My curiosity about A. Mitchell Palmer was piqued originally as a young man when I discovered that we had both graduated from the same high school, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. What I discovered from Coben's biography is that Palmer was one of the most infamous characters in American politics in the 20th century (which may explain why I never heard his name mentioned in four years at Stroudsburg High School).

He was surely the worst attorney general of the last century. His only competition is from Harry Dougherty, Harding's attorney general, and John Mitchell, who was Nixon's. Dougherty was just a crook and Mitchell, while just as venomous as Palmer, never got the opportunity to do as much damage as Palmer did. In large part this is because civil liberties were strengthened in the wake of Palmer's excesses. For instance, his tenure led to the birth of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Palmer was Wilson's third and last attorney general, serving from 1919 to the end of the administration in March 1921. Having once rejected an offer of the Democratic nomination for president, he now tried to use his position as attorney general to win the 1920 nomination. America was going through a period of post-war xenophobic hysteria, and Palmer -- after first trying to resist it -- decided that he would become the leader of the nativists. He plotted and carried out a series of wholesale arrests of completely innocent immigrants. He held them incommunicado for weeks and, in some cases, for months. And he deported a couple hundred who had committed no crimes at all.

The ironic thing about Palmer's career is that, until he became attorney general, he was a progressive who used his various public offices for the good of working men and women, to put an end to child labor, and to push the progressive agenda of the first Wilson administration through Congress. If he had never been attorney general, he would be a minor hero of the Progressive Era. Why he switched remains one of the mysteries of American history -- although Coben correctly points out that one probable reason is that Palmer grew up in a xenophobic community. I can attest that Stroudsburg was still that way when I lived there.

Coben's biography is well-researched and also well-written, by the standards we usually associate with the work of historians. It's regrettable that other historians haven't looked at the same life and times; they're certainly open to multiple interpretations.