To the editor:

Right or wrong, President Bush's domestic spying program is not unprecedented. In his book, "Roosevelt's Secret War," author Joseph E. Persico reveals that more than a year before the United States entered World War II President Roosevelt authorized illegal wiretapping of suspected spies and saboteurs by the FBI. Then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had a long history of this kind of counterespionage dating to the 1920s when, during the Red Scare, he rounded up "nearly ten thousand suspected radicals and subversives" in this country.

Congress had outlawed wiretapping in the Communications Act of 1934, and in 1939 the Supreme Court upheld the ban. Still, Hoover's agents continued the practice for years, tracking "Communist and fascist activities" with Roosevelt's blessing, until challenged by Attorney General Robert H. Jackson in 1940. Citing the Supreme Court's decision, Jackson issued an order barring the FBI from wiretapping. In the name of national security, FDR quickly came to Hoover's defense with a memorandum directing him "in such cases as you may approve É to authorize the necessary investigating agents that they are at liberty to secure information by listening devices direct to the conversation or other communications of persons suspected of subversive activities against the government of the United States, including suspected spies." As Persico writes "In short, never mind Congress, the Supreme Court, or the attorney general's qualms. The nation was in peril."

JEFF JERNIGAN, Cape Girardeau