When J. Edgar Hoover Lost and Freedom Won

When J. Edgar Hoover Lost and Freedom Won:

 In talking with Betty Medsger about her new nonfiction book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, one can hear her journalistic neutrality yield to an admiration for individuals who would risk their futures to expose government acts (in this case, by the FBI) that corrupt the Constitution.

Medsger broke the story with articles in The Washington Post about government files - obtained through a 1971 burglary of an FBI office - that documented a shadow FBI that spied at will on US citizens. Several decades later she spent years researching how this little-known robbery with a monumental impact came to be - and she learned for the first time who had carried it out, eluded the FBI and avoided prosecution.