The FBI by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Author:Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones [Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

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a crisis of american democracy: 1972–1975

In the 1970s, Americans were shocked to learn that their government had destroyed democracy in several foreign countries, and was now undermining it at home. Disillusionment with government reached a critical level, and a precipitous decline in respect for the FBI contributed substantially to that result.

Much of the disillusionment was with the conduct of foreign policy. The costly Vietnam War was waged against nonwhite people in support of an unelected government in Saigon, and disproportionately fought (according to its critics) by blacks, Latinos, and other underprivileged Americans. Meanwhile, it emerged that the CIA had propped up some of the world’s most invidious dictatorships, and had conspired in the overthrow of elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, Guyana, Chile, and Australia.

These foreign events framed the debate on America’s democratic shortcomings, yet they were not the crux of the matter. What really goaded people into action was the undermining of democracy at home. Revelations that the CIA had spied on Americans inside the United States through its CHAOS program, in contravention of its 1947 charter, helped destabilize American politics. President Richard Nixon’s disgrace in the Watergate affair intensified concerns over the right of Americans not to be burglarized by their own government. When it was discovered that the FBI had violated the democratic rights of Americans through COINTELPRO and other activities, the bureau, too, became a target for public opprobrium.

The bureau’s contribution to democracy’s crisis was just one factor among several. It was still significant, however, and invites scrutiny. Prior criticism of the bureau, new revelations in 1972–75, the death and replacement of J. Edgar Hoover, and the unfolding of the 1974–75 intelligence “flap” all help to explain both the crisis in general and the particular nature of the FBI’s intense discomfiture by mid-decade.

Criticism of the FBI and its precursors was an established tradition, and had many strands. It had been chiefly conservative in character until the bureau lost sight of its equal justice mission in the World War I era, and then it was mixed, with widespread liberal disillusionment setting in by the end of World War II. McCarthyism-Hooverism alienated more liberal and left-leaning citizens, as well as some conservatives.

Fred Cook’s 1964 book, The FBI Nobody Knows, concentrated the minds of liberal critics. Cook was a journalist whose previous activities were of a character to have been recorded in Hoover’s Confidential and Personal files. The author of a book defending Alger Hiss, he had also excoriated the FBI in articles in the Nation. He noted how the bureau had tried to sabotage Max Lowenthal’s 1950 critique and then pink-smeared its author when the book came out anyway. FBI intimidators delayed publication of Cook’s own book. When it appeared, he was unsparing in his judgments of Hoover and his agency: the bureau stood “four-square in the corner of the white supremacists,” and the congressmen of the Teddy Roosevelt era who had feared the rise of a Fouché-style secret police had been justified in their suspicions. Like his mentor Lowenthal, Cook overlooked the conservative stance of those Progressive-era critics.

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