G-Man, page 105
Just twenty-one years old in the fall of 1969, Hampton had already made a name for himself as a powerful orator and effective local organizer, rising through the youth ranks of the NAACP and then becoming chairman of the local Panther chapter before he was old enough to vote. From the perspective of the Chicago office, that made him a “Key Agitator” and potential Black “messiah,” albeit one as yet without a national following. Though Hampton spurned Weatherman theatrics, he worked diligently to create alliances with other groups, including local Chicago gangs and even so-called hillbilly rights groups, which advocated on behalf of poor white migrants from states like Kentucky and Tennessee. For Hoover, this was the prospect most to be avoided. And because Hampton was a Black radical and not a white student, the means chosen were extreme. What Hoover did to Hampton in the months following the Days of Rage ranks with the “suicide letter” to King as among the most merciless actions of his career.[24]
The Chicago police carried out the worst of it. But they were prodded along by Hoover’s men. The FBI carefully documented Hampton’s run-ins with the law, including an arrest for taking ice cream from an ice cream truck and handing it out to neighborhood children. In early 1969, a tip from the local field office led to Hampton’s arrest on that charge in the midst of a live television interview—an episode that “proved highly embarrassing to the BPP,” in the Bureau’s approving words. Over the next several months, the Panthers and police engaged in several shoot-outs and violent confrontations, each one contributing to a heightened atmosphere of dread. In early October, just a few days before the Weatherman debacle in Lincoln Park, they exchanged gunfire at the local Panther office; police followed up by ransacking the place. On November 13, another gun battle, this one lasting a full half hour, resulted in the deaths of two police officers.[25]
Into this tinderbox the FBI brought a match in the form of William O’Neal, a local Panther informant recruited under Hoover’s stepped-up informant initiatives. After the police murders, O’Neal’s FBI handler summoned him for a meeting, asking for information about what the local Panther chapter, including chairman Fred Hampton, seemed to be doing and saying in response to the shoot-out. They met again later that month, at which point O’Neal drew a map of Hampton’s apartment, presumably to aid the police in a planned raid. As Hampton’s bodyguard, O’Neal knew the layout well, including where Hampton slept. He indicated everything on his diagram, which the Chicago field office promptly shared with the police. In late November and early December, O’Neal’s handler spoke five to seven times with police contacts and met in person at least once. On December 3, he reported to Hoover that Chicago police were “currently planning a positive course of action relative to this information.”[26]
The following morning, at four forty-five a.m., fourteen Chicago officers burst in on the “Panther crib” where several people, including Hampton, were fast asleep. Ostensibly in search of illegal guns, they came in carrying not only their service revolvers but also heavier weapons—including at least one machine gun—from both official and personal collections. Their first barrage killed a Panther named Mark Clark. After that, the police began shooting wildly. According to later reports, Clark got off a single, reflexive shot as he died—the only shot fired by the Panthers that night. The police fired up to ninety-nine bullets, including two shots delivered point-blank into Hampton’s forehead. At the end of it all, “FRED HAMPTON, Illinois Chairman of the BPP, lay dead,” in the words of an FBI report, with bullet wounds near his right ear and right eye.[27]
Initial news coverage described a gun raid gone bad. In Panther circles, though, word spread quickly that Hampton had been “murdered in his bed,” in the words of Panther leader Bobby Rush—and that Hoover had been at least tangentially responsible. When blood tests suggested that Hampton had been drugged, those suspicions took on new weight. “A pig agent must have given it to him because Fred never used any drugs and J. Edgar Hoover has said he has infiltrators in the Black Panther Party,” Rush told the press. Hoover may or may not have known in advance about the drugging or about the precise plan for the raid; such local operational details sometimes made their way up to headquarters, sometimes not. Either way, he helped to make Hampton’s death possible: by vilifying the Panthers and pressuring his men to act, by authorizing and orchestrating the larger COINTELPRO effort, and by encouraging FBI field offices to coordinate their efforts with local police.[28]
And when it was all over, he applauded it as just the sort of operation he had long been seeking. On December 8, O’Neal’s handler wrote to Hoover to recommend a special payment to the informant for providing information of “tremendous value.” “The raid was based on the information furnished by informant,” the memo noted, claiming credit for helping to orchestrate the raid if not for firing the fatal shots. Hoover approved a three-hundred-dollar bonus for O’Neal above and beyond his regular stipend. [29]
* * *
—
Rather than slowing down the cycle of political violence that plagued Nixon’s first year in office, Hampton’s killing accelerated it. Among Chicago activists, the death “instilled a sense of militancy and resistance, that certain things would not be tolerated,” one alderman recalled. For the members of Weatherman, one participant remembered, “It was the murder of Fred Hampton more than any other factor that compelled us to take up armed struggle.” On December 6, two days after Hampton’s death, Weatherman took credit for bombing two police cars in Chicago. A few months later, they became the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), a clandestine armed network dedicated to waging “war” against an American society “too fucked-up” to recognize its own evil. Of the three thousand bombings in the United States over the course of 1970, only a handful could be directly attributed to the WUO. But theirs took on a special significance—emblematic, in Hoover’s words, of the “terroristic violence” being embraced by the “fanatics” of the American left.[30]
Meanwhile, the Panthers remained embroiled in their own violent exchanges with the authorities. Arrested in 1969 for the alleged plot to bomb major sites throughout New York, the “Panther 21” won a blanket acquittal two years later. By that point, though, the organization was in uneven decline as a national force, unable to sustain what had always been an against-the-odds struggle. In late 1969, when Hampton was killed, some 10 percent of BPP members were already police or federal informants. Added to that problem was a vicious rivalry between party leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who demanded that their members choose sides between them. The FBI sought to accentuate their disagreements through rumors and fake letters—all to swift effect. In 1971 Hoover pronounced “the differences between Newton and Cleaver” entirely “irreconcilable” and moved on to identifying “future targets.”[31]
In that sense, Hoover got at least some of what he had wanted back in 1968, when he pushed his men to move more aggressively against what he viewed as a “nihilistic” and “anarchistic” left. It is less clear that the rest of the country ended up better off. Despite what Hoover claimed, the young revolutionaries of the late 1960s stood for ideas shared by many Americans: that the country’s progress on racial justice was too slow and insufficient, that the war in Vietnam was a painful and deadly mistake. Their turn to violence hurt rather than helped their case, but Hoover would have come for them anyway, just as he had once targeted the nonviolent civil rights movement. It was a far cry from what he had once promised Harlan Stone, after his early-life encounters with “anarchistic” movements forced a civil liberties reckoning. Now there were important people urging him to go even further and do even more to contain the left—beginning with Richard Nixon.
Chapter 57
The Man Who Stayed Too Long
(1970–1971)
Anti-war activists accused by Hoover (in poster) of plotting to kidnap National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. By the early 1970s, Hoover’s once-stellar reputation was in free fall, especially on the left.
Lee Lockwood/The Chronicle Collection/Getty Images
On June 5, 1970, while the FBI was busy brainstorming how to “intensify” the split between Weather Underground and the Panthers, Nixon convened a meeting of intelligence officials at the White House. He hoped to discuss the state of the New Left, Black Power, and anti-war movements—and to pressure Hoover not to rein in FBI activity but to be more aggressive. Nixon understood the meeting as an intervention in history, a moment to face the fact that America was coming apart and the New Left was largely to blame. “We have moved from the ‘student activism’ which characterized the civil rights movement in the early 60s through the ‘protest movements’ which rallied behind the anti-war banner beginning with the march on the Pentagon in 1967 to the ‘revolutionary terrorism’ being perpetrated today,” he read from talking points written up in advance of the meeting. To remedy this “new and grave crisis,” he turned to the one man who had been wrestling with the left longer than anybody else in the room, appointing Hoover as the chair of a committee to bring the intelligence agencies together in support of the president’s agenda.[1]
Nixon did not know all the details of COINTELPRO, or the fact that Hoover’s agents were already deep inside some of the most abstruse debates and rivalries of the New Left. What he did know was that Hoover seemed strangely hesitant to use certain other techniques that had long been staples of the domestic intelligence system. Despite their many loopholes, the directives that Hoover had issued in 1965 and 1966—no bag jobs, no mail covers, tight controls on bugging and wiretapping—still held sway at the Bureau. Indeed, the years since had further convinced him that the public and the courts were in no mood to tolerate, much less applaud, clandestine techniques that had once been routine. To Nixon, though, his decisions looked like a puzzling unwillingness to do what needed to be done in the midst of a national crisis. After all this time—and despite many public words to the contrary—Nixon thought that Hoover was losing his nerve.
To prod the FBI into action, Nixon selected Thomas Charles Huston, a young army intelligence officer turned White House staffer, one of the most outspoken conservatives in the upper reaches of the executive branch. Huston had come to politics as a leader of Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative analogue to SDS. As an organization, YAF still loved Hoover; in 1969, it sponsored a nationwide Masters of Deceit contest, with a thousand-dollar prize for the best essay on the book’s anticommunist principles. As a person, Huston was more skeptical—not only of Hoover, but of any unelected bureaucrat who chose to spend a lifetime in government. He believed that “the bureaucracy must be treated as the enemy,” a powerful force with its own culture and interests. Huston took it as his mission to “harass, brow-beat, do whatever is necessary” to bring people like Hoover in line with the White House agenda.[2]
Given the director’s long friendship with the president, Huston might have assumed that hardball tactics would not be necessary. During Nixon’s first eighteen months in office, Hoover had mostly been a willing partner, happy to do favors when the president asked. There were exceptions, though, and new signs that reflected just the problems Huston feared. In the spring of 1969, concerned over Vietnam-related leaks, Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had approached Hoover with a request for help. Hoover went along at first, installing at least seventeen wiretaps—on White House and National Security Council staffers as well as reporters—and reporting to Kissinger on the findings. As the weeks went on, however, he began to worry that the taps would be exposed—thus subjecting the FBI to charges of political spying or, worse yet, suppression of the free press. By the middle of 1969, he was demanding that the taps be authorized in writing by someone higher up, preferably the attorney general or the president. In the end, hoping to placate Hoover, the attorney general agreed to put his name to paper, and Kissinger himself came to Hoover’s office “to express his personal appreciation” for what the FBI had done. Everyone recognized that “this coverage represents a potential source of tremendous embarrassment to the Bureau and potential disaster for the Nixon administration,” in the words of one FBI memo. Contained in that analysis was the idea that one side might have to be cut loose to protect the other.[3]
Even where Hoover appeared to go along willingly with Nixon’s requests, there was often an edge to the exchange, a wariness about who was gathering information on whom. In 1969, Nixon asked Hoover to investigate rumors about a “coterie of homosexuals” at the White House, in which high-ranking aides supposedly met after hours in secret rendezvous. Hoover soon pronounced the whole thing ridiculous, much to the relief of White House counsel John Ehrlichman and chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, both of whom had been named as members of the ring. In retrospect, though, Ehrlichman came to view the exoneration as a form of intimidation in its own right—a reminder from Hoover that he could make or break their reputations anytime he chose to do so.[4]
Hoover convened the first meeting of his New Left intelligence committee on Monday, June 8, three days after the gathering at the White House. It did not go well. When Hoover announced that they were being asked to present a historical analysis of the left, Huston interrupted to say that this was not at all what the president wanted—that Nixon was more interested in developing a strategy for the future than in wallowing in the past. Hoover left the meeting infuriated at Huston’s arrogance, dismissing the young staffer as a “hippie intellectual” with no respect for the work of government.[5]
Over the next two weeks, with Hoover’s grudging permission, Huston met with top officials from the various intelligence agencies to hammer out a plan for the president. When Nixon received their draft report, he liked what he saw. Hoover did not. Huston’s report called for an all-out ideological war against the New Left, including surveillance and disruption tactics far more ambitious than what the FBI was currently doing. Where the report went especially wrong, in Hoover’s view, was in its call for a council of officials from various intelligence agencies to supervise the effort, and its recommendation that Hoover lift the restrictions he had put in place on wiretaps, bugs, mail covers, and other clandestine techniques. In Hoover’s assessment, the plan asked the FBI to interrupt its current operations and assume a greater risk of exposure at just the moment that COINTELPRO was yielding real results. Hoover had no issue with surveillance and counterintelligence, in other words. He just wanted to be the one in charge, and he did not want to get caught.
And so he set out to stop Huston’s plan, drawing upon the best of his bureaucratic skills. He began by marking up the report with footnotes, each registering a distinct objection. Where the report recommended an “intensification” of electronic surveillance, Hoover maintained that “the FBI does not wish to change its present procedure.” Where the report called for “relaxing restrictions” on covert mail opening, he noted that the practice was “clearly illegal” and likely to result in “serious damage . . . to the intelligence community” if revealed to the public. In response to a suggestion that the federal agencies expand their use of campus informants, Hoover warned of “leaks to the press which would be damaging and which could result in charges that investigative agencies are interfering with academic freedom.”[6]
The footnotes were in place by the time Hoover gathered the committee for its second official session on June 25—by all accounts, one of the most dreadful afternoons in intelligence history. Tasked with reviewing Huston’s report, Hoover decided to go through the document page by page, asking for separate comments on each of forty-three pages, footnotes included. When the moment came for Huston to chime in, Hoover dismissed him, calling him by the wrong name (Hoffman, Hutchinson) before returning to the leisurely review process. In a follow-up memo to the White House, an infuriated Huston complained that Hoover was being “bull-headed as hell,” refusing to accept “a single conclusion drawn or support a single recommendation made.” “Twenty years ago he would never have raised the type of objections he has here,” Huston complained, “but he’s getting old and worried about his legend.” He recommended that Nixon call the director in for a “stroking session,” convinced that Hoover would listen only to the president.[7]
Nixon declined to take Huston’s advice about meeting with Hoover. Instead he gave verbal assent to the Huston report’s recommendations, authorizing Huston to ignore Hoover and put the plan into effect. When Hoover received Huston’s notice announcing the new policy, he “went through the ceiling,” in the words of one aide, demanding that Attorney General John Mitchell take up the matter directly with Nixon. In the meantime, Hoover did not exactly defy the president’s wishes. Instead, he agreed to move forward—but only under a direct, written order from the president or the attorney general. “Despite my clear-cut and specific opposition to the lifting of the various investigative restraints referred to above and to the creation of a permanent interagency committee on domestic intelligence,” he told Mitchell, “the FBI is prepared to implement the instructions of the White House at your direction.” In other words, Hoover had no intention of being the fall guy for any “illegal” activities Nixon might be seeking.[8]
Nixon could read between the lines, and quickly rescinded his approval of the Huston Plan. “I knew that if Hoover had decided not to cooperate, it would matter little what I had decided or approved,” he later explained. Appalled at watching Nixon give way to an unelected, seventy-five-year-old bureaucrat, Huston composed a last-ditch message appealing to the dignity of the president’s office. “At some point, Hoover has to be told who is President,” he wrote in late August 1970, once the battle was all but lost. “It makes me fighting mad, and what Hoover is doing here is putting himself above the President.” It was a fair point, but not one that Nixon cared to acknowledge.[9]
