Posted on 09/16/2003 11:47:55 AM PDT by Shermy
"Try not to become a person of success, but rather, to become a person of value" - Albert Einstein.
"Try not to become a person of interest, but rather, to become a person of invisibility" - Chuck Goudie.
As Daily Herald readers and my own children have generously reminded me over the years, "you're no Einstein."
I've considered the observation to be quite shallow. As you can see from my photograph I don't have 120-volt hair, a silver moustache or cue-ball eyes.
But you don't have to be Einstein to realize that his most famous philosophy of life needs a makeover. It's no longer enough to be a person of success or value. In this era of great suspicion and terrorists, you must become a person of invisibility to ensure that you don't get the dreaded label "person of interest."
As a longtime student of the criminal arts, with a master's degree in the science of mayhem, havoc and public chaos, I am well qualified to update Einstein's oft-quoted advise.
The origin of the designation "person of interest" is unclear. It most likely does not have a Latin root. I can find no reference to anyone in Caesar's time being a "persona interesta."
The notion of such individuals who might pose a threat to the American government began during World War II. That's when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered government agents to track potential foreign subversives in "Official and Confidential Files."
President Lyndon B. Johnson continued the practice in 1965, according to published reports, requesting that the FBI check out people critical of White House Vietnam War policy.
The first time I find any published mention of the exact term "person of interest" in a criminal context is 33 years ago. A New York Times abstract from June 28, 1970, cites the phrase "person of interest" as a federal "agent's term for those citizens, many with no criminal records, whom Govt wants to keep track of in effort to avert subversion, rioting and violence or harm to nation's leaders."
According to the article, then Sen. Sam Ervin considered such a designation as helping to lead the United States toward a "police state."
So initially, persons of interest could be anyone. Hippies, drug addicts, nosey news reporters, leftists, rightists, centrists, anti-war longhairs, skinhead neo-Nazis or just someone who flipped off a law enforcement hotshot on his way to work.
And it would appear that history is repeating itself.
Law enforcement agencies from Chicago to Charlotte, Boston to Boca Raton, sea to shining sea, are merrily referring to suspects as a "person of interest." Never again will you have the pleasure of hearing your local police commandant order his underlings to "round up the usual suspects."
There are no usual suspects, at least not officially. There are people the police are interested in.
Back in the old days, jumper cables were frequently clamped onto the appendages of someone who was arrested to determine the truth. Everybody was a suspect and nobody was ruled out of having committed a crime.
In these days, torture is administered by affixing a label to potential wrongdoers. They are merely identified as "persons of interest" by law enforcement.
In Chicago and the suburbs, police now routinely refer to suspects as "persons of interest." In Louisiana, police have put a man's likeness on billboards and labeled him as a "person of interest" in a serial murder case.
Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, the annals of American jurisprudence or even in your township law enforcement manuals, will you find the term "person of interest." It just doesn't exist.
The predecessor to "person of interest" was the now-extinct term "target." That word implied that the government had the goods on somebody, was going after them with all the grand force of the government and that someday a chorus line of Brooks Brothers suits would be at the podium announcing criminal charges.
Federal agents never really enjoyed the label "target," probably because the taxpaying public envisioned some poor mope with a bull's eye on his back being chased and wrongly pursued. That is also why the word "suspect" made such a quick exit in the past few years.
The new criminal craze, "person of interest," is intended to be legally vague. It enables law enforcement to tag someone as dirty without really covering him or her with mud.
The latest incarnation of this is with Steven J. Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert who is still a government "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks that followed Sept. 11.
Enduring two years of scrutiny, without ever being called a suspect, Hatfill filed a federal lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft and other U.S. officials and agencies. Hatfill accused them of destroying his reputation and ruining his employment chances by labeling him a "person of interest" in the investigation of unsolved anthrax mailings that killed five people in 2001.
Had Hatfill adopted my updated version of Einstein's famous quote, he could have escaped such a scandalous reputation as a "person of interest."
The ex-Army scientist should simply have retired to Colon, Mich., the Magic Capital of the World, and made himself invisible.
Even Einstein could have figured that.
• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC-7/News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by e-mail at goudie@attbi.com.
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