The man J. Edgar Hoover blamed for Pearl Harbor: Larry Fly, the forgotten hero who refused to illegally wiretap Americans.

• Author: Socolow, Michael J.

THE ACCUSATION STUNNED wartime Washington. In July 1943, numerous newspaper columnists blamed one specific federal employee for the intelligence failures that led to Pearl Harbor. His name was James Lawrence "Larry" Fly, and he had been coordinating all civilian and military telecommunication since 1940. While chairing both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Defense Communications Board (DCB), Fly had accrued significant political enemies simply by fulfilling his responsibilities. With so many critics, the smear stuck.

Fly knew immediately who had planted the rumor. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had secretly approached Fly in September 1940 with an urgent request. The bureau wanted permission (and access) from Fly's FCC to secretly wiretap various unnamed Americans and foreign nationals within the United States. Fly, who possessed a remarkable command of media law, knew Hoover's request violated not only the Fourth Amendment but Section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934. That section, tided "Unauthorized Publication or Use of Communications," contained a subsection called "Practices Prohibited" that clearly indicated warrantless wiretapping was illegal.

Fly rejected Hoover's request. Hoover never forgave him. Indeed, Fly's refusal triggered an enmity so enormous, personal, and long-lasting that Hoover's biographer, Curt Gentry, described it as legendary even by Washington standards. Hoover pushed the Pearl Harbor accusation relentlessly for the rest of Fly's life, and Fly would battle Hoover's agency--in courtrooms, in the press, on television, and elsewhere--for decades. Yet few Americans today have heard of Larry Fly. His legacy of civil libertarianism and his courage in challenging the FBI remain largely forgotten in our amnesiac culture.

With every revelation about the expansion of illegal surveillance, and with each news report chronicling the decline of privacy protections, the civic cost of forgetting Fly's efforts continues to escalate. The post-9/11 debates over expanding the surveillance state would have unfolded very differently had Fly's crusade against illegal wiretapping been integrated in public school civics curricula. Indeed, in the years since 9/11 it is difficult if not impossible to locate a federal functionary of Fly's stature publicly campaigning against infringements of liberty. Fly was the rare politically appointed bureaucrat more loyal to the Constitution than to any specific administration or party.

Fly's biographer, Mickie Edwardson, died before completing her full manuscript. She did, however, publish several scholarly articles drawn from her research. Media historians, regulatory activists, and civil libertarians all remain indebted to her labor. Much of this article, for example, draws from Edwardson's "James Lawrence Fly, the FBI, and Wiretapping," published in The Historian in 1999.

But it's not simply the biographical void that explains Fly's disappearance. It's also the fact that few prominent figures in American political history acquired so many powerful enemies. At different times, over less than a decade, Fly was condemned by such powerful business and political leaders as CBS Chairman William S. Paley, RCA Chairman David Sarnoff, 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, and of course Hoover. Only the patronage of President Franklin Roosevelt buoyed Fly in the stormy political waters of World...