Files Detail Years of Spying on Bernstein

For more than three decades starting in the 1940's, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obsessively documented the activities of Leonard Bernstein, especially his associations with groups listed as subversive or communist, and, in the 1960's, his support for the civil rights and antiwar movements, newly released files show.

The F.B.I. never established that Mr. Bernstein, who died in 1990, was a member of the Communist Party. Indeed, he vehemently denied it under oath in 1953, and soon after that, the bureau acknowledged finding no communist ties.

But Mr. Bernstein remained an enthusiastic, if sometime indiscriminate, supporter of what he considered to be good causes, and the F.B.I. continued to accumulate reports on his travel and performances and his efforts against the Vietnam War and on behalf of civil rights and, in one well-known episode, the radical Black Panther Party.

The file shows that on one occasion, after Mr. Bernstein held a controversial fund raiser for the Black Panthers at his Park Avenue apartment in 1970, the F.B.I. went beyond intelligence-gathering and schemed to undermine him with damaging news leaks.

The F.B.I. documents, 666 pages of reports on Mr. Bernstein, were made available yesterday in Los Angeles by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which had obtained them from the bureau under the Freedom of Information Act. Portions of the reports have been blacked out or deleted by the Government, and the civil liberties group says it will sue to get the deleted material as well as the files that were not released.

With the reports' earnest citations of "red fronters" and other derisive terms for suspected subversives, they recall a time of blacklisting and redbaiting, when cold war fears drove political passions.

"It's funny until you remember that the F.B.I. took that kind of thing seriously and that that kind of F.B.I. skulduggery ruined so many lives," said Allan Parachini, public affairs director for the regional civil liberties group. Mr. Parachini requested the file nearly four years ago, when he was a news reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

"It is a reminder of the most unacceptable and reprehensible behavior on the part of the F.B.I. that went on for so long," he said. Because the F.B.I. censored the file and took more than three years to provide the part it turned over, he said, "I think it's fair to question, is it really over yet?"

FBI: No Comment

Asked to respond to issues raised in the file, the F.B.I. in Washington issued a short statement. "These materials have been released and can now be evaluated by the public," said Mike Kortan, a bureau spokesman. "It is the F.B.I.'s longstanding policy not to comment on this kind of historical information."

When a daughter of Mr. Bernstein, Jamie Bernstein Thomas, was told in New York yesterday of the release of the papers, she said the extent of the file did not come as a big surprise.

"My father knew that the F.B.I. was tailing him and keeping an eye on him very early," she said, "because when he tried to get a passport to go to Europe in the late 1940's, he was denied one, and he had to go to the State Department in order to straighten it out."

She added: "Whenever any liberal cause asked my father to be on their steering committee, or in the list of names on their letterhead, he said, 'Sure,' without doing any investigation into the organization. If it sounded like a nice liberal cause, he would lend his name to it, and the F.B.I. found that alarming."

Long after the uproar over the Bernsteins' fund-raising party for the Black Panthers, she recalled, the family learned from F.B.I. files that emerged during a court case that some protesters outside their apartment, who identified themselves as being from the Jewish Defense League, were actually F.B.I. agents.

In 1980, Mr. Bernstein said, "I have substantial evidence, now available to all, that the F.B.I. conspired to foment hatred and violent dissension among blacks, among Jews and between blacks and Jews."

The F.B.I. files revealed yesterday range widely over Mr. Bernstein's causes and career as conductor and composer but make no mention of one aspect of his life that biographers have dealt with extensively and that was unlikely to have escaped F.B.I. scrutiny: his bisexuality and homosexual relationships. Mr. Parachini of the civil liberties group said he suspected that such material had been withheld.

The documents show that the F.B.I. had been collecting information on Mr. Bernstein since at least 1943, when, in the jargon of the bureau, "a confidential informant of known reliability" reported that Mr. Bernstein, then the young assistant director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, "had sent greetings" to the American Youth for Democracy, one of 13 organizations cited by the Attorney General as communist. The F.B.I. documents said Mr. Bernstein was "connected" with the group, which later honored him with awards and receptions.

In 1944, Mr. Bernstein was listed as a sponsor of a dinner for a cartoonist for the Morning Freiheit. The Attorney General called the newspaper "a Communist Yiddish daily," the F.B.I. said.

In 1945, the file said, he signed an advertisement in The New York Times for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an anti-Fascist group and another organization considered subversive. The F.B.I. also found it suspicious that he had agreed to dedicate a musical number to a "free Spain." Moreover, he was listed in The Daily Worker, the Community Party newspaper, as a member of the "Music Division of the First Conference on American-Soviet Cultural Cooperation." He was also listed as a judge for musical auditions sponsored by the National Negro Congress.

The most direct piece of information linking Mr. Bernstein to communism comes in a 1951 file reporting that "a confidential informant of known reliability" said in 1950 that, in 1945, Benjamin J. Davis and another official of the American Communist Party "described Leonard Bernstein as an adherent of the Communist Party." He was also said to have "agreed to submit to Communist discipline."

Bits and Pieces

Strange tidbits found their way into the file. In 1949 someone found a phone book on the "D" train that contained the names of purported communists and a program from a performance that bore Mr. Bernstein's name. In 1952, Mr. Bernstein was taking a ship home from Europe when he talked with someone about a film, and an informer reported the conversation to the F.B.I. The New York Police Department, working with the F.B.I., found that Mr. Bernstein's wife, Felicia, had leased her apartment to someone reported years earlier to have been in the Communist Party.

Agents duly noted that in 1959, when Mr. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic performed in the Soviet Union, "Bernstein and the group received a warm reception from the Russians."

Although Mr. Bernstein was unaware of the extent of the F.B.I.'s dossier, he knew by the early 1950's that his name had been linked to groups called subversive. He responded in 1953 in a sworn affidavit with his application to obtain a passport. "Although I have never, to my knowledge, been accused of being a member of the Communist Party," he began, "I wish to take advantage of this opportunity to affirm under oath that I am not now or at any time ever been a member of the Communist Party or the Communist Political Association."

But in a revealing admission that he may have been used by groups with hidden agendas, he said that in some cases, "my name became linked through a charitable and well-intended impulse and obviously without the probing deliberation required."

He said "the name and real purpose" of some of these groups "are hardly more than a blur in my memory" and a link more on paper than personal. "Besides my ignorance of their underlying purposes," he added, "I have no recollection or knowledge of ever having joined any of them which had a membership roll in the true sense."

Mr. Bernstein's account was supported by Margaret Carson, who had known him since 1942 and was his personal representative for virtually his entire career. "I would say his political involvement was for all humanity," she said yesterday. "He loved the world and wanted the best for it. His closest political self-definition was that he was a socialist. He said as much. But he never joined the Communist Party."

In 1954, another memo conceded that the F.B.I. had turned up little. But it said "reports are to be submitted even though no information has been developed reflecting Communist Party or Communist Party front activity on the part of the subject."

And they were, through the administrations of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

A 1961 memo tracked the New York Philharmonic's tour to Japan. And the F.B.I. director advised the Kennedy White House of its long investigation of Mr. Bernstein. In 1968, the Johnson White House was notified by the F.B.I. that "information has also been developed that Mr. Bernstein has been active in the civil rights movement." Harry Belafonte had enlisted him to march in Selma, Ala.

Birth of 'Radical Chic'

In 1970, Mr. Bernstein and his wife opened their Park Avenue duplex to a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers, setting off a furor in the press that fueled intense F.B.I. interest and action. The affair was covered by Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times, who depicted an avid Mr. Bernstein listening to militants urging a takeover of capitalist America. "I dig absolutely," the maestro was quoted as responding.

He later contended that his position had been distorted. But several months later, Tom Wolfe immortalized the encounter in New York magazine and gave it a name -- "radical chic" -- in an article that became a book, and a dismayed Mr. Bernstein was stuck with the image.

Worse followed. When one of the Black Panthers for whom Mr. Bernstein and his guests had raised $10,000, Donald Lee Cox, was sought on a murder charge, the F.B.I. schemed to capitalize on the issue, according to a document in the file.

In a memo on May 18, 1970, to one of Mr. Hoover's top deputies, W. C. Sullivan, another F.B.I. official, G. C. Moore, makes note of the events and suggests leaking an account "to a cooperative news media source on a confidential basis."

The proposed item was to note that Mr. Cox had been one of those "with whom these elite socialites were rubbing shoulders." It added this editorial question: "Prior to Bernstein and their misguided friends contributing additional funds for the alleged protection of the constitutional rights of such a group, shouldn't there first be given consideration to the establishment of a fund to aid the surviving members of the victim's family?"

The file did not make it clear whether the item had ever been successfully planted in a news report.

The following year, the F.B.I. grappled with a "reported plot" by Mr. Bernstein to embarrass President Nixon with a performance of the composer's "Mass" at the dedication of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Mr. Nixon said he did not want to intrude on a Kennedy family moment and skipped the opening.