On the face of it, one would think that this book was the perfect subject for the perfect author. After some years of trying, the journalist Fred Jerome has been able to obtain the almost unredacted FBI files on Albert Einstein. One knows, if one has done this, that FBI files, when they are released, often come with lines of thick black ink that cover things the bureau thinks you should not know. These include the names of informants and FBI agents.

In my case, I wanted my own file as I was thinking of writing a piece that I was going to call “Friends and neighbors”, but the redacted file was useless. My file had been assembled because I needed a clearance to work at Los Alamos. In Einstein’s case it was because J Edgar Hoover – the then head of the FBI – had an obsessive hatred of Einstein, who, for Hoover, represented every left-wing tendency he despised.

Jerome wanted Einstein’s files because he saw they represented a marvellous story – spying on the greatest scientist of the 20th century. It should also be noted – as the author does – that Jerome’s father was jailed for being a member of the Communist Party. He does not tell us the details, but he has a vivid memory of being followed by men in grey suits wearing fedoras – FBI agents.

In short, as I said, one seems to have the perfect subject for the perfect author. But as I was reading The Einstein File, I kept asking myself why I did not like the book more. First there is the writing, which I found sloppy. For example, Jerome describes the July 1939 visit of Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard to Einstein, who was vacationing on Long Island. Their purpose was to get Einstein to sign a letter to President Roosevelt warning of a possible German attempt to make nuclear weapons. On the way they drove past the hypermodern structures that had been erected for the World’s Fair that was being held in New York. Jerome writes (page 30): “For all that Szilard loved inventions and the benefits of technology, at that moment the glitzy exhibition must have seemed an ironic backdrop to the catastrophic drama he sensed was about to unfold.” How does Jerome know what impression these structures made on Szilard, to say nothing of their being an “ironic backdrop”? This is a trivial example, but I will give a very serious one later.

On top of this, there is the matter of the page notes. Many of the pages are festooned with stars and daggers indicating some note or notes at the bottom of the page. Not only are these notes exceedingly distracting, but also many of them seem pointless. For example, after a largely irrelevant divagation about the bubonic plague, we are informed at the bottom of page 29 that “before subsiding in 1656, the Plague killed more than 100,000 Londoners”. Unless one is Gibbon, it is better to let sleeping page notes lie.

Apart from the problems with the writing there is another problem that is really not Jerome’s fault. The book quotes extensively from the FBI files and, to put the matter bluntly, they are so stupid as to be excruciatingly dull. Apart from the absurdity of trying to show that Einstein was a spy for the former Soviet Union, one is struck again and again by how totally incompetent these people were – and, God help us, perhaps still are. In the case of Einstein they could not get even the elementary facts straight.

Considerable resources were spent investigating an imaginary son, Albert Junior, who was supposed to have some sinister connection with the Soviets. A biographical sketch of Einstein from 1950, meanwhile, contains so many basic mistakes that it appears to have been written by a child. What is not childish is its allegation that Einstein had a connection with Klaus Fuchs, who, as we know, did spy successfully for the Soviet Union.

In this respect Jerome makes such a monumental error that when I first read it I was sure that it must have been taken from one of the FBI reports. A speech writer for Senator Joseph McCarthy named Howard Rushmore had published a series of articles in the New York Journal American that claimed that Einstein had a connection with Fuchs. Hoover, and his deputy Clyde Tolson, eventually read and relied on them. Jerome comments: “Whether or not Hoover and Tolson had already read the Rushmore article, Tolson no doubt remembered that Einstein and Fuchs were both German Jews and had lived in Berlin around the same time.”

Not only is this statement totally false, it is also very dangerous. Anyone who has taken five minutes to read about Fuchs knows that he came from generations of Protestant pastors, including his father, who converted to Quakerism. Moreover, Fuchs did not live in Berlin at around the same time as Einstein. He was a student in Leipzig and then Kiel until he was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Jerome’s statement is dangerous because if you search for Fuchs on the web, you will find virulently anti-Semitic sites that claim that Fuchs was a Jew. Incidentally, when asked, Fuchs said that he had never met Einstein.

If one has studied Einstein’s life, it comes as no surprise that he took an active part in politics. One of my favourite stories told by one of his assistants was of Einstein coming into the office to announce that now Kurt Gödel had really gone crazy. He had voted for Eisenhower for president, Einstein explained.

But, to Jerome’s credit, he has put together a chronicle of Einstein’s political and social activity in the US that is valuable and, at least to me, in some parts novel. I had not realized, for example, Einstein’s involvement with racial injustice. He spoke out against lynching and he lectured at black educational institutions. He became friends with Paul Robeson, the magnificent black actor and singer, whose left-wing views put him at the top of Hoover’s list of enemies, with Einstein close by. It seems to have been Hoover’s intent to put together enough of a dossier to have Einstein deported. (To where? Germany?) It is easy to be smug about this and to say that it is all in the past. But these are difficult times and I am sure there are Hoovers out there making lists.