Susan Rosenfeld, the FBI's first official historian is critical of Tim Weiner's Enemies: A History of the FBI. She offers a detailed look at Weiner's book at the History News Network.
This book is not an objective study of FBI history. Instead it selects examples that bolster the contention that the FBI put its wars against anarchists, Communists, the New Left, and foreign and domestic terrorists ahead of any consideration for the Bill of Rights. Weiner concedes that proponents from all these groups actually committed acts of espionage or violence. But for the most part, he features perpetrators who were never punished.
Weiner also oversells the role that surveillance played in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and beyond. As former foreign counterintelligence (FCI) agent Robert Lamphere noted in The FBI-KGB War, “only a small fraction of the New York field office [in the 1940s]—fifty or sixty men out of a thousand—was concerned with Soviet espionage and few agents outside the squad really knew or cared much about Soviet spies.”
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
http://hnn.us/articles/tim-weiners-enemies-wears-its-anti-fbi-agenda-its-sleeve
Note: The piece offers a link to a rebuttal by Tim Weiner, but I was unable to link to that piece.
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