Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power by Rosenfeld Seth

Author:Rosenfeld, Seth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

24

A Key Activist

Mario and Suzanne Savio loaded their seventeen-month-old son, Stefan, and their bags into their secondhand station wagon and drove away from Berkeley.

Savio had been struggling to get by, bartending at the Steppenwolf, doing odd jobs. He had been convicted of causing a public nuisance for his part in the protest against the navy recruiters the previous November, along with Jerry Rubin, Stew Albert, Steve Hamilton, and Mike Smith, and had drawn the stiffest sentence: ninety days in county jail and a $350 fine. That conviction and the one for the Sproul Hall sit-in were on appeal, but still they weighed on him. And, finally, he had given up his fight for readmission, saying he was too broke to go to school.

He was, moreover, worried about his boy, who remained inexplicably difficult and required constant attention. Although Savio was coping with his own travails, Suzanne said, he was “always kind to Stefan.” Much as Savio’s mother had doted on him, he doted on Stefan. Recalling his own traumatic experience at the hands of a domineering father, he deliberately dealt with the child on a democratic basis, consulting him as to his wishes with the same meticulous care as when he was debating an adult about an important political point. The civil rights activist was determined to avoid “the concentration of authority” that went with the traditional family. Just the thought of Stefan being dominated, he wrote to a friend, made Savio “fearful to the point of panic.” But the young couple would not learn until much later that Stefan had severe developmental disabilities, and as Suzanne recalled, her husband’s efforts only left Stefan “anxious and confused” and Savio disappointed in himself.

On top of all this, he was still fighting the depression that had afflicted him since he was a teenager.

“Things were too difficult here,” Suzanne told the Berkeley Barb as they prepared to leave town in early May 1967. “We’re just going to get in the car and go.”

Savio may have thought he was leaving Berkeley behind, but he would soon find that he was still caught up in radical politics—and in the gears and levers of the FBI’s surveillance machinery. All along, Hoover had been intensifying the bureau’s investigation of the man he and Reagan blamed for starting so much of the trouble at Berkeley.

A few weeks after Reagan’s inauguration, Agent Don Jones had reported an informer’s claim that Savio had attended two “educational classes” of the Berkeley branch of the Communist Party back in August 1966. Jones’s report of January 23, 1967, suggested that Savio was more involved with Communists than previously known. The bureau repeated the allegation in other internal communications and forwarded it to army intelligence. Here, it seemed, was the proof Hoover had been looking for all along.

But it was wrong. According to a subsequent FBI report, the informer’s statement had been incorrectly transcribed: Savio was not present. His name had been merely mentioned. Nonetheless, FBI officials continued to circulate the erroneous allegation. There is no evidence in Savio’s dossier that they told army intelligence about the mistake.

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