The files on the Berkeley operations suggest that Hoover was far more concerned with the political ideas of professors and students and the president of the university, Clark Kerr, than he was with what logically would be assumed to be the FBI’s chief interest at Berkeley—the security of the federally funded campus program that played a major role in developing nuclear weapons, including development of the atomic bomb.
In 1960, Hoover assigned FBI agents to search for derogatory information about each of the university’s 5,365 faculty members. Staff members, even at the lowest levels, also were investigated. At one point, a sixty-page bureau report was prepared on the university. It included a list of Berkeley professors to be placed on the secret Security Index, the list of Americans to be detained without warrant in the event of a national emergency. It included reports on fifty-four professors whose families subscribed or contributed money to what the bureau considered “subversive publications,” information apparently gathered as a result of the bureau’s large secret mail-opening program. The special report also discussed Berkeley faculty members’ involvement in “illicit love affairs, homosexuality, sexual perversion, excessive drinking, or other instances of conduct reflecting mental instability.”
The FBI had been deeply embedded on the Berkeley campus for more than twenty years by the time the Free Speech Movement started in the fall of 1964 in response to the university’s enforcing for the first time a little-known rule that barred students from speaking on campus about off-campus political causes, such as civil rights, an issue of deep interest to many Berkeley students. Mario Savio, who became the most widely known leader of the movement, had returned to campus in the fall of 1964 after working in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. Like many students who had worked there that summer and faced violence while helping black people register to vote, Savio was shocked that officials at his California campus barred students from speaking about the most important issues of the day. Having suffered physically to help black people assert their right to vote in Mississippi, he now defended Berkeley students’ right to speak freely on campus.
With the birth of the Free Speech Movement, the FBI had many new targets: the protesting students and faculty who supported them. The students who participated in the movement lived under FBI surveillance for years. Savio was followed by the FBI long after the movement and his days on campus had ended. Even students’ families and some reporters who covered the movement were investigated by the FBI.
Hoover’s anger at the protesting Berkeley students, from the Free Speech Movement through opposition to the Vietnam War, fueled his long-simmering distaste for Berkeley, especially his dislike of Clark Kerr. Kerr, who had been head of the Berkeley campus from 1952 to 1958 and head of the entire University of California system from 1958 to 1967, was remembered when he died in 2003 at age ninety-two not only as the creator of the highly esteemed California higher education system but also as a very significant influence on the reform of higher education nationally and internationally as chairman and director of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. But Hoover despised him because he was, as an FBI report identified him in 1958, “a ‘liberal’ in the education field.” A Quaker, as a young adult Kerr had worked for the American Friends Service Committee on various projects that served poor people. In Hoover’s opinion, such an affiliation automatically made Kerr a subversive who should be removed from his position of influence.
“I know Kerr is no good,” Hoover once wrote in a memo to top aides.
An economics professor and a labor arbitrator, Kerr also was against communism. He had in fact signed the controversial loyalty oath that many University of California faculty members refused to sign in the 1950s. But Kerr defended the rights of professors who refused to sign it when the university system’s governing board of regents moved to fire them. That support of his colleagues’ rights increased Hoover’s dislike of Kerr. When President Johnson requested a routine background check of Kerr when he planned to appoint him to his cabinet as secretary of health, education, and welfare, FBI files reveal, Hoover sabotaged Kerr by telling Johnson that Kerr was disloyal—an accusation the bureau had investigated and knew was not true.
Hoover’s determination to have Kerr fired from the University of California went into turbo speed just two weeks after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as governor of California in January 1967. For Hoover, as for Reagan, getting rid of Kerr was a priority. When he campaigned against Governor Pat Brown in November 1966, Reagan promised to “clean up” the University of California. Like Hoover, he thought Kerr was too soft on student protest.
After Reagan was inaugurated, he immediately asked the FBI agent in charge of the San Francisco office for a briefing on what the bureau knew about professors and students on the Berkeley campus. The agent, Curtis O. Lynum, was somewhat aghast about the request and recommended to Hoover that the bureau not brief Reagan because the controversy at the university was too politically sensitive. But Hoover saw Reagan’s interest in Berkeley as an “opportunity” and ordered Lynum to share the bureau’s abundant Berkeley files with the new governor. It was not the first time Lynum had opposed Hoover over Berkeley matters. Two years earlier, Hoover had ordered him to write a report that would indicate the demonstrations on the campus were controlled by the Communist Party. That order and Hoover’s reaction then to Lynum were indicative of Hoover’s willingness not to let facts shape his interpretation of reality. Lynum told him there was no evidence that communists controlled the demonstrations. The director insisted the party was involved and asked him two more times for a report that would state that. Much to Hoover’s annoyance, each time Lynum refused to write what would have been a false report.
Against his own judgment, Lynum obeyed Hoover’s order to brief Reagan on Berkeley soon after his inauguration. Plans moved quickly, thanks largely to the fact that Hoover and Reagan already had a trusting and effective working relationship, and also because Hoover had already laid the groundwork for Kerr’s firing. FBI files obtained by Rosenfeld reveal that Hoover and Reagan had worked together much more than was previously realized on blacklisting alleged subversives in the movie industry in the 1950s. Now they joined forces once more, this time against Kerr.
The high level of power that was brought to bear in the effort to fire Kerr is striking. It involved the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, and the new California governor. Hoover often treated the CIA with contempt, sometimes even ordering agents to have no contact with the agency and once, during World War II, sabotaging a clandestine action by the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. But for the sake of getting rid of Clark Kerr, Hoover collaborated with CIA director John McCone and welcomed him to a secret meeting in his office at 3:30 on the afternoon of June 28, 1965. It was the last of several high-level meetings McCone attended that day, including a national intelligence briefing, where he presented a plan for an immediate substantial increase in U.S. troop strength in Vietnam, and a meeting where he briefed members of the Atomic Energy Commission about foreign nuclear weapons development.
That afternoon, after a meeting at the State Department, where McCone discussed new turmoil in Africa and the Middle East, he came to Hoover’s office to plot what to do about Kerr. These two heads of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence agencies huddled in intense discussion about how to remove Kerr. It may have been the only time the director ever happily collaborated with the CIA. The quality of the education system Kerr had created in California and was renowned for was not part of their agenda. The fact that he was a liberal who did not take strong action against students protesters was.
McCone, a 1922 graduate of Berkeley, had some ideas about how to accomplish their mutual goal. He knew well a member of the university’s board of regents he thought might influence other regents to oppose Kerr. Over the next two years, Hoover provided secret FBI files on faculty members and students to that regent. Finally, with Reagan elected governor, the plan conceive
d by Hoover and McCone went into play. On January 20, 1967, at the first board of regents meeting after Reagan was inaugurated, and with Reagan attending, the board voted to fire Kerr.
When the FBI’s role in events that led to the firing of Kerr was first revealed by Rosenfeld in a June 9, 2002, article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said at a hearing of his committee that the bureau’s role was “outrageous and some would even say criminal conduct.”
The FBI fought strenuously to keep information about the FBI’s Berkeley covert actions from being released to Rosenfeld. In his thirty-year pursuit of the files, each time Rosenfeld asked for relevant FBI files, the bureau refused to supply most of the ones he requested. When documents were released, many were nearly totally redacted, making them meaningless. Like Carl Stern forty years earlier, the only way Rosenfeld was able to obtain the files he requested—and have some redacted information restored—was by suing the bureau. He did so five times. In each suit, federal trial and appellate judges ordered the FBI to release the files requested by Rosenfeld. In the end, he received nearly 300,000 pages that documented the long history of Hoover’s campaign to cleanse Berkeley of people he thought were subversive.
The FBI spent more than a million dollars trying to prevent Rosenfeld from obtaining the files that document this history. When his book was published in 2012, Rosenfeld compared the FBI’s actions against Berkeley during the Cold War with its recent efforts to refuse to release files about that history: “During the Cold War FBI officials sought to change the course of history by secretly interceding in events, manipulating public opinion, and taking sides in partisan politics. The bureau’s efforts, decades later, to improperly withhold information about those activities under the FOIA are, in effect, another attempt to shape history, this time by obscuring the past.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Robert S. Mueller III, the FBI director since September 2001, if the bureau purposely “pursued litigation as a means to prevent or delay Mr. Rosenfeld from obtaining information to which he was entitled under the FOIA.” In response, Mueller instructed the bureau’s general counsel to examine the record to determine if that was the case. In a letter to the senator, Mueller said he “abhorred any investigative activity that targets or punishes individuals for the constitutional expression of their views. Such investigations are wrong and anti-democratic, and past examples are a stain on the FBI’s greater tradition of observing and protecting the freedom of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights.”
Rosenfeld requested, again under the FOIA, and eventually received the general counsel’s report Mueller had ordered. All the findings were deleted. But in the very brief text that was not redacted was a revealing comment by Howard Shapiro, then the FBI’s general counsel. He stated that in the bureau’s failed appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, “it appears that we were advancing arguments that bordered on the frivolous in order to cover our own previous misconduct.”
HOOVER’S PERCEPTION that he could intrude into and influence the inner workings of institutions beyond his mandated responsibility even included forays into the U.S. Supreme Court. He expected members of the judiciary, the branch of government that is supposed to be the most independent, to bend to his will. Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and court staff members should, he thought, be willing to violate laws and their codes of ethics in order to serve his interests. Members of the court staff and at least one justice did so.
During court appeals in the espionage cases of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, Hoover received daily intelligence reports from inside the court, where all information exchanged that is not filed publicly is supposed to be confidential. According to a 1953 FBI memorandum, during the Rosenbergs’ appeals, the captain of the Supreme Court police “furnished immediately all information heard by his men stationed throughout the Supreme Court building. He kept special [FBI] agents advised of the arrival and departure of persons having important roles in this case.” As soon as the Rosenbergs were executed, the director authorized sending a letter of appreciation to two Supreme Court officials “for their whole-hearted cooperation in this case.”
A 2,076-page FBI file on the U.S. Supreme Court reveals that in addition to using Supreme Court employees as sources, the bureau investigated Hoover’s suspicions of communist influence on the court in the 1950s, when Earl Warren was chief justice of the court. The file became public as a result of a Freedom of Information request by Alexander Charns, a Durham, North Carolina, attorney and the author of the 1992 book Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court.
In 1965, a high-ranking FBI official, acting on Hoover’s behalf, secretly asked for and received direct assistance on Hoover’s behalf from Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas regarding a case then pending before the court that involved the bureau. After Fortas, in response to Hoover’s inquiry, violated a court rule that prohibits justices from discussing pending cases with anyone outside the court, Hoover wrote in a memo to the FBI official who consulted with the justice that Fortas had demonstrated he was “a more honest man than I gave him credit for being.” It was a strange interpretation of honesty. Hoover said he had feared Fortas “would try to weasel out [of helping Hoover] on grounds it was improper for him as a member of the court to even discuss the matter”—as, of course, it was. To Hoover, it was more important that the justice serve Hoover’s interest than it was that he maintain the integrity required by the court.
IN THE ANNALS of both national law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies, the roles Hoover played and the adulation he sought and received were unique. He repeatedly stretched his responsibilities into areas that were not part of his official responsibility. As Ungar wrote, “The FBI acted as if it had an entire way of life to protect.” With the growth of protest, the bureau “became ever more frightened and confused until it saw itself as a bulwark against the lawlessness and disintegration of the American way of life. The FBI felt it had a mission to set things right again, and if that meant its own escalation of tactics and some desperate measures in the name of law, then so be it.”
Hoover’s roles in regard to the Vietnam War and racial issues—the two most important issues in the country in the twentieth century—were the most far-reaching of all his self-appointed intrusions into important areas of American life.
From the beginning of the Vietnam War, he made himself the watchdog of dissent against the war. His efforts got under way in the summer of 1964, as the Johnson administration was still trying to determine whether a U.S. Navy ship had been attacked by North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. Acting as though it was certain the attack had occurred, members of the administration urged Congress to authorize President Johnson to send troops to Vietnam to retaliate against this attack. The measure authorizing those first troops, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—an extremely important piece of legislation that would be relied on for a decade by both President Johnson and President Nixon as Congress’s ongoing blank check authorizing the war—passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, only Senator Ernest Gruening, Democrat from Alaska, and Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat from Oregon, voted against the measure. Gruening warned his colleagues they were signing “a predated declaration of war.” Morse predicted that “history will record that we have made a great mistake by giving the president war making powers in the absence of a declaration of war. What is wrong with letting the Constitution operate as written by our constitutional fathers?”
The FBI director was watching closely as this first Vietnam War authorization legislation was being debated. He, of course, had no professional responsibility in relation to legislation or to war planning. But he regarded those who did not support the war to be subversives who should be targeted by the FBI, and he used the bu
reau to enforce that position from the time of those congressional debates on the first war legislation in 1964 until he died in 1972. He had agents collect the names of people who sent telegrams to Senator Morse expressing support for his stand against the war resolution and started files on them. That was the beginning of the lists he collected in connection with the Vietnam War. Later, he expanded COINTELPRO to include operations against antiwar activists.
Two years after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat from Arkansas, convened hearings on the progress of the war. Hoover and his agents were listening and watching again. At President Johnson’s request, Hoover placed Fulbright under constant surveillance, including when he dined at embassies. Hoover assigned agents to find evidence that Fulbright, one of the most respected senior members of Congress at the time, “was either a communist agent or a dupe of the communist powers.”
Throughout the Vietnam War, the FBI supported the assumption of Presidents Johnson and Nixon that opposition to the war in the United States was not homegrown but was made possible by financial support from foreign—most likely communist—governments. It was difficult for American intelligence operators to let go of the idea that foreign governments were providing the antiwar movement with financial support because they knew the United States, through the CIA, had provided aid for years to antigovernment groups in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Because of that, they “easily calculated,” wrote former CIA agent Vincent Marchetti, that “somehow the communist countries were now getting even by using American groups to stir up trouble in the United States.” Hard as the CIA and FBI tried to establish evidence of foreign support for American activists, such evidence never was found, according to Marchetti and officials of both the CIA and the FBI. Ungar, in his extensive research, reached the same conclusion: “Despite many investigations, no such link ever was found.”
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