Spooked By His Sci Fi, FBI Looked Into Asimov As Possible Communist Tipster 190
v3rgEz writes "By September 14, 1960, Isaac Asimov had been a professor of biochemistry at Boston University for 11 years, and his acclaimed "I, Robot" collection of short stories was on its seventh reprint. This was also the day someone not-so-subtly accused him of communist sympathies in a letter to J. Edgar Hoover. They ominously concluded that "Asimov may be quite all right. On the other hand . . . . ." The "tip off" wasn't given much credit, but it didn't matter since Asimov's science fiction writing alone was enough to warrant FBI monitoring, particularly as the FBI hunted for the mysterious ROBPROF, a communist informant embedded in American academia. MuckRock has Isaac Asimov's FBI files in full, and a write up of the more interesting bits."
Re:Typos (Score:2, Informative)
It's timothy, what else would you expect?
All he does is drive traffic to the sites that allegedly pay him to do so.
In those days (Score:2, Informative)
.. But today you are actually rewarded for being a socialist. ( which was what they used the term communist for back then.. not true Communism )
Re:He WAS ex-soviet (Score:2, Informative)
He was born in the USSR. That makes him suspicious, not from Communist leanings, but from divided loyalties. Honestly, I wouldn't trust someone born in a different country who *doesn't* have divided loyalties.
However, in his writing, he is the furthest thing from a communist. See what he says about democratic and egalitarian movements in the Galactic Empire in his Foundation prequels. Of course, he was also not a fascist; he wrote several books about nationalist societies, such as Lucky Starr and the Moons of Saturn, and that story The Currents of Space, about the Empire of Trantor moving in on the nationalist backwater Sark and its slave world Florina and the silly trouble those planets cause.
He's really more of a royalist than anything else.
Also, he was the most prolific writer ever, save R.L.Stein, who wrote the same story over and over and over, and he wrote several science books as well, and was a biochemistry professor in his spare time. He died in the late '90s of AIDS that he contracted from a blood transfusion back before they figured out that they need to check for HIV and throw out donated blood that contains the virus.
Re:He WAS ex-soviet (Score:3, Informative)
Former Navy linguist here. Many of my fellow cryptologic technicians - interpretive were born in another country, even still had relatives or property there, and nonetheless managed to hold the TS/SCI clearance required for the job. If your foreign origin has endowed you with a skill that the US needs, like mastery of a foreign language, then of course you can get a clearance.
The case of Wen Ho Lee [wikipedia.org], a Taiwanese-born scientist who held a security clearance and was erroneously prosecuted for violating security norms, was a pretty public affair especially in places like Slashdot, so you should have been aware that your claim here is bogus.
Re:Same story, different time (Score:2, Informative)
And then I'm reminded by the nightly news that human intelligence hasn't appreciably increased between now and then.
HUMINT may not have appreciably increased, but clearly ELINT, COMINT, and SIGINT have gotten better.
Scary twist ending (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the whole report, the most suspicious things they have on him are that he's an academic in biology like this spy they're looking for codenamed "ROBPROF," and he wrote reviews for a defunct magazine that had a similar name to a defunct communist publication.
Then in the last page they say that even though none of this really matches up, they should still consider that he could be ROBPROF and they should keep an eye on him because his "background contains information inimical to the best interests of the United States" 8-(
Re:In those days (Score:5, Informative)
But today you are actually rewarded for being a socialist.
This is only true if you think the statement "The government should promote the general welfare" immediately makes you a socialist.
The number of people able to make a living because they are socialists is (being generous) around 1000, and most of them not a particularly good living. There are some people that hold good jobs and also are socialists, but typically they hold those jobs because of their skills unrelated to their politics. What absolutely doesn't exist is a well-established and well-funded set of organizations with media outlets, think tanks, etc hiring bunches of people making well over $250,000 a year promoting socialism, whereas such organizations do exist for movement conservatism (some talk radio, Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Chamber of Commerce, etc), libertarians (some talk radio, Cato Institute, some Tea Party organizations), and to a lesser degree for the Democratic Party (MSNBC, Brookings Institution, AFL-CIO). But there's a giant gap between the Democratic Party and actual socialists: The Democrats want to keep getting their nice big donations from big corporations, so they shy away from doing anything that smacks of bona-fide socialism.
If you're thinking that the people receiving welfare are being rewarded for being a socialist, that doesn't make any sense, because welfare recipients receive their benefits regardless of whether they're a socialist or not. They are arguably benefiting from the majority of voters believing that a bit of socialism in the name of preventing people from starving or freezing to death is a good idea, but that's different from they themselves being socialists.
What is true is that being a socialist no longer destroys your career like it did in the 1950's.
Re:Used to this yet? (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. Today's NSA makes J. Edger look like an amateur.
Compared even to his contemporaries — on the other side of the Iron Curtain — he has always been an amateur. Same goes for the much-despised Joe McCarthy as well.
Maybe, a total of 200 people (Asimov not among them) have lost their jobs unjustly because of those two gentlemen. Compared to the roughly 20 million losing their freedom and lives in USSR due to Stalin's (and post-Stalin's) repressions [wikipedia.org], that is, well, incomparable.
Communism and Asimov's Sf Club (Score:3, Informative)
To be fair, Asimov was one of the Futurians (if that was the name?), and a good chunk of the Futurians did attempt to distribute Communist pamphlets at the first Worldcon in 1939 (IIRC -- and the attempt was stopped by Worldcon organizers, who felt that non-sf politics had no place there). However, Asimov was also allegedly the Futurian who thought the pamphlets were a stupid idea as compared to Worldcon coolness, and quickly abandoned exile in the coffee shop across the street to return to Worldcon, hang out with non-Futurian friends, and watch Metropolis. Pretty soon they all trickled back across the street (IIRC).
(And strictly speaking, they weren't all Communists, but rather had some sort of idealistic idea about science fiction bettering world politics. But the group's "Cool Older Guy" was a Communist, so the club's politics ended up having a Communist and/or Trotskyist bent. At the time, Frederick Pohl and Donald A. Wollheim (later of DAW Books) were both Communist in their politics, among many others.)
However, it would appear that neither the FBI nor the informant knew about the Futurians thing. And a lot of sf fandom lost enthusiasm for Communism as history made it clear to them that Stalin was Not Good.