FBI historian, educator Athan Theoharis dies
Athan Theoharis, who exposed FBI misconduct through his tenacious use of Freedom of Information Act requests, helping to reveal how the bureau investigated political opponents, intimidated critics and illegally eavesdropped on actors, civil rights activists and alleged radicals, died July 3 at his home in Syracuse, N.Y. He was 84.
The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Jeanne Theoharis.
While other historians examined individual cases or FBI targets, Theoharis focused on unraveling the agency’s byzantine filing and records procedures. His research led to the discovery of the “secret files” of Director J. Edgar Hoover and his top deputies, who kept sensitive files in their own offices, outside of the bureau’s “official” filing system. Some documents, intended for destruction, were simply labeled “Do Not File.”
Theoharis obtained tens of thousands of documents related to illegal wiretaps, mail openings and break-ins. Some showed that the FBI had gathered embarrassing material about top officials, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and broke into the office of left-wing organizations such as the American Youth Congress, where it photocopied correspondence with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
As he reviewed the files, Theoharis began to argue that the bureau’s reputation for catching gangsters, spies and terrorists was grossly exaggerated, and that its surveillance programs threatened civil liberties. While he noted that presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt had wielded the FBI as a political tool, ordering the bureau to investigate opponents, he assigned much of the blame for its improprieties to Hoover, who ruled the FBI for 48 years until his death in 1972.
“Hoover was an insubordinate bureaucrat in charge of a lawless organization,” he told the Milwaukee Journal in a 1993 interview. “He was also a genius who could set up a system of illegal activities and a way to keep all documentation secret for many years.”
Theoharis chronicled
Hoover’s FBI in books including “The Boss” (1988), with co-author John Stuart Cox, and “From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover” (1991), offering commentary for a sweeping collection of FBI documents.
The second of five children, Athanasios George Theoharis was born in Milwaukee on Aug. 3, 1936. His mother and father, a Greek immigrant, ran a diner out of the first floor of their home, where Athan worked as a boy. At 16, he earned a scholarship to the University of Chicago.
Theoharis initially studied political science, and received bachelor’s degrees in 1956 and 1957, a master’s degree in 1958 and a doctorate in history in 1965. In books such as “The Yalta Myths” (1970) and “Seeds of Repression” (1971), he examined the Truman administration and the 1945 Yalta Conference between the heads of the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.
He taught at what is now Texas A&M University, Wayne State University in Detroit and the College of Staten Island before joining Marquette in 1969. Two years later, he published “Thirty Years of Wire Tapping,” an article in the Nation that attracted the attention of the Church Committee, a U.S. Senate committee formed in 1975 to investigate abuses by the FBI and other U.S. national security agencies.
Theoharis was soon hired as a consultant for the committee. When he received a limited security clearance for his work, it was as though “the curtains parted,” his daughter recalled.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he tried to sound the alarm on secrecy and surveillance, arguing against the expansion of the FBI’s domestic spying programs in books such as “Abuse of Power” (2011). He later joined former staffers and members of the Church Committee in calling for the creation of a new committee to investigate U.S. intelligence practices.
His wife of 53 years, the former Nancy Artinian, died last year. In addition to his daughter Jeanne of Brooklyn, survivors include another daughter, the Rev. Liz Theoharis of Manhattan, a son, George Theoharis of Syracuse, a brother; two sisters; and five grandchildren.