Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [97]
There was now concern about the FBI on college campuses. At Yale, a student magazine reported, FBI agents were influencing academic appointments by feeding the Provost with derogatory information on teachers. A distinguished physicist, Professor Henry Margenau, had been berated by agents for addressing a youth group of which the Bureau disapproved. He had knuckled under, and now consulted the local FBI office before accepting speech invitations.
William F. Buckley, Jr., future right-wing pundit, then editor of The Yale Daily News, played a leading role in the furor that followed these revelations. In secret, he sent the FBI blind copies of his letters on the subject to fellow student journalists, and suppressed a letter to the News from a student editor at Harvard. Edgar’s master of propaganda, Lou Nichols, promptly identified Buckley as a future ally.
While Edgar denied that his agents had infiltrated Yale, the record shows that there was an FBI ‘liaison officer’ in the university. Today it is known that the Bureau opened files on thousands of teachers, throughout the education system. ‘The entire teaching profession,’ University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins would soon declare, ‘is now intimidated.’
The fear was usually generated, as at Yale, by quiet interrogations of radicals, FBI whisperings to college officials, followed by discreet firings. There was nothing quiet about the fuss a few years later, when Professor Howard Higman, a sociology teacher at the University of Colorado, made the mistake of mocking Edgar personally.
The episode began when one of the professor’s students, a former Miss America named Marilyn Van Derbur, used Edgar’s book Masters of Deceit to contradict the professor’s thesis that the Soviets would have been able to build the Bomb anyway, without help from American Communists. Higman responded by scoffing at Hoover’s book and saying he ‘disapproved of the rise in the United States of a political police …’ Told of this by an informant, Edgar retaliated by triggering a nationwide flood of stories and letters denouncing the professor.
In 1991, when he obtained his partially censored FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, the professor was astounded to find that it totaled some 6,000 pages, covered many years and included investigations not only of him but of his children. ‘Can’t we set a fire under the University of Colorado,’ Edgar had written, ‘for having such a character on its faculty?’ ‘We need to meet some of these academic punks in their own back yard,’ wrote an aide, and an FBI official flew to Colorado to give a ‘forceful’ lecture to Higman’s students and colleagues.
‘I was wrong to have said the FBI was a political police,’ the professor commented. ‘I’ve discovered since it is a church. That you don’t contradict J. Edgar Hoover, because he’s infallible.’
It is now known that, in the fifties and sixties, the FBI penetrated more than fifty colleges and universities. It obtained the collaboration of many senior academics, including at various times the presidents of Yale and Princeton and the dean of students at Harvard, to identify and oust faculty members thought to be Communist or of the extreme Left.
Not even men of religion were safe from Edgar’s punitive hand. In Brooklyn, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, the Reverend William Melish and his father drew heavy rightwing criticism for promoting American–Soviet friendship. The FBI, Melish recalled, soon found an insidious way to chastise him. ‘The headmaster of the Polytechnic Preparatory School, where I had gone as a boy, was the secretary of the parish. A number of “Poly Boys” were in the FBI, and they were deliberately sent to call on the headmaster about me. They tried to persuade him that he should do something