Alex Ross: The Bernstein Files

Big kudoronies to investigative reporter Alex Ross who dug up Lenny's huge FBI file, where we learn some new crazy things: it's unsurprising that J. Edgar Hoover, that nasty old drag queen, clearly envious of all the fun Lenny was gaily having, became obsessed with the conductor's "unAmerican" activities (while of course, over the 1940s and 1950s and beyond, the mafia made billions and the KKK terrorized blacks, both organizations mostly undisturbed by J-Ed's G-Men). Bernstein after all, as a gay Jewish lefty, was the perfect target for Hoover's hatred.

Still, what's in the papers discovered by Ross and published by The New Yorker, is almost Orwellian in its madness:

In 1958, one informant stated: “I know that Bernstein is a card-carrying Communist but I have no proof of it but I can tell by the way he talks.” Such missives seemed to multiply after Bernstein became the music director of the New York Philharmonic, in 1958.

Oh, and believe it or not, the Director himself personally wrote to a Wisconsin nun who had asked the Bureau to investigate Bernstein due to his Communism, and sent her some literature.