Heavy Radicals : The Fbi's Secret War on America's Maoists: the Revolutionary Union Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 (9781782795339) by Leonard Aaron J.; Gallagher Conor A

Author:Leonard, Aaron J.; Gallagher, Conor A. [Leonard, Aaron J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-533-9
Publisher: Natl Book Network
Published: 2015-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Victor Riesel was one of those “friends.”

Riesel was a New York journalist who covered the labor beat as a syndicated columnist from the 1940s till the early 1980s. At the height of his career he was carried in nearly 350 newspapers, giving him a direct voice to the mainstream in the US. He is perhaps best known for an incident in 1956, when he was attacked on a Manhattan street by a man who threw sulfuric acid in his face, blinding him—this in response to a column he wrote in regard to a Long Island union and the mob. While Riesel’s 1995 New York Times obituary dutifully mentions that incident, it makes no mention of his work for the FBI. Instead they describe how, “Mr. Riesel never stopped inveighing against gangster infiltration and other corruption in labor unions that had stirred his emotions since his youth.”503 Absent also are his role in promoting the blacklist during the McCarthy era,504 his personal and partisan friendships with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,505 and his close association with the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover. The exact contours of that relationship were not public; documented only in his personal papers and the FBI file on him.

Among Riesel’s papers, amid the numerous correspondences, appointment diaries, notes and drafts of columns are three file folders of correspondence with various FBI officials from the sixties well into the seventies. The correspondence in the file start as the FBI began to confront the growing unrest on the university campuses in the sixties. In 1965, the number three man in the FBI, Deputy Director Cartha DeLoach, wrote to Riesel: “As is well known, the communists are attempting to influence the minds of college students and are eager to do anything possible to promote their own selfish aims on our campuses.”506 That same year Hoover himself wrote to Riesel, thanking him for a column dealing with the mob and vending machines: “I feel you have performed a real public service by bringing this information to the attention of your readers.” Written on the Director’s letterhead it was signed with the familiar, “Edgar.”507 Another correspondence explains how Hoover had agreed to write a guest column for Riesel.508

The documents make clear Riesel’s relationship with the FBI continued after Hoover’s death in 1972. There is a note in 1973 from the new director Clarence Kelly, writing, “Your staunch support and kind comments regarding our accomplishments in 1973 certainly mean a great deal to all of us in the FBI.”509 Such relationships continued right up through the administration of William Webster—who Riesel lunched with in 1978, soon after Webster took over the Director’s job.510

These were not just friendly correspondence among acquaintances. Riesel was playing a direct role for the FBI on a number of fronts. For example in 1970 he wrote an article against the Black Panther Party and its newspaper. According to the Church Committee:

In November 1970, seeking to create a boycott by union members handling the newspapers shipment, Mr. Hoover directed 39

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