Nightline Daily E-mail: 5/14
N I G H T L I N E, May 14 -- I think it ran on Sunday nights at 8PM, and starred Efram Zimbalist Jr. It was, of course, "The F.B.I." As a young child, that really was my first exposure to "the Bureau." And if I remember correctly, just as "Dragnet" had done for the police, the program presented the FBI as the good guys, who rarely, if ever, made mistakes. Later, as an eighth grader on a YMCA bus tour around the country, one of the high points was a visit to the Bureau's headquarters where we got to see the lab, and where agents would fire machine guns. How much cooler could it get?
These days, aside from the X-Files, when you do hear about the FBI, it generally seems to be bad news. The story of their failure to turn over all of the documents in the McVeigh case is all over the news. Before that, a spy for the Russians at the highest level of the Bureau itself, the Wen Ho Lee espionage case out at the Los Alamos Nuclear Lab, and criticism of the work of the FBI's lab, which for many years had set the standard for the scientific investigation of crimes. For the most part, the FBI that we had all grown up with, seems to have run off the tracks. And no, I'm not going to rehash all of the J.Edgar Hoover stories.
What's going on? It's hard to tell. For journalists, the FBI is one of the hardest institutions to cover. Bureau officials rarely give interviews. We end up relying, for the most part, on retired agents, which can sometimes be dangerous, but can most times be useful as they are freed from the restrictions the Bureau puts on its current staff. Is this just a run of bad luck, or are there larger systemic problems. The current director, Louis Freeh, is about to end a controversial tenure. He was popular with many Republicans on the Hill because he challenged Attorney General Janet Reno and the Clinton White House on issues like campaign finance. He was equally unpopular with many Democrats for the same reason. Now, in the wake of last week's stunning developments in the Oklahoma City bombing case, criticism is coming from both sides of the aisle. There is talk of Congress holding hearings, and I'll leave that to you all to decide if that helps or hurts.
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