Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds.

This is an article that my dad emailed to me a few weeks ago. I thought it was so interesting that I re-read it for this assignment.

Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds Summary and Reaction

by Lauren Groves

For the last few years of his life, Ernest Hemingway suffered from mental afflictions and was diagnosed with depression and paranoia. According to a close friend (A.E. Hotchner), he believed that his car, his room and his phone were being bugged and that his mail was being intercepted. Friends were supportive but worried about his obsession that someone was watching him. It made him lack fervor for life and, at times, lose the will to live completely.

He was soon transported to the psychiatric section of St. Mary’s hospital on November 30^th, 1960. In December he received eleven electric shock treatments. The whole time he was there, he remained convinced that his room in the ward was bugged, and that the phone outside his room was tapped. He also expected one of the interns at the hospital was a fed.

He was released for a short while, but the strife created by his “paranoid delusions” led him to attempt suicide two more times. On a flight to the Mayo Clinic, “though heavily sedated, he tried to jump from the plane. When it stopped in Casper, Wyoming for repairs, he tried to walk into the moving propeller.”

Years after he tragically managed to take his own life at the barrel of a shotgun, the truth was made known. The F.B.I. released its Hemingway File, which reveals that beginning in the 1940’s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Hemingway under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s frequent visits to Cuba. So now we come to grips with the realization that his crazy behavior in the last year of his life was highly justified. In fact, around the time his paranoia set in, he had already been under surveillance for almost twenty years.

This once again raises the constitutional debate over privacy that has been going on for hundreds of years in America. When the constitution was written, our forefathers listed our rights to life, liberty, and property. However, they neglected to mention anything about privacy. The closest we citizens get to privacy is in the contents of the ninth and tenth amendments. Even though it doesn’t say anything about personal privacy, it does provide that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” (9^th amendment) and that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution…are reserved…to the people” (10^th Amendment.) When analyzing these two amendments in unison, it is clear to me that there is a right to privacy. Because the government isn’t specifically given the power to violate the people’s privacy, it is reserved as a people’s right.

Hemingway lived a wonderful life to its fullest. It was only when his right to privacy was unconstitutionally revoked, that things went wrong. A brilliant literary mind was wasted away to nothing with shock treatments that were ordered by doctors on account of his “paranoid” condition. If his constitutional rights had not been violated, I believe he could have lived on well into his golden years. He could have retained the concentration that was needed to finish his aesthetically pleasing book about Paris, “A Moveable Feast,” and many more masterpieces. Ernest’s tragic end is an excellent example of how unconstitutional surveillance can ruin a vibrant and beautifully-lived life.