The Burglary Page 4

  • A day later, four students were killed and nine were injured, some of them permanently disabled, on the Kent State campus by National Guard gunfire as students assembled peacefully that Monday for a demonstration at noon. It was the first time Americans were killed while protesting the war. A few days later, according to White House presidential counsel John Dean, behind closed doors at a Department of Justice meeting, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called one of the slain students a “slut” and seemed to have little interest in how they had been killed. No one was ever convicted of the killings.

  • Shortly after the shootings at Kent State, Representative Tip O’Neill, Democrat from Massachusetts, said this on the House floor: “Look at the situation. No nation can destroy us militarily, but what can destroy us from within is happening now.”

  • Nixon, at the urging of his staff, formed a Commission on Campus Unrest to examine the causes of unrest, including the killings at Kent State. He rejected his commission’s conclusions that White House policies and current social conditions in the United States were the cause of most student protest.

  • Two students were killed several days after the Kent State shootings by local and state police one night at Jackson State University, a black campus in Jackson, Mississippi. Despite the fact that no students shot at police, and there was no evidence any students possessed guns, city and state police armed with carbines, submachine guns, shotguns, and service revolvers shot more than 460 rounds of ammunition at the windows of the dormitory where one of the killings took place. (The second student was shot dead on a nearby street as he carried milk home from a grocery store.) The shots by law enforcement officers shattered every window on one side of the dormitory. As at Kent State, no one was ever convicted for the killings.

  • The Friday after the killings at Kent State, scores of students were bludgeoned in New York’s financial district by hundreds of construction workers who rampaged through the streets attacking students with crowbars and other heavy tools wrapped in American flags. They did so as the students sang at a peaceful noon vigil at a day of mourning called for by New York mayor John Lindsay to honor the slain Kent State students. To prevent the people they injured from receiving medical care, the construction workers—most of them were from the building site of the Twin Towers—yanked down a Red Cross banner outside an emergency clinic that had been hastily set up at Trinity Church by New York University doctors. When Michael Belknap, a lawyer with the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, tried to help a bleeding student, he was knocked down and stomped on his back by construction workers. “Someone yelled, ‘He’s a commie bastard. We ought to kill him,’ ” Belknap told a reporter. The Wall Street Journal reported that financial district workers threw streams of ticker tape and data processing punch cards from their windows in celebration of the violence taking place in the streets below.

  • Twenty-two of those New York construction workers were honored at the White House a few weeks later by President Nixon. He thanked them for showing their patriotism the day they beat students. He gave them flag lapel pins, and they gave him a yellow hard hat like the ones they wore the day they assaulted students, seventy of whom were seriously injured.

  • Vice President Spiro Agnew wrote a letter of thanks to the union official who organized the attacks on the students, Peter Brennan, head of the New York City Building Trades Council. He congratulated him for his “impressive display of patriotism” the day of the attacks. When Nixon was reelected in 1972, the president rewarded Brennan, who was a leader of the movement to increase the number of labor Democrats who voted for Nixon in 1972, by appointing him secretary of labor.

  • On August 24, 1970, a bomb exploded in front of Sterling Hall, a building that housed the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A thirty-three-year-old physics researcher and father of three young children was killed and four people were injured. Three people were convicted for the crime and a fourth suspect is still being sought by the FBI.

  That was America in 1970.

  It was an extraordinary time in the life of the country. Not since the Civil War had Americans been so divided. Nearly all of the divisions were related to the war. It became clear that year that the war that had been tearing Vietnam apart for many years was now also tearing apart the soul of America—in the heartland and in the cities, from coast to coast. Frustrations were higher and hopes lower in the peace movement than they had been at any time. Many people wondered if this war, which by now in reports from Vietnam was often called a bloodbath, would end.

  People had been asking: Can there be peace in Vietnam? Now people also asked: Can there be peace at home?

  IT WAS IN 1970, that mad time, to use Daniel Berrigan’s words, that Davidon became aware of another war: the war against dissent. As he moved from peace group to peace group that year, searching for more effective ways to escalate opposition to war, he repeatedly heard a very troubling rumor. He heard it from people in various types of peace organizations—academic, scientific, religious, antidraft. They told him there were growing fears that there were FBI spies in their midst. Fear of informers was having a poisonous impact, he was told. People worried about whether the person who stood beside them at a demonstration was an informer. Some wondered about their neighbor, their colleague at work, or the new volunteer in the peace organization office—were they informers? Trust was fraying. Some people considered colleagues with such concerns to be paranoid and dismissed them.

  Davidon listened carefully, but he was cautious. At first, he did not take the concerns very seriously. True to his reluctance to accept either speculation or conspiracy theories, he thought people might be exaggerating, or that their frustrations about the war, after so many years of failing to stop it, might be fueling irrational fears. But the concerns were repeated to him again and again. Very reasonable people from a diverse range of peace organizations expressed them.

  By the fall of 1970, Davidon no longer doubted what people were telling him. He concluded that the rumor probably was true: Peace organizations had been infiltrated by informers. One of the nation’s most powerful leaders, J. Edgar Hoover, he now feared, might have turned the power of the FBI against people who opposed the war. Davidon thought about it constantly. If it turned out that the U.S. government was suppressing Americans’ right to express dissent—including and especially dissent about the most crucial issues: the war, the use of apocalyptic weapons in the war, and racial equality—then much was at stake. Without the freedom to dissent without being spied on, Davidon thought, dissent was empty, erased, useless. Such spying, he thought, was gravely hypocritical in a nation that expressed great pride in being the land of the free. How could a government that claimed to be fighting a war for people’s freedom in another country at the same time suppress its own people’s right to dissent?

  Finally, Davidon decided that it was as important to answer this question—was the FBI suppressing dissent?—as it was to oppose the war. Most people would have recognized the enormous inherent impediments to answering the question and concluded it would be impossible to do so, but Davidon decided the implications were simply too big, too important—too damaging to the heart of democracy—to let it go unanswered. As he had done when he became deeply concerned about the development and use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, he now quietly did what he thought was a citizen’s obligation: He took responsibility for finding the answer to the question.

  Davidon focused his scientifically trained mind on how to prove or disprove the persistent rumor that the government was spying on Americans for reasons unrelated to suspicion of crime. He analyzed what was known about how J. Edgar Hoover operated. Little had been written about the FBI or the director, except for what had been ghostwritten by FBI staff and by the people the director referred to inside the bureau as “friendly” journalists. Prior to 1971, there had been very little public criticism of the director or the bureau except for occasional commentary by Alan Barth in the W
ashington Post and Tom Wicker in the New York Times. The only reporting that raised questions about the FBI had been done by Jack Nelson in the Los Angeles Times, a book by Nelson and Jack Bass, and Fred Cook’s book and articles in the Nation magazine. As FBI policy dictated, journalists had been hampered by never having access to FBI records or officials, even after the Freedom of Information Act became law in 1966. From what he had absorbed about the director, Davidon had the impression that he was an extremely bureaucratic manager and an extremely conservative ideologue. That combination, he thought, could be a potentially potent and dangerous pair of defining characteristics when embodied in an extraordinarily popular and powerful person at the pinnacle of American law enforcement. He thought that if Hoover was a consummate bureaucrat, perhaps he kept and distributed within the bureau detailed records of his opinions and his operations. And, he thought, perhaps he also required those who carried out his orders to file detailed reports.

  It was just a hunch.

  As Davidon framed the problem to himself, he concluded that the question could be answered only by presenting hard evidence to the public. Neither rhetorical condemnation nor unproved assumptions would do. Rhetoric without supporting evidence of actual suppression of dissent could be dismissed easily and likely would lead to deeper cynicism than already existed. A great believer in the potential of average people to make wise decisions if they are armed with information, he was confident that if evidence of official suppression of dissent could be found and be presented to the public, people would demand that such suppression be stopped.

  But how could evidence be found? In a life spent as a problem solver, in physics and in activism, this was the most difficult problem Davidon had ever faced. He could not shake the thought that evidence might exist, and if it existed, it should be possible to find it and prove conclusively whether the destructive rumors were true. But he could think of no lawful way to find evidence.

  This perplexing dilemma led Davidon, in late 1970, to think again of burglary. He disliked the idea of using burglary as a resistance tool, just as he had when he reluctantly joined Catholic activists in raiding draft board offices in early 1970. But when he considered the options, there seemed to be no other way to get documentary evidence of FBI operations except by breaking into an FBI office and taking files.

  Just as Davidon was ready to ask a few people he deeply trusted what they thought of his idea, two events in late 1970 focused national attention on Hoover and the FBI.

  The first event took place November 27, 1970, the day after Thanksgiving, when the director made a rare appearance before the Supplemental and Deficiencies Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He went to Capitol Hill that day to make the case he made to Congress every year, usually before a House Committe: that a crisis atmosphere made it essential that Congress increase the bureau’s budget. But today he had an additional reason for testifying: to disclose highly charged secrets his top aides had urged him not to reveal.

  Hoover had little to worry about regarding budget increases. He had long had extraordinary success in getting the increases he wanted. As Los Angeles Times reporters Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow wrote in their 1972 book The FBI and the Berrigans, “Only twice since 1950 had the FBI not received the exact amount of its budget requests. On those two occasions, the FBI received more than he requested.” With few exceptions in his nearly half century as director, his sessions before Congress were lovefests, not inquiries. Members of Congress would rise, one by one, to praise and thank him. They treated him as though they were there to serve him, not to question him. Years later, the public would learn that Hoover carefully cultivated this sense of intimidation, but at the time only the intimidated had a clue.

  By then Hoover had been director of the bureau for forty-six years, since Calvin Coolidge was president. That made him the longest-serving appointed public official in U.S. history, a record that still stands. Though the attorney general was technically his supervisor—at this time it was John Mitchell, the future head of President Nixon’s reelection campaign, who would later go to prison for his crimes in the Watergate scandal—Hoover acted as though he was his own boss. With very few exceptions, most attorneys general and presidents treated Hoover as though his perception of his power was correct.

  Like most senators and members of Congress, Democratic senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Republican senator Roman L. Hruska of Nebraska—the only two senators present for his November 1970 presentation—had good working relationships with Hoover. They put this session together hastily. The long mahogany table in the chandeliered room would have accommodated at least two dozen senators, but because it was the day after Thanksgiving most were not available. Senators Byrd and Hruska sat beside each other on a long side of the table facing Hoover. Opposite them, the director’s longtime colleague and companion Clyde Tolson sat on one side of Hoover, and John P. Mohr, an assistant to the director, sat on his other side as he read aloud to the two senators all of his twenty-seven pages of prepared testimony. He decried the amount of overtime agents had to work because of the “growing menace”—four million hours during fiscal year 1970, he said. That was one of his secret annual budget tricks. Hoover required agents to submit phony overtime records so he could use the contrived data when he made his annual case before Congress for a budget increase. In his testimony this day, he asked for an extra $14.5 million above the annual increase. This extra allocation, he said, was needed because of “terrorist tactics” that made it necessary to hire a thousand additional agents. These hires would bring the total number of agents to 8,350, an unprecedented 14 percent increase in one year.

  Hoover always had a story line to justify his request for a budget increase. It usually was about frightening threats. Since the beginning of the Cold War, he had based his annual pitch on the need to strengthen the bureau’s ability to fight the growth of communism in the United States. He stuck with this story long after communism had nearly disappeared in the country, even long after there were more FBI agents posing as party members than there were genuine party members at Communist Party meetings. Hoover’s story line this day in late 1970 was different. The small number of senators present to hear him—two—was no indication of the profound implications of what he would say behind closed doors and then immediately release to journalists. The senators were willing props on a stage Hoover had designed in order to make secrets public.

  He had given this same testimony before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations just two weeks earlier. It was not released to the press then. He had made sure it would be released today.

  He told the senators about the bureau’s increased responsibilities in the investigation of organized crime, an area he had long avoided. He talked about the growing dangers imposed by the New Left, especially the Weathermen, noting that one member of that radical group, Bernardine Dohrn, had recently been placed on the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.”

  Then he came to the heart of what he said that day, what dominated national news that evening and the next day. He told his audience of two:

  Willingness to employ any type of terrorist tactics is becoming increasingly apparent among extremist elements. One example has recently come to light involving an incipient plot on the part of an anarchist group on the east coast, the so-called “East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives.”

  This is a militant group self-described as being composed of Catholic priests and nuns, teachers, students, and former students who have manifested opposition to the war in Vietnam by acts of violence against Government agencies and private corporations engaged in work relating to U.S. participation in the Vietnam conflict.

  The principal leaders of this group are Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Catholic priests who are currently incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, for their participation in the destruction of Selective Service Records in Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968.

  This group plans t
o blow up underground electrical conduits and steam pipes serving the Washington, D.C., area in order to disrupt federal government operations. The plotters are also concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed Government official. The name of a White House staff member has been mentioned as a possible victim. If successful, the plotters would demand an end to United States bombing operations in Southeast Asia and the release of all political prisoners as ransom. Intensive investigation is being conducted concerning this matter.

  It was a bombshell.

  Hoover had arranged to have a member of his staff call selected journalists and tell them that the director’s testimony from the closed hearing would be available when the hearing ended. The FBI staffer assured reporters they were going to get a big story. As Hoover concluded his remarks, Mohr gave copies of Hoover’s twenty-seven-page prepared statement to the clerk of the Senate committee and asked him to distribute them to the reporters who were waiting outside the closed hearing room door.

  The director was so eager for the claims he made to have the widest possible public exposure that two weeks later, on December 11, he published a booklet containing his by then well-known “secret” testimony and had it mailed to journalists, public officials, business leaders, and other influential people throughout the country. In a cover letter sent with the booklet, Hoover wrote, “It is my hope that through this document a better understanding will result of the work and problems facing the FBI.” The distribution of his testimony—first to journalists that day and later in the widely mailed booklet—marked the first time in the bureau’s history that the director had made public unproven allegations about criminal acts by specific people who had not been charged.