Nixon on Bernstein: "Son of a bitch"

Hands in the air for New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, who has published US government documents relating to Leonard Bernstein on the magazine's blog, including FBI files, memos from the files of Richard Nixon’s infamous 'plumbers', and several lively excerpts from Nixon’s White House tapes.

Those who have read the transcripts of Aaron Copland's relentless MacCarthy hearing will know of the terrifying resources the US government was willing to put into the monitoring and interrogation of left-wing composers in the middle of the last century.
Initially, it seems, J Edgar Hoover's office dismissed 'ambiguous and sweeping' insinuations about the politics of our beloved Lenny. But as McCarthyism took hold an X appeared next to the 'communist' box on his file. Much later, in the late sixties some serious stationery was committed to documenting Bernstein's support of Black Panther associates who had been charged with criminal activity.
The most entertaining parts of the file include some personal correspondence in 1961 between Hoover, director of the FBI, and a New York Philharmonic-attending communist-hunting nun, who received free literature and a plug for Hoover's book Masters of Deceit.
Some splendidly paranoid correspondence from the Nixon administration surrounding the premiere of Bernstein's Mass makes interesting reading, while sound files of Nixon dismissing Bernstein's habit of kissing people on the mouth, including Alvin Ailey, as 'absolutely sickening', and dismissing the composer himself as a 'son of a bitch' are simply beyond parody.