzu. Tell us about “The Art of War,” and what an ancient Chinese military treatise has to do with contemporary U.S. intelligence.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what “The Art of War” teaches.

Chapter seven focuses on the dangers of direct conflict. How do U.S. intelligence agencies, as Sun Tzu says, “subdue the enemy without fighting”?

Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons.

How about black ops?

Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins.

All of them committed by U.S. intelligence?

The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis.

Let’s turn to a 1964 book that brought to light the role that intelligence services played in U.S. foreign policy.

“The Invisible Government” was the first reported book that actually described what the CIA did. It was written almost 50 years ago, and was a landmark. It explained that the CIA was not James Bond, which was just then becoming popular – that intelligence was not a matter of flying into a foreign capital in a trench coat, overthrowing a government, having a martini, making love and then catching the next plane. It showed that intelligence was a difficult, dirty, dangerous and at times tedious business which was about information, and how information meant power.

So it’s a very good book that is still vital today. And David Wise is still writing great books about intelligence.

In the introduction, the author defines the invisible government as the “interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States… a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government”, with the CIA “at its heart”. Is that 50-year-old description of America’s intelligence apparatus still accurate? How did 9/11 change the structure of U.S. intelligence?

Things got much more complex. There are now 17 different American intelligence services, with a bureaucracy of interlocking directorates above them overseen by the Director of National Intelligence. All of them are required to report to the secretary of defense, who in turn reports to the president. In the last three years things have gotten better, largely due to the author of our next book.

That author is former CIA director and U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Michael Gates.

Robert Gates was the head of the CIA under the first President Bush. Under the second President Bush, at the end of 2006, he succeeded the irascible Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. He stayed on under Obama until just a few months ago.

Gates, as you can see in “From the Shadows,” really understands how intelligence can serve and do disservice to the president of the United States. He probably had more experience in intelligence than anyone who has ever been secretary of defense. The secretary of defense basically runs the show when it comes to intelligence. We spend somewhere just south of $100 billion a year – the precise amount is classified – on intelligence, and the secretary of defense controls 85 to 90 percent of that.

Tell us more about this book.

Bob Gates basically got off the bus from Wichita, Kan. in 1966 and went to work for the U.S. government. He went from the air force to the CIA. After learning Russian, he became an expert – as we defined it – on Russia during the Cold War. He himself never went to Russia until the Cold War was ending, even though he was considered to be among the leading experts on the USSR. He got off the plane and Gorbachev said to him: “How does it look from the ground?” Because the U.S. had been staring down at the Soviet Union from spy satellites and planes, but we didn’t understand what was going on on the ground. We could count the missiles, but we didn’t see the potatoes rotting in the field because there wasn’t enough fuel to take them to market.

Gates learned through bitter experience, over the course of half a century, how intelligence works. It’s an amazing book. And as secretary of defense he used that knowledge to improve our intelligence services.

What precisely is the relationship between the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence apparatus?

Ultimately, intelligence should serve the national security of the United States. When you get up in the morning and open the paper or turn on your computer, you want to know: Is the world safe? Is my country safe? Is my city safe? Is my family safe? That is what the president wants to know too, and that is the job of intelligence.

Can any flow chart explain the relationship between the 17 agencies that are part of the U.S. intelligence service and Department of Defense?

In theory, it’s a bunch of boxes that connect and send intelligence up through the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to the president. In the past, it has worked more like 17 different musicians with 17 different scores playing a cacophonous tune with the conductor flailing his arms madly. But we’re getting better at it.

Next you cite one of Barbara Tuchman’s lesser-known works of history, “The March of Folly.” Tell us about it.

In short, this is one of the greatest books ever written. Why did the Trojans take in the wooden horse? Why was America in Vietnam? Barbara Tuchman explores those questions, and the answer is folly – leaders acting against the interests of their constituents.

Folly explains so much of the history of world events. People believe that the world is run by conspiracies because that is what they read in novels and see on cheap TV series. But the course of world events is determined less by conspiracies than it is by stupidity. Why did the British lose the United States? How did the Renaissance popes bring on the Protestant reformation? Folly. Lack of intelligence.

Please connect the dots to our topic of intelligence.

Consider the three meanings of the word intelligence. It is the power of your mind; it is secret information; and it is secret action taken in the name of a nation. If we had more intelligence we would know our enemies, have fewer wars and there would be less folly throughout history.

If the Trojans knew the Greeks were in the horse, they wouldn’t have opened the gates.

Exactly. Why did they let the horse in? Folly.

“The March of Folly” is used to teach blind spot analysis in business schools, a method for uncovering faulty or obsolete assumptions. How do intelligence agencies perform blind spot analysis to prevent the sort of folly that Tuchman described?

“The March of Folly” explains how not to make decisions. Leaders must learn to act only out of enlightened self-interest. To use power wisely, they must make intelligent use of information. If they blunder on based on faulty assumptions, then the Greeks end up inside of Troy and Americans wind up mired in Vietnam for a decade.

Let’s end with George Orwell’s “1984.” Most of us know it, but please explain why you chose it.

None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?

“1984″ described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in “1984″ was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, “Enemies,” is about.

But you suggest that America’s Big Brother is a bit of a bumbling uncle.

Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance.

Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power.

During a visit to the FBI, as you point out, President Obama proclaimed “we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals.” But you suggest that liberty and security are opposing forces. How has the pendulum swung between liberty and security? And which way is it swinging now?

In the introduction to “Enemies” I point out that Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance.

I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory.

When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress.

The film deservedly gives Hoover credit for establishing the first federal police force that used modern forensics to nab bad guys, especially Prohibition-era gangsters whose grisly kidnappings and murders had captivated the public’s appetite for the lurid underworld of criminals and their molls. Eastwood also provides a plausible rationale for Hoover’s lifelong paranoia about Communism:  Soon after World War I ended, the Washington home of Hoover’s boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was bombed by an anarchist.

Fair enough.

But the biopic inaccurately portrays Hoover as a critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy. In fact, the FBI director was a crucial ally of the Red-baiting demagogue.  Indeed, at Hoover’s personal direction, agents spent hundreds of hours perusing FBI files to supply McCarthy with evidence of Communist subversion.   Hoover also coached McCarthy about how to insulate himself from criticism by labeling targets as “loyalty risks” instead of “card-carrying Communists,” which was harder to prove.  A Hoover deputy even instructed McCarthy on manipulating press coverage by releasing his attacks just before news deadlines so that reporters wouldn’t have time to interview the other side.

Nor does the film discuss Hoover’s order to “neutralize” Eastwood’s one-time costar, actress Jean Seberg, by falsely telling journalists that she was pregnant thanks to a leader of the Black Panthers.  Seberg later committed suicide; her family blamed the FBI smear.

The biopic does portray Hoover’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly because of his ties to Soviet agents, which led to FBI bugs that captured the civil rights leader’s marital infidelity.  But here, too, “J. Edgar” underplays Hoover’s nefariousness.   In fact, the FBI planted listening devices in King’s home, office and hotel rooms, recording more than a dozen large tape reels whose contents Hoover provided to numerous parties: the president and vice president, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA, the military, the United Nations, members of Congress, and the press.

What vital intelligence did Hoover disseminate?  That King, according to Hoover, was a “tom cat” with “obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”  The FBI claimed to have recorded King in flagrante during group sex parties in which, according to FBI transcripts, he boasted of his prowess (“I am the best pussy-eater in the world”) and invoked Jesus while in the throes of passion: “I’m fucking for God!”

Ultimately, FBI accounts of King’s sexual antics turned out to be embellished.  Although King committed adultery, a Hoover deputy involved in the smear campaign later admitted that the African-American voices captured on FBI bugs may actually have been those  of King’s associates;  to the white agents who made up Hoover’s force, all black voices evidently sounded the same.  Still, that didn’t stop Hoover’s minions from compiling yet another field report that spread the preposterous story that King, after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got drunk and chased prostitutes down the hallway of his Oslo hotel — while stark naked.

Hoover stubbornly believed his incendiary leaks would “destroy the burrhead.”  But they didn’t.  Despite Hoover’s best efforts to spread the dirty details, no member of the press reported on them; in the mid-1960s, such gossip-mongering was anathema to the mainstream media.  Still, no journalists had the courage to reveal the FBI’s witch hunt against King, either; news executives feared crossing Hoover no less than the politicians who were routinely blackmailed by him.  (According to author Curt Gentry, Hoover blocked a critical magazine article by circulating photos of the publisher’s wife performing fellatio on her black chauffeur.)

Even King’s assassination didn’t stop the FBI’s vilification.  Indeed, the worldwide grief over his murder made Hoover more determined than ever to resurrect the salacious stories about the martyr’s sex life.  This time, the FBI found a willing outlet: columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who quoted from Hoover’s classified files about King’s “illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent Negro dentist.”  (Anderson later decided that Hoover had used him to implicate King in “a posthumous scandal, to turn even his death into a sordid affair.”  Three years later, Anderson paid him back by becoming the first prominent mainstream journalist to turn on Hoover — rifling through his trash, exposing his financial corruption and blackmailing techniques, even hinting that he was gay.)

And what about such gossip, including that Hoover had a secret double-life as a drag queen?  In Eastwood’s movie, the rumor is transformed from the erotic to the morose: Minutes after the death of Hoover’s mother, he grieves near her body, weeping mournfully as he dons her necklace and a favorite dress.  The lawman is not a sexual pervert, you see, just a faithful and bereaved son.

In truth, the outlandish cross-dressing story was circulated more than three decades after it allegedly occurred, when a witness of dubious credibility told writer Anthony Summers that she saw Hoover at a New York orgy, engaging in sex with young boys while reading a Bible. He was supposedly dressed in a red skirt, lace stockings, high heels and curly wig, a black feather boa around his neck and makeup with false eyelashes on his face.

Perhaps the posthumous vilification of Hoover as a depraved sexual hypocrite is only poetic justice; after all, during his lifetime, he was Washington’s consummate master of sexual slander and political blackmail.  But instead of ignoring the baseless transvestite story, “J. Edgar” attempts to sanitize it and rehabilitate Hoover’s image.

Even Eastwood’s depiction of the FBI director’s relationship with his longtime deputy and confidant — and reputed lover — gives Hoover the heterosexual benefit of the doubt.  Although Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is portrayed as Hoover’s loyally swishy sidekick, Hoover returns the adoration with only a manly love, rebuffing Tolson’s overture to turn the relationship physical.  However tormented, Hoover remains in the end closeted even from himself.

To be sure, cinematic license is to be expected in such movies; feature films are not nonfiction biographies.  But given the known facts of Hoover’s life, Eastwood has painted his subject in the best light possible—better than he deserves and infinitely kinder than Hoover ever treated his many enemies, who included some of the most heroic figures of that tumultuous era.

Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling: Clint Eastwood has made his day.

I’ll get to the historical and political insults of “J. Edgar” shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie, which features Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around his dreary, post-Victorian suite of offices, looking worried under a mountain of latex and makeup (when he plays the 1970s-era Hoover) and talking in one of those unplaceable, old-timey Northeast Corridor accents. (Admittedly, Hoover in life had a strange voice; he lived from birth to death in Washington, D.C., but spoke in an affected manner that sounded nothing like today’s mid-Atlantic accent.) It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if “J. Edgar” is about to become “Queer Eye for the FBI,” and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t.

Actually, if there’s one area where Black’s lumpy screenplay, with its awkward chronological backing-and forthing, deserves some credit, it’s in the highly plausible account of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. From early on in Hoover’s FBI career it was widely assumed that he was gay, but the evidence was always circumstantial and the handful of people who knew him personally always denied it. (The allegations that he was a cross-dresser came from only one source, and don’t match anything else we know about this intensely cautious and private individual. Most historians view them as urban myth.) I think the fairest thing to say is that it seems likely Hoover was primarily homosexual, despite his purported romance with actress Dorothy Lamour, but not at all clear whether he acted on those impulses. Black imagines Hoover and Tolson cohabiting as “confirmed bachelors,” in a state of permanently unresolved erotic tension, which would go a long way toward explaining the secret policeman’s massively screwed-up psychology.

But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, “J. Edgar” goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random. Historical characters appear and disappear in shticky little pieces — Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman, Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh, Jeffrey Donovan doing the world’s worst “pahk the cah in Hahvehd Yahd” accent as Robert F. Kennedy, Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon — without ever seeming to justify their presence on the stage. You get the feeling they’ve all got a problem with Hoover, but you’re never sure why. Maybe they just found him a weird and distasteful little man, which is certainly how he comes across. On the other hand, it might be helpful if this movie made the point that Hoover was as close as we’ve ever come (so far) to having an unelected dictator, and that the only real reason he didn’t become a Stalin-level tyrant was the constraint of a democratic political system he could not entirely subvert, much as he tried.

Eastwood and Black certainly bring up many of the things that made Hoover so noxious, beginning with the Palmer raids of 1919-20, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists and anarchists who had committed no crime. At the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed to head a special Red-hunting branch of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, which launched his long career as a self-appointed guardian of American political rectitude, devoted to stamping out dissident opinion wherever it cropped up, and whether or not constitutional rights got trampled in the process. “J. Edgar” makes clear that Hoover conducted secret surveillance on suspected Commies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who purportedly had a lesbian affair with a reporter); perjured himself before Congress; conducted an especially vile counterintelligence program aimed at undermining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders; and generally turned a blind eye to organized crime in his relentless persecution of left-wingers.

But you get almost no sense of the extent or intensity with which Hoover mobilized the federal government’s police force to crack down on unconventional political opinion. The second Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy 1950s is never mentioned, nor is the word COINTELPRO, and Hoover’s vicious racism is largely ignored. (Intriguingly, the rumors that Hoover was gay were echoed, during his lifetime, by speculation that he might be partly black.) Furthermore, all this stuff is presented as quirky side info in a story about a weird dude who lived with his mom (Judi Dench, giving the only tolerable performance in the whole film) and had a lifelong boyfriend he maybe never slept with. Oh, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to fingerprinting. Did I mention that? Everybody pooh-poohed his interest in bringing forensic science to law enforcement, and now look! Yes, Hoover was a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, quite likely a paranoid sociopath and incipient fascist, a terrifying incarnation of many of the worst currents of American political opinion in one individual. OK, yeah, that’s all true — but his real legacy is found in “CSI: Miami.”

Just in case you think I have some kind of personal bias when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover, well, I plead 100 percent guilty. He ruined the lives of countless innocent people and was instrumental in spreading the idea that the Constitution doesn’t apply to people who say bad things about the government. He pretty much built the slippery slide that led to the national-security state of the last decade, when civil liberties have been eviscerated and privacy is a sham. (I will further add that he personally supervised the surveillance and harassment of my mother, her then-husband and many of their colleagues in the 1940s labor movement, and I’ve seen the files to prove it.) If there’s a darker figure in American history since the Civil War, I’m really not sure who it is. Nixon? George W. Bush? Not even close. Dick Cheney? Only in his undead dreams. I only wish I believed in hell so I could believe that it wasn’t hot enough for John Edgar Hoover.

But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain. But honestly, what can we expect from Clint Eastwood at this point? This movie says a great deal more about him, I’m afraid, than it does about J. Edgar Hoover. And what it says is that one of the greatest American screen actors of the 20th century has squandered much of that legacy in the 21st by becoming a director of indifferent Oscar-bait movies that look handsome on the surface but have nothing to say, and that nobody ever wants to watch twice. Even by the dismal recent standards of “Hereafter” and “Invictus” and “Changeling” this movie is a disappointment, because watching it once is bad enough, and because it may leave younger viewers with the impression that J. Edgar Hoover was mostly important to history because he wasn’t gay enough to have decent fashion sense.