For many years, I had a recurring dream of being chased by the FBI. What the hell could that have been about?

During my childhood in the late 1940s and early ’50s, with the Cold War at its peak, the FBI’s infallibility was unquestionable. We knew this because a host of movies and television shows — I Led 3 Lives, I Was a Communist for the FBI, The Red Menace, I Married a Communist, My Son John, and more — boosted the feds to heroic proportions.

The several-thousand-page file that J. Edgar Hoover and his minions built on me starts when I was thirteen years old. The bureau starts such files early for red-diaper babies. But my memories of being identified as a “Red” began in 1948 when I, age eight, was helping my dad distribute flyers for the Independent Progressive presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, who had been agriculture secretary and vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt. One unwilling recipient of the leaflet chased me down the block, calling me “a filthy Red.” I had to ask my parents later what exactly that meant.