Web Extra!
The Washington Post is reporting that radio legend and River Forest resident Paul Harvey frequently submitted his radio scripts to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for approval over a 20 year period.
The newspaper broke the story Friday after a year long effort that included 1,400 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
“And now, the rest of the story,” the Post article deadpanned in introducing the news.
The Post reports Harvey, who died last year, regularly wrote Hoover and his deputies and passed on scripts for comment. Harvey in turn was rewarded with research and suggested changes in scripts.
The Post also tells a story of a Harvey publicity stunt in 1951 that nearly got him indicted, but ultimately earned him face time with his hero Hoover. The two men, both staunch anti-communists and deeply conservative, hit it off famously.
Hoover’s troops apparently weren’t so impressed. After Harvey illegally entered Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont late at night in an attempt to prove lax security there he almost immediately found himself arrested. Besides a .380 caliber handgun, investigators found a typewritten four-page script in his car that told a fabricated story of how his Argonne escapades went.
“Suddenly I realized where I was. That I had entered, unchallenged, one of the United States’ vital atomic research installations,” Harvey had written in advance of his adventure.
A grand jury declined to indict him. According to the Post, though, the FBI wanted nothing to do with Harvey.
“This looks like a publicity stunt and I don’t think we should carry the ball if we can avoid it,” the Post quotes from a 1951 FBI memo.