Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [210]
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‘Justice is only incidental to law and order.’
J. Edgar Hoover, 1968
In April 1969, a brooding President Nixon called Edgar to discuss the unrest sweeping the nation about Vietnam. Nixon was worried about student unrest, about draft resisters and the possibility of a mutiny by troops in the field. It was the sort of thing, he felt, that ‘brings down governments.’ Edgar’s response was to compare the situation to the Russian revolution of 1917. Rambling on about ‘bleeding hearts,’ he told Nixon that campus rebellion could be solved if ‘presidents of the universities showed more guts and expelled the individuals …’
Later, when Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd at Kent State University, killing four young people and wounding eight, Edgar had no compassion. ‘The Guardsmen used as much restraint as they could,’ Edgar informed presidential aide Egil Krogh. ‘The students invited and got what they deserved.’
In fact, official investigations showed the students were shot when they were hundreds of feet away from the Guardsmen, too far to be any threat. None of those killed were militants. A tape of the incident shows that the fatal salvo was preceded by a single gunshot. ‘This could have been fired,’ wrote the historian William Manchester, ‘either as a signal or from fear, by Terence F. Norman, a spurious “freelance photographer” who was really an informer on the FBI payroll …’
All Vietnam protests, however peaceful, were infiltrated by FBI agents. On Edgar’s orders, informants were paid to report on the plans – and private lives – of peace activists. Some of the victims were famous. Jane Fonda, trailed by the FBI long before her controversial visit to North Vietnam, was reported as arriving at an airport ‘disheveled and dirty.’ Her address book, containing ‘names, addresses and telephone numbers of many revolutionary and leftist groups,’ was confiscated and Xeroxed for FBI files. The actress’ mail was opened, her phones bugged, her bank records examined. She became, for the Bureau’s record, ‘Jane Fonda: Anarchist.’
The famous were at least somewhat protected by their celebrity. There was no such protection, however, for the obscure Scott Camil, a two-tour Marine veteran, home from Vietnam with his wounds, nine medals and grave misgivings about the war. After Camil helped found Vietnam Veterans Against the War and threw away his medals in front of the Capitol, Edgar ordered a ‘full-scale aggressive investigation.’ The former Marine was put out of circulation, first on kidnapping charges, which were dropped, then for possession of marijuana. Agents have since admitted they had been told to find a way, any way, to ‘neutralize’ Camil as a peace activist.
The instrument for the most serious abuses of the period was the Bureau’s COINTELPRO project, originally launched thirteen years earlier to undermine the Communist Party using dirty tricks – fake documents, bogus phone calls and fabricated news stories.1 In 1968, with Edgar’s approval, agents concocted a letter to Life magazine signed by Howard Rasmussen of Brooklyn. Rasmussen did not exist, and the purpose of the letter was to smear a leader of the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies. Morris Starsky, an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University who happened to be an antiwar activist, lost his job after an anonymous letter was sent to college officials. That letter, too, had been dreamed up at the FBI.
The FBI worked to divide and disrupt, to set one radical group against another. Bureau artists churned out bogus fliers attacking the ‘crap’ influence in the New Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam, then submitted a copy to Edgar. It was labeled ‘Obscene,’ with the apologetic explanation that it was necessary to use bad language