Given the FBI’s history of insinuating itself into presidential campaigns, this latest October surprise shouldn’t have been any surprise at all.

As early as 1919, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, the progressive A. Mitchell Palmer, deployed bureau agents in an eponymous operation to round up and deport alleged radical immigrants. The Palmer Raids were ostensibly a response to a series of bombings, but it became apparent that Palmer had had something more in mind when he threw his hat into the ring for the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination and ran on a proto-Trumpian agenda of “undiluted Americanism.” Palmer didn’t get past the first ballot, however, and ultimately the raids’ most lasting impact was Palmer’s decision to have his young assistant administer the arrests. The official, whose own youthful ambition earned him the nickname “Speed,” was 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover.

Following the Teapot Dome scandal, the seemingly incorruptible Hoover was appointed to head the bureau. If money didn’t tempt Hoover, power did. While he managed to survive the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, Roosevelt nearly brought Hoover’s career to a premature halt. After his election, FDR announced that Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh, a fierce opponent of the Palmer raids, would be his attorney general. Walsh told friends that Hoover would be replaced. But that month, Walsh married a Cuban woman in Havana. After flying back to Florida, the couple boarded a train to Washington. While passing through North Carolina, Walsh’s wife found him on the floor, dead, the apparent victim of too much honeymooning.

Homer Cummings, who replaced Walsh, retained Hoover. The director quickly realized the way to keep his job was to make himself indispensable to FDR. Wiretapping was a relatively new investigative tool, and as it turned out Roosevelt was eager to use it against his political opponents on the left and right. Up for reelection in 1936, he had Hoover eavesdrop on the leftist members of the Newspaper Guild and other suspected members of the Communist Party, despite the party’s attempt to establish a “popular front.”

Then, as FDR began to gear up for a third term, Hoover went after Father Charles E. Coughlin, the ultraconservative radio priest who was a major thorn in Roosevelt’s side. In January 1940, 17 members of Coughlin’s pro-Hitler Christian Front were arrested by the FBI, charged with plotting to kill several congressmen. Whether the charges were accurate or not, the arrests finished Coughlin as an influential political figure.

That same year, the bureau sought to quash the opposition of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans with raids on its offices. But it was in 1948 that Hoover unleashed the FBI for the first time to further his own career. Like everyone who was not a member of the Truman family, Hoover assumed that Thomas Dewey would be the next president. Hoover’s former assistant William Sullivan recalled that Hoover believed if he used the bureau’s resources on behalf of the Dewey campaign, he would be named attorney General as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court and eventually to becoming Chief Justice.

“Many agents—I was one,” recalled Sullivan, “worked for days culling FBI files for any fact that could be of use to Dewey.” After Dewey secured the nomination, Hoover fed him backgrounders on crime issues and information about Truman’s connections to Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast. The FBI also pressured HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas to jump-start its hearings after a grand jury brought no indictments from testimony by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers. As Drew Pearson wrote, “Those watching [Assistant Director] Lou Nichols note that he goes in and out of the office of [Thomas] like an animated shuttlecock.”

At the same time, the bureau was intensely involved in disrupting Henry Wallace’s third-party campaign. Wallace had been a target of the FBI when he was still vice president, but in 1948, the bureau stepped up its activities by surveilling and intimidating Wallace staffers and supporters and feeding negative information about Wallace to the press and the Truman campaign, which cooperated with the bureau’s efforts. Truman’s victory marked an end to Hoover’s ambitions. The 1952 election and the subsequent races found the director again in survival mode by making himself useful to his favored candidates.

While most people remember the 1952 campaign for Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, the FBI’s efforts to slander Adlai Stevenson (perhaps for personal, as well as political reasons) as a closeted homosexual gets less attention. According to Hoover’s biographer, Curt Gentry, the director was the source of rumors that Stevenson had once been arrested on morals charges. The same rumors were spread in 1956, but only Walter Winchell took the bait, notoriously declaring that a vote for Stevenson was a vote for Christine Jorgensen.

In 1960, it was John F. Kennedy’s turn. Concerned about JFK’s possible plans, Hoover let Kennedy’s aides know that the bureau had recordings of JFK’s wartime trysts with Inga Arvad, a Danish woman suspected of having Nazi ties. Hoover was told he would be retained.

Lyndon Johnson enjoyed Hoover’s gossip (he once famously said that it was “better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in”), but the two were on opposing sides in the 1968 race. As a last-ditch effort to help the troubled Hubert Humphrey campaign, Johnson announced the resumption of peace talks with North Vietnam. He soon learned, however, that South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu was sabotaging the effort, convinced he could get a better deal if Nixon won. Madame Anna Chennault, a GOP leader and a close friend of South Vietnam’s ambassador Bui Diem, was the person whispering in Thieu’s ear. Gentry writes that when information turned up that she was communicating to Nixon through Spiro Agnew, Johnson thought he had clinched the election for Humphrey, but Agnew’s phone records just happened to turn up missing. The investigation was closed and Nixon went on to a narrow victory.

In 1972, George McGovern became the last candidate to challenge Hoover’s supremacy when he announced that if elected he would replace the clearly aging director. Sullivan recalled that agents were again ordered again to collect malicious gossip for leaking to the press. Ironically, many of Nixon’s Watergate-era excesses, such as the Huston Plan, were too much even for Hoover. He died anyway that May, six weeks before the break-in. Since his death and until this year, the FBI has mostly stayed on the outside of presidential elections, as the work of disruption and dirty tricks has been usurped by party operatives who can operate with less restraint than even Hoover could.

In 1948, Henry Wallace grasped the larger issues stemming from the FBI’s actions, declaring, “We Americans have far more to fear from those actions which are intended to suppress political freedom than from the teaching of ideas with which we are in disagreement.”

If Hoover were alive today he’d be 121 years old and undoubtedly still running the FBI. Considering Comey’s actions, perhaps a séance would be in order to see if he still is.

For more than thirty years, the FBI and I have been playing a weird, one-sided game of hide and seek. I seek historical records, they hide them–and the American public winds up the loser.

My quest has to do with the Hiss case, one of the most important trials of the twentieth century. Alger Hiss was indicted for perjury sixty years ago this month; the cold war he was indelibly identified with has been over for almost two decades. Yet I’m still being stonewalled in my requests. (Hiss’s federal indictment related to charges that he had committed espionage for the Soviet Union in the 1930s; he was convicted in 1950 and imprisoned for forty-four months. He died in 1996, proclaiming his innocence to the end.)

My involvement began in the mid-1970s, after Hiss and a journalist named William A. Reuben had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents related to the case. Soon after the first government documents began arriving, I was hired to sort through the papers and make sense of them. The problem was that while the bureau eventually released nearly 50,000 pages on the case, many were severely censored with black marker, while countless others were withheld in their entirety. The result was that our attempts at understanding what the FBI did or didn’t do to help secure Hiss’s conviction were severely undermined.

Our efforts continued through the 1980s and early 1990s. Then, in 1993, President Clinton directed all government agencies to comply with the spirit of the FOIA, declaring that “openness in government is essential to accountability and the Act has become an integral part of that process.”

Encouraged, we filed a new suit to have the FBI release Hiss’s entire file intact and without deletions. After years of delay, the first batches of unredacted documents began to trickle in, and for the first time a clear picture began to emerge of what the bureau was up to in the 1940s. The spigot was soon closed, however, with the onset of the Bush administration. Although I continue to receive documents (and the FBI has now said that the number of Hiss-related documents in its files approximates 500,000), those released over the past couple of years have contained more deletions than those that were made available in the 1970s. Most appear to be completely arbitrary. A name withheld on the first page of a document citing a privacy exception will be revealed on the second. Documents released whole in the 1970s are now mostly redacted.

I am far from the only researcher coping with the FBI’s intransigence. A 2002 memo to government agencies by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, countermanded the Clinton policy, urging federal agencies to look for legal arguments to reject every FOIA request they received. It was an effective tactic: In the five years prior to the memo, federal agencies granted 51 percent of FOIA requests; last year that number had plunged to 36 percent.

One doesn’t have believe in Hiss’s innocence to understand the importance of the people’s right to know to our democracy. This goes far beyond the issues in involved in the Hiss case. This is about history, and our ability to preserve and understand ours.

Some people are fighting back. An informal group of lawyers specializing in FOIA matters calling itself FOIL (Freedom of Information Lawyers) has proposed a Historic Records Act. The idea behind it is that records of historical importance such as those we and other researchers are seeking need to be released with protections that go beyond the FOIA.

“Essentially, what needs to be done is to get away from the FOIA’s concept of ‘exemptions’ from disclosure and endorse the overriding presumption that disclosure is in the public interest with respect to all categories and classes of records, subject only to limited postponements for extremely sensitive records, so that all information ultimately becomes public,” says one FOIL attorney, James Lesar, who has spent four decades investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. “All information means all.”

Additionally, more than sixty non-profit groups–including progressives, libertarians, and conservatives–have proposed that the incoming Attorney General issue during his first days in office a new “A.G.’s memo” that by overturning the Ashcroft memo “reinstitutes the presumption of openness under FOIA.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee will soon be holding hearings into President Obama’s nomination for Attorney General Eric Holder. It would be encouraging if instead of concentrating on whether Holder did or didn’t approve President Clinton’s pardon for Marc Rich, members of the Judiciary Committee asked him about the more important issue of where he stands on issuing such a memo and on the general question of openness and accountability and the people’s right to know.

President Obama ran on a campaign of promising not only change but also transparency. In terms of the FOIA and redacted documents that fill my mailbox, it would be nice if he meant that literally.

When someone once wrote that Eliot Asinof was “the last angry man,” it made Eliot furious.

Yes, he agreed, he could get angry at times, but as he saw it, this wasn’t some sort of character defect; there were good reasons for his rage. Like a lawman of the old West, Eliot, who died on June 10 at the age of 88, lived by a code. He hated hypocrites, liars and cheats. It wasn’t his fault that they kept crossing his path.

He also couldn’t tolerate injustice, stupidity and abuse of power–especially when he was the victim of it. Bad books and movies were also on the list. Even more, however, he hated it when other people–those who couldn’t help themselves–suffered similar fates. When they did, it infuriated him, but instead of just grousing, he created a lifetime’s body of work celebrating rebels and nonconformists who took on the system. Eliot’s characters didn’t always win, or, as in the case of the notorious hijacker Garrett Trapnell, didn’t always have righteous intentions, but Eliot admired them for it. Even the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, the subject of his most famous book, Eight Men Out, were to some extent righteous rebels in Eliot’s view. He didn’t absolve them of their crime, but he understood it in the larger context of baseball’s unjust treatment of those great athletes.

The outlines of Eliot’s life are probably common to many Nation readers of a generation that is rapidly disappearing. His father helped run the family menswear store, and Eliot was raised on Long Island and Manhattan. He was a World War II veteran who was radicalized by the infuriating stupidity of military life on Adak Island in the Aleutians, where he served out the war. He was hit by a rock during the melee caused by the American Legion at the 1949 Paul Robeson concerts in Peekskill, New York. He became a screenwriter and TV writer and worked as a front for blacklisted writers until he was blacklisted himself. Unique among Nation readers, he married Marlon Brando’s sister Jocelyn, had a son and got divorced. He wrote his first novel in 1955 and fourteen subsequent books of fiction and nonfiction.

Eliot represented the best of the old left and was proud of it. When Bob Dylan, then the young pied piper of the New Left, made his now infamous and ignorant put-down of the people who “haven’t got any hair on their head” in the audience at the annual dinner of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in 1963, it was Eliot who led the booing–and not because he was follicularly challenged himself.

A longtime Nation subscriber, he could still get pretty cranky about the magazine. In his last hours before doctors induced his final coma, I brought him a pair of reading glasses so he could read the latest issue. He glanced at it for a moment and laid it down. “You know, I have a lot of problems with this magazine, but,” he added with a shrug, “it’s the best we got.” Then he had a few choice words for our healthcare system, said he was ready for a nap and never woke up again.

Eliot was a tough nut, but he had the courage of his convictions. On my first visit to his West End Avenue apartment, I learned that he literally opened his door to anyone. When you buzzed him from the lobby of his apartment he just buzzed back (which must have pleased his neighbors to no end). Then, when you exited the elevator and rang his doorbell, he threw it open to greet whoever was standing in front of it. That made for an interesting situation after Eliot got into an argument in the New York Review of Books with Norman Mailer over Mailer’s support for the release of imprisoned murderer Jack Henry Abbott. Not long afterward, Eliot opened his door, and standing in front of him was Abbott himself (Eliot emerged unscathed, unlike the young waiter at a Lower East Side Restaurant who crossed paths with Abbott a few weeks later and was stabbed to death).

I first met Eliot in 1978. I was then working as legal researcher for Alger Hiss, using the Freedom of Information Act to uncover evidence that he had been framed. As a baseball fan who had recently read and admired Eight Men Out, it occurred to me that a FOIA request might reveal something about the scandal. I looked Eliot up in the phone book and called him to see what he thought. He was pleasantly skeptical, but encouraged me to give it a try.

So I filed my request. When the documents arrived in the mail a few months later, however, they were all about Eliot. It pleased him in a way, because the documents finally revealed why he had been blacklisted–for signing a petition outside Yankee Stadium calling for the team to integrate. He used the material in a speech on the blacklist I heard him give a few months later, although what I remember best about it was his opening line: “I want to open by stating for the record that I am not now nor ever have been Isaac Asimov.”

As I was starting out on my own career as a writer, Eliot took me under his wing, freely offering his opinions about the ways of publishers (“They put out shit”) and agents (“They exist to suck off of writers”). But for all his legendary crankiness, he could be surprisingly protective of other people’s feelings. He was never harsh about my own work. “That was a good book–real good,” he said last year about my most recent effort, Generation on Fire, a celebration of rebellion and nonconformity in the 1960s. I was pleased that he liked it, but his praise also sparked the realization that he had never said anything about the previous four.

He loved to go to movies, even though most received the Asinofian thumbs down: “It’s a lot of shit.” Even when he got to act in two of them, he didn’t much care for his own performances–“acting is a lot of shit.” On the other hand, anyone else who was so frequently disappointed by the cinema would have given up long before. Eliot continued to go. Having worked in Hollywood, he had no illusions about it. He still believed that filmmakers were obligated to tackle important subjects (especially political ones) honestly. He hated when they took the easy way out with their characters and plots or gave in to commercialism. He was right, of course.

Like any freelance writer, he succumbed to the quick buck on occasion, but he had his limits. After Rosie Ruiz jumped in front of the pack and claimed to have won the Boston Marathon in 1980, she managed to convince a publisher to buy her side of the story. She couldn’t write, though, so they offered Eliot some decent money to ghost the book. Eliot agreed, but on one condition: they would privately drive upstate and set up a 26.2-mile course. Rosie would run it and prove that she could have won the race. They marked out the course but on the appointed day, only Eliot showed up. That was the end of the Rosie Ruiz story, and the end of a decent advance.

It wasn’t the first time he turned down good money on principle. He once refused a personal offer from Mafia chieftan Frank Costello to ghost his memoirs. He did, however, accept a cigar and an offer from Fidel Castro to write a script about the Cuban revolution. While out in Hollywood, in 1956, Warner Brothers wanted to cast his son Marty as the lead in its new TV show Dennis the Menace. Eliot said no. The studio offered Eliot a lot of money and a chance to write A-movie screenplays. Eliot said no. He didn’t want his child screwed up by Hollywood. The studio hired Jay North instead. And Marty turned out just fine.

Eliot was less able to suffer fools gladly than anyone I ever knew. A memoir completed just before his death reveals the roots of his anger. Adak, that frozen hellhole in the Aleutians, was to Eliot what Dresden was to Kurt Vonnegut, but not because of the weather. The enlisted men were forced to make do with a boiler that barely provided heat and hot water, while continually on the verge of exploding. Eliot managed to requisition another one but when it arrived, a colonel commandeered it for his own private use. The old boiler did explode, killing a young corporal, a decent kid–the only death of an American soldier on the island, according to Eliot. He called it murder.

To the end of his life, he hated authority, and the themes of rebellion and courage, all borne from his experience on Adak, echo through nearly all his work, most notably in Craig and Joan, about a young couple who killed themselves to protest the war in Vietnam and People v. Blutcher, which told the story of an African-American man from Brooklyn who fought racism and corruption in the NYPD in the 1960s, years before Frank Serpico went public with his own charges.

Eliot’s bleak worldview sometimes made for a difficult friendship (and, for Marty, parenthood as well). There were times when I’d put down the phone after a conversation in which Eliot was in such a bleak mood that I felt my soul needed a shower. But I could never stay away from him for long. Even at his most crotchety, he was too much fun. He knew the inside stories on everything from Dag Hammarsjköld’s death to how NFL games were fixed by dirty refereeing. With Elliot, there were no sacred cows. He relayed to me a story Hank Greenberg had told him about Lou Gehrig’s anti-Semitism, and one more hero bit the dust. He was a also a great joke teller. He made lovely, whimsical sculptures from stuff he found lying around his yard. He was a fantastic piano player and golfer, all gentle pursuits in their own way. He was also a great ally. “We’ll dance on his grave,” he once said gleefully about someone who did me wrong. He meant it, too.

When his building went co-op in the early ’80s, he finally had his grubstake. He took the money from his insider’s sale and moved to a dilapidated cottage in Ancramdale, New York. He shared the space with a golden retriever pup he named Babe, a lovable dog to whom Eliot gave the run of the county. Eventually, he and his son Marty together built a home on twelve beautiful acres in Ancramdale (Eliot was then in his 60s and had never attempted anything like that before). He became an endearing fixture in the small community. He adopted the people who operated the Ancramdale General Store and the restaurants in the area as his family, which meant they could feel free to return his insults. When he became ill and had to be rushed to the hospital a few years ago, several of them kept an around-the-clock watch in his room.

Over the last couple of years though, his memory began to slip. When he could only barely shoot his age in golf (he first did it at the age of 79–a remarkable athletic achievement), he put his clubs away for good. But he also managed to finish an antiwar novel that he had begun during the Reagan Administration. It will be published this fall and is titled Final Judgment. In Eliot’s case it was, and as to be expected, its honesty and anger is brutal.