Books: J. Edgar's Accounting

MASTERS OF DECEIT (374 pp.)—J. Edgar Hoover—Holt ($5).

Edgar Hoover, who is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party, undoubtedly knows more details about the subject than anyone except those who have been and are not. From the Communist Manifesto to the latest hindsights of a lapsed Marxist, the literature of Communism has largely been professional and confessional, written by insiders. The FBI chief's book belongs to a smaller but useful class of books by those who, concerned with the suppression of Communism, look at it from the outside. Hoover has written a primer-in a sense a how-to-do-them-down-yourself...