Several years ago, Laurence Silberman, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a man widely admired by conservatives for his wisdom and rectitude, spoke of his experience in the mid-1970s looking into the secret files of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
“Accompanied by only one FBI official, I read virtually all these files in three weekends,” Silberman, who was then President Gerald Ford’s deputy attorney general, recalled in a speech to a judicial conference. “It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service.”
“I intend to take to my grave nasty bits of information on various political figures — some still active.