Why didn't the hippies get into the jfk assassination ?

[Steve Minnerly]

I was ( still am in spirit ) a hippie during the late 1960's and early 1970s (graduated from high school in 1971 ).

I spent a lot of time living communally and having great intellectual conversations into the night discussing all the great questions of the universe about art, existence, politics.

I never had one conversation with anybody at that time about the 1960s assassinations , black ops or strange things happening in the news . I can only remember one time somebody making a passing reference to when the Symbionese Liberation Army got massacred in LA and how that story was probably a bunch of crap.

Nobody even knew the name Mae Brussell. If the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane or Hot Tuna or Johnny Winter or any of those people we looked up to at the time had pushed this topic a bit more i think consciousness really could have been raised about these events.

The only real mention was when the Stones said "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys" in "Sympathy For The Devil".

[Tracy Riddle]

David Crosby tried to tell people at the Monterey Pop Festival.



The Zapruder film, bootlegged during the Shaw trial, was often shown at anti-war protests and student gatherings during the time.

[Steve Minnerly]

Excellent find Tracy.

I had seen that before and i thought about it about 5 minutes after i hit the "Submit reply" button.

Speaking of hippies today is the day that the woodstock music and art fair began back in 1969.

My good friend Joe called me up the the night of the first day. We were both 16 years old and the footage of the event was all over the news He said "Come on man. What are we sitting here for ? Lets go".

Unfortunately my mother had also seen the footage and said "Youre not going to that drug fest with all the naked girls swimming in the lake".

The real thing i regret is 2 years later Joe was killed by a drunk driver. Drinking age was 21 in Connecticut and 18 in NY and we Connecticut kids use to travel "over the line" to a bar called The Berkshires all the time. He was hit by one of the Connecticut kids returning.

BTW -The Berkshires had some of the best amateur bands i have ever seen anywheres and there was no cover charge

[Steve Minnerly]

Tracy wrote - The Zapruder film, bootlegged during the Shaw trial, was often shown at anti-war protests and student gatherings during the time.
___________________________________________

Yes and Ramparts or the Realist ( I always get those mixed up ) did articles on the assassination too now that i think about it. So i guess there was more publicity than I remember.

[Peter Lemkin]

I was at Woodstock and there had many interesting experiences and met many an interesting person. The feeling was electric and more than positive - a feeling of hope and that 'we' could change the World - I never felt quite the same feeling in a crowd again. I had felt it one other time a few years before at MLKs March on Washington. I was often called [at times derisively] a hippie [for I had long hair and beard], but never considered myself one. I also came from a very politically aware and active family, so conspiracies, government lies and secrets, dirty tricks of the Oligarchy, et al. were what I grew up with. Hell, I couldn't even rebel by smoking grass or hallucinogens...and my mother once baked some Alice B. Toklas brownies which one of her straight friends gobbled down before we could warn her....I was also a friend of Terrence McKenna and once met Dr. Tim - as well as many other well-known persons of that time. Ah, those were the days my friends, we thought they'd never end...... They did...and many were assassinated or otherwise had their lives disrupted, to make it all 'end'. We were then perceived as the same kind of threat that the Anti-War Movement was and recently OWS. Not clones of the repressive same-old, same-old business as usual. Not buying the bullshit mythology and lies. Working [inwardly or outwardly] for a better World and being better World Citizens. Not big consumers and not following orders.

[Tracy Riddle]

Overall, I think LSD and pot kept too many people in that generation tranquilized into complacency. I'm not against consciousness-expansion, and the careful experimentation with such chemicals, but I think many young people were just kept drugged up so they wouldn't be a bigger threat to the system.

[Peter Lemkin]

Overall, I think LSD and pot kept too many people in that generation tranquilized into complacency. I'm not against consciousness-expansion, and the careful experimentation with such chemicals, but I think many young people were just kept drugged up so they wouldn't be a bigger threat to the system.

Some were. I wasn't and others weren't. I tripped at the maximum a few times per year and smoked no more than an average of once per week, maximum, for a few of my college years. Now, either is only for a very special occasion....the kind that hardly ever find me these days.

You are correct that some overused those and other drugs and hidden forces may well have been pushing just that, as they now do crack in the poor areas. Alcohol is a lot more dangerous in any case for most and has been a constant.

[Steve Minnerly]

Yeah Peter i have been asked from time to time about what happened to the hippies and the spirit of the 1960s. I reply that it wasn't just a matter of a fad that went out of style although that might have been part of it.

It was three things.

1) It went out of style
2) There was a active covert and overt attempt to crush it
3) People had kids and a lot of people that had kids had to adopt a straight appearance and life style to be able to hold onto jobs to support those kids.

The Kennedy assassination should have shown people that the covert attempt to crush the left was very powerful. COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos and the other black ops contributed greatly also.

The Beats could have told the hippies what they were in for. They experienced the attempts to exterminate them.

If youve seen Chuck Workmans film "The Source" you know that ultimately the forces of darkness failed to stamp out at least the artistic influence of the Beats.

[Steve Minnerly]

Overall, I think LSD and pot kept too many people in that generation tranquilized into complacency. I'm not against consciousness-expansion, and the careful experimentation with such chemicals, but I think many young people were just kept drugged up so they wouldn't be a bigger threat to the system.

I knew a lot of hippies that worked incredibly hard construction jobs that smoked a lot of pot so im not sure it can be characterized as a pacifier.

A drug like heroin or barbituates or alcohol are a lot more effective at that.

LSD was actually used sparingly among the people i knew because its pretty overwhelming. Youre not gonna do acid and go about your daily routine like you could with pot.

Of course this is all just my anecdotal evidence.

[Peter Lemkin]

This is much more on the destruction of the 60s political movements via COINTELPRO and CHAOS, etc.; but there were other equivalent 'efforts' for those who just had an alternative life style....and I believe many of the folk heros and musical heros of the time were murdered - few died as stated. There are some threads here on that.



COINTELPRO Revisited - US Domestic Covert Operations


US Domestic Covert Operations From the Archive: WAR AT HOME (2/5) From: yibgle@cts.com (Gary Lee) Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 14:20:26 GMT Organization: The Gloons of Tharf Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy _________________________________________________________________ Anyone who doubts that the government is capable of using agents provocateurs to plant phony requests for bomb-making information in this newsgroup as a pretext for censoring the entire net (or that it is capable of much worse if that fails) should take a glance at the following articles. These posts also contain much that should be of interest to anyone thinking about joining or starting any kind of anarchist direct-action campaign or organization. Gary _________________________________________________________________ /** pn.publiceye: 23.5 **/ ** Written 6:49 pm Jan 24, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye ** _________________________________________________________________ How COINTELPRO Helped Destroy the Movements of the 1960s Since COINTELPRO was used mainly against the progressive movements of the 1960s, its impact can be grasped only in the context of the momentous social upheaval which shook the country during those years. All across the United States, Black communities came alive with renewed political struggle. Most major cities experienced sustained, disciplined Black protest and massive ghetto uprisings. Black activists galvanized multi-racial rebellion among GIs, welfare mothers, students, and prisoners. College campuses and high schools erupted in militant protest against the Vietnam War. A predominantly white New Left, inspired by the Black movement, fought for an end to U.S. intervention abroad and a more humane and cooperative way of life at home. By the late 1960s, deep-rooted resistance had revived among Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. A second wave of broad-based struggle for women's liberation had also emerged, along with significant efforts by lesbians, gay men, and disabled people. Millions of people in the United States began to reject the dominant ideology and culture. Thousands challenged basic U.S. political and economic institutions. For a brief moment, "the crucial mixture of people's confidence in the government and lack of confidence in themselves which allows the government to govern, the ruling class to rule...threatened to break down." By the mid-1970s, this upheaval had largely subsided. Important progressive activity persisted, mainly on a local level, and much continued to be learned and won, but the massive, militant Black and New Left movements were gone. The sense of infinite possibility and of our collective power to shape the future had been lost. Progressive momentum dissipated. Radicals found themselves on the defensive as right-wing extremists gained major government positions and defined the contours of accepted political debate. Many factors besides COINTELPRO contributed to this change. Important progress was made toward achieving movement goals such as Black civil rights, an end to the Vietnam War, and university reform. The mass media, owned by big business and cowed by government and right-wing attack, helped to bury radical activism by ceasing to cover it. Television, popular magazines, and daily papers stereotyped Blacks as hardened criminals and welfare chiselers or as the supposedly affluent beneficiaries of reverse "discrimination." White youth were portrayed first as hedonistic hippies and mindless terrorists, later as an apolitical, self-indulgent "me generation." Both were scapegoated as threats to "decent, hard-working Middle America." During the severe economic recession of the early- to mid- 1970s, former student activists began entering the job market, some taking on responsibility for children. Many were scared by brutal government and right-wing attacks culminating in the murder of rank-and-file activists as well as prominent leaders. Some were strung out on the hard drugs that had become increasingly available in Black and Latin communities and among white youth. Others were disillusioned by mistreatment in movements ravaged by the very social sicknesses they sought to eradicate, including racism, sexism, homophobia, class bias and competition. Limited by their upbringing, social position, and isolation from older radical traditions, 1960s activists were unable to make the connections and changes required to build movements strong enough to survive and eventually win structural change in the United States. Middle-class students did not sufficiently ally with working and poor people. Too few white activists accepted third world leadership of multi-racial alliances. Too many men refused to practice genuine gender equality. Originally motivated by goals of quick reforms, 1960s activists were ill-prepared for the long-term struggles in which they found themselves. Overly dependent on media-oriented superstars and one-shot dramatic actions, they failed to develop stable organizations, accountable leadership, and strategic perspective. Creatures of the culture they so despised, they often lacked the patience to sustain tedious grassroots work and painstaking analysis of actual social conditions. They found it hard to accept the slow, uneven pace of personal and political change. This combination of circumstances, however, did not by itself guarantee political collapse. The achievements of the 1960s movements could have inspired optimism and provided a sense of the power to win other important struggles. The rightward shift of the major media could have enabled alternative newspapers, magazines, theater, film, and video to attract a broader audience and stable funding. The economic downturn of the early 1970s could have united Black militants, New Leftists, and workers in common struggle. Police brutality and government collusion in drug trafficking could have been exposed in ways that undermined support for the authorities and broadened the movements' backing. By the close of the decade, many of the movements' internal weaknesses were starting to be addressed. Black-led multi-racial alliances, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign and the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition, were forming. The movements' class base was broadening through Black "revolutionary unions" in auto and other industries, King's increasing focus on economic issues, the New Left's spread to community colleges, and the return of working-class GIs radicalized by their experience in Vietnam. At the same time, the women's movement was confronting the deep sexism which permeated 1960s activism, along with its corollaries: homophobia, sexual violence, militarism, competitiveness, and top-down decision-making. While the problems of the 1960s movements were enormous, their strengths might have enabled them to overcome their weaknesses had the upsurge not been stifled before activists could learn from their mistakes. Much of the movements' inability to transcend their initial limitations and overcome adversity can be traced to COINTELPRO. It was through COINTELPRO that the public image of Blacks and New Leftists was distorted to legitimize their arrest and imprisonment and scapegoat them as the cause of working people's problems. The FBI and police instigated violence and fabricated movement horrors. Dissidents were deliberately "criminalized" through false charges, frame-ups, and offensive, bogus leaflets and other materials published in their name. (Specific examples of these and other COINTELPRO operations are presented on pages 41-65.) COINTELPRO enabled the FBI and police to exacerbate the movements' internal stresses until beleaguered activists turned on one another. Whites were pitted against Blacks, Blacks against Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, students against workers, workers against people on welfare, men against women, religious activists against atheists, Christians against Jews, Jews against Muslims. "Anonymous" accusations of infidelity ripped couples apart. Backers of women's and gay liberation were attacked as "dykes" or "faggots." Money was repeatedly stolen and precious equipment sabotaged to intensify pressure and sow suspicion and mistrust. Otherwise manageable disagreements were inflamed by COINTELPRO until they erupted into hostile splits that shattered alliances, tore groups apart, and drove dedicated activists out of the movement. Government documents implicate the FBI and police in the bitter break-up of such pivotal groups as the Black Panther Party, SDS, and the Liberation News Service, and in the collapse of repeated efforts to form long-term coalitions across racial, class, and regional lines. While genuine political issues were often involved in these disputes, the outcome could have been different if government agencies had not covertly intervened to subvert compromise and fuel hostility and competition. Finally, it was COINTELPRO that enabled the FBI and police to eliminate the leaders of mass movements without undermining the image of the United States as a democracy, complete with free speech and the rule of law. Charismatic orators and dynamic organizers were covertly attacked and "neutralized" before their skills could be transferred to others and stable structures established to carry on their work. Malcolm X was killed in a "factional dispute" which the FBI took credit for having "developed" in the Nation of Islam. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an elaborate FBI plot to drive him to suicide and replace him "in his role of the leadership of the Negro people" with conservative Black lawyer Samuel Pierce (later named to Reagan's cabinet). Many have come to view King's eventual assassination (and Malcolm's as well) as itself a domestic covert operation. Other prominent radicals faced similar attack when they began to develop broad followings and express anti-capitalist ideas. Some were portrayed as crooks, thugs, philanderers, or government agents, while others were physically threatened or assaulted until they abandoned their work. Still others were murdered under phony pretexts, such as "shootouts" in which the only shots were fired by the police. To help bring down a major target, the FBI often combined these approaches in strategic sequence. Take the case of the "underground press," a network of some 400 radical weeklies and several national news services, which once boasted a combined readership of close to 30 million. In the late 1960s, government agents raided the offices of alternative newspapers across the country in purported pursuit of drugs and fugitives. In the process, they destroyed typewriters, cameras, printing presses, layout equipment, business records, and research files, and roughed up and jailed staffers on bogus charges. Meanwhile, the FBI was persuading record companies to withdraw lucrative advertising and arranging for printers, suppliers, and distributors to drop underground press accounts. With their already shaky operations in disarray, the papers and news services were easy targets for a final phase of COINTELPRO disruption. Forged correspondence, anonymous accusations, and infiltrators' manipulation provoked a flurry of wild charges and counter-charges that played a major role in bringing many of these promising endeavors to a premature end. A similar pattern can be discerned from the history of the Black Panther Party. Brutal government attacks initially elicited broad support for this new, militant, highly visible national organization and its popular ten-point socialist program for Black self-determination. But the FBI's repressive onslaught severely weakened the Party, making it vulnerable to sophisticated FBI psychological warfare which so discredited and shattered it that few people today have any notion of the power and potential that the Panthers once represented. What proved most devastating in all of this was the effective manipulation of the victims of COINTELPRO into blaming themselves. Since the FBI and police operated covertly, the horrors they engineered appeared to emanate from within the movements. Activists' trust in one another and in their collective power was subverted, and the hopes of a generation died, leaving a legacy of cynicism and despair which continues to haunt us today. ** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye ** /** pn.publiceye: 23.6 **/ ** Written 6:50 pm Jan 24, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye ** _________________________________________________________________ Black Panther Party Program: What We Want -adopted 1966 1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. 2. We want full employment for our people. 3. We want an end to the robbery by the CAPITALISTS of our Black Community. 4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings. 5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. 6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service. 7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people. 8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails. 9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States. 10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny. ** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye ** /** pn.publiceye: 23.7 **/ ** Written 6:51 pm Jan 24, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye ** _________________________________________________________________ THE DANGER WE FACE Domestic Covert Action Remains a Serious Threat Today The public exposure of COINTELPRO and other government abuses elicited a flurry of apparent reform in the 1970s. President Nixon resigned in the face of impeachment. His Attorney General, other top aides, and many of the "plumbers" were prosecuted and imprisoned for brief periods. The CIA's director and counter-intelligence chief were ousted, and the CIA and the Army were again directed to cease covert operations against domestic targets. The FBI had formally shut down COINTELPRO a few weeks after it was uncovered. As part of the general face-lift, the Bureau publicly apologized for COINTELPRO, and municipal governments began to disband the local police "red squads" that had served as the FBI's main accomplices. A new Attorney General notified several hundred activists that they had been victims of COINTELPRO and issued guidelines limiting future operations. Top FBI officials were indicted for ordering the burglary of activists' offices and homes; two were convicted, and several others retired or resigned. The Bureau's egomaniacal, crudely racist and sexist founder, J. Edgar Hoover, died in 1972. After two interim directors failed to stem the tide of criticism, a prestigious federal judge, William Webster, was appointed by President Carter to clean house and build a "new FBI." Behind this public hoopla, however, the Bureau's war at home continued unabated. Domestic covert action did not end when it was exposed in the 1970s. It has persisted throughout the 1980s and become a permanent feature of U.S. government. ** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye ** /** pn.publiceye: 23.8 **/ ** Written 6:52 pm Jan 24, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye ** _________________________________________________________________ Domestic Covert Action Did Not End in the 1970s Director Webster's highly touted reforms did not create a "new FBI." They served mainly to modernize the existing Bureau and to make it even more dangerous. In place of the backbiting competition with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies which had previously impeded coordination of domestic counter-insurgency, Webster promoted inter-agency cooperation. Adopting the mantle of an "equal opportunity employer," his FBI hired women and people of color to more effectively penetrate a broader range of political targets. By cultivating a low-visibility image and discreetly avoiding public attack on prominent liberals, Webster gradually restored the Bureau's respectability and won over a number ofits former critics. State and local police similarly upgraded their repressive capabilities in the 1970s while learning to present a more friendly public face. The "red squads" that had harassed 1960s activists were quietly resurrected under other names. Paramilitary SWAT teams and tactical squads were formed, along with highly politicized "community relations" and "beat rep" programs featuring conspicuous Black, Latin, and female officers. Generous federal funding and sophisticated technology became available through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, while FBI-led "joint anti-terrorist task forces" introduced a new level of inter-agency coordination. Meanwhile, the CIA continued to use university professors, journalists, labor leaders, publishing houses, cultural organizations, and philanthropic fronts to mold U.S. public opinion.[f-41> At the same time, Army Special Forces and other elite military units began to train local police for counter-insurgency and to intensify their own preparations, following the guidelines of the secret Pentagon contingency plans, "Garden Plot" and "Cable Splicer." They drew increasingly on manuals based on the British colonial experience in Kenya and Northern Ireland, which teach the essential methodology of COINTELPRO under the rubric of "low-intensity warfare," and stress early intervention to neutralize potential opposition before it can take hold. While domestic covert operations were scaled down once the 1960s upsurge had subsided (thanks in part to the success of COINTELPRO), they did notstop. In its April 27, 1971 directives disbanding COINTELPRO, the FBI provided for future covert action to continue "with tight procedures to ensure absolute security." The results are apparent in the record of 1970s covert operations which have so far come to light: The Native American Movement: 1970s FBI attacks on resurgent Native American resistance have been well documented by Ward Churchill and others.[f-44> In 1973, the Bureau led a paramilitary invasion of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as American Indian Movement (AIM) activists gathered there for symbolic protests at Wounded Knee, the site of an earlier U.S. massacre of Native Americans. The FBI directed the entire 71-day siege, deploying federal marshals, U.S. Army personnel, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, local GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation, an armed tribal vigilante force), and a vast array of heavy weaponry. In the following years, the FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM and the Native people. From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of the tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to the first years of the Pinochet regime in Chile.[f-45> To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public protest against it, the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological warfare. Central to this effort was a carefully orchestrated campaign to reinforce the already deeply ingrained myth of the "Indian savage." In one operation, the FBI fabricated reports that AIM "Dog Soldiers" planned widespread "sniping at tourists" and "burning of farmers" in South Dakota. The son of liberal U.S. Senator (and Arab-American activist) James Abourezk, was named as a "gunrunner," and the Bureau issued a nationwide alert picked up by media across the country. To the same end, FBI undercover operatives framed AIM members Paul "Skyhorse" Durant and Richard "Mohawk" Billings for the brutal murder of a Los Angeles taxi driver. A bogus AIM note taking credit for the killing was found pinned to a signpost near the murder site, along with a bundle of hair said to be the victim's "scalp." Newspaper headlines screamed of "ritual murder" by "radical Indians." By the time the defendants were finally cleared of the spurious charges, many of AIM's main financial backers had been scared away and its work among a major urban concentration of Native people was in ruin. In March 1975, a central perpetrator of this hoax, AIM's national security chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an undercover operative for the FBI. As AIM's liaison with the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee during the trials of Dennis Banks and other Native American leaders, Durham had routinely participated in confidential strategy sessions. He confessed to stealing organizational funds during his two years with AIM, and to setting up the arrest of AIM militants for actions he had organized. It was Durham who authored the AIM documents that the FBI consistently cited to demonstrate the group's supposed violent tendencies. Prompted by Durham's revelations, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced on June 23, 1975 that it would hold public hearings on FBI operations against AIM. Three days later, armed FBI agents assaulted an AIM house on the Pine Ridge reservation. When the smoke cleared, AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright and two FBI agents lay dead. The media, barred from the scene "to preserve the evidence," broadcast the Bureau's false accounts of a bloody "Indian ambush," and the congressional hearings were quietly cancelled. The FBI was then free to crush AIM and clear out the last pockets of resistance at Pine Ridge. It launched what the Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission described as "a full-scale military-type invasion of the reservation"[f-46> complete with M-16s, Huey helicopters, tracking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. Eventually AIM leader Leonard Peltier was tried for the agents' deaths before a right-wing judge who met secretly with the FBI. AIM member Anna Mae Aquash was found murdered after FBI agents threatened to kill her unless she helped them to frame Peltier. Peltier's conviction, based on perjured testimony and falsified FBI ballistics evidence, was upheld on appeal. (The panel of federal judges included William Webster until the very day of his official appointment as Director of the FBI.) Despite mounting evidence of impropriety in Peltier's trial, and Amnesty International's call for a review of his case, the Native American leader remains in maximum security prison. The Black Movement: Government covert action against Black activists also continued in the 1970s. Targets ranged from community-based groups to the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and the surviving remnants of the Black Panther Party. In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit and disrupt the United League of Marshall County, a broad-based grassroots civil rights group struggling to stop Klan violence. In California, a notorious paid operative for the FBI, Darthard Perry, code-named "Othello," infiltrated and disrupted local Black groups and took personal credit for the fire that razed the Watts Writers Workshop's multi-million dollar cultural center in Los Angeles in 1973. The Los Angeles Police Department later admitted infiltrating at least seven 1970s community groups, including the Black-led Coalition Against Police Abuse. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) conspired with the Wilmington, North Carolina police to frame nine local civil rights workers and the Rev. Ben Chavis, field organizer for the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ. Chavis had been sent to North Carolina to help Black communities respondto escalating racist violence against school desegregation. Instead of arresting Klansmen, the ATF and police coerced three young Black prisoners into falsely accusing Chavis and the others of burning white-owned property. Although all three prisoners later admitted they had lied in response to official threats and bribes, the FBI found no impropriety. The courts repeatedly refused to reopen the case and the Wilmington Ten served many years in prison before pressure from international religious and human rights groups won their release. As the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) began to build autonomous Black economic and political institutions in the deep South, the Bureau repeatedly disrupted its meetings and blocked its attempts to buy land. On August 18, 1971, four months after the supposed end of COINTELPRO, the FBI and police launched an armed pre-dawn assault on national RNA offices in Jackson, Mississippi. Carrying a warrant for a fugitive who had been brought to RNA Headquarters by FBI informer Thomas Spells, the attackers concentrated their fire where the informer's floor plan indicated that RNA President Imari Obadele slept. Though Obadele was away at the time of the raid, the Bureau had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to assault a government agent. The COINTELPRO-triggered collapse of the Black Panthers' organization and support in the winter of 1971 left them defenseless as the government moved to prevent them from regrouping. On August 21, 1971, national Party officer George Jackson, world-renowned author of the political autobiography [Soledad Brother,] was murdered by San Quentin prison authorities on the pretext of an attempted jailbreak. In July 1972, Southern California Panther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was successfully framed for a senseless $70 robbery-murder committed while he was hundreds of miles away in Oakland, California, attending Black Panther meetings for which the FBI managed to "lose" all of its surveillance records. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act later revealed that at least two FBI agents had infiltrated Pratt's defense committee. They also indicated that the state's main witness, Julio Butler, was a paid informer who had worked in the Party under the direction of the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department. For many years, FBI Director Webster publicly denied that Pratt had ever been a COINTELPRO target, despite the documentary proof in his own agency's records. Also targeted well into the 1970s were former Panthers assigned to form an underground to defend against armed government attack on the Party. It was they who had regrouped as the Black Liberation Army (BLA) when the Party was destroyed. FBI files show that, within a month of the close of COINTELPRO, further Bureau operations against the BLA were mapped out in secret meetings convened by presidential aide John Ehrlichman and attended by President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell. In the following years, many former Panther leaders were murdered by the police in supposed "shoot-outs" with the BLA. Others, such as Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid Bin Wahad (formerly Richard Moore), and the New York 3 (Herman Bell, Anthony "Jalil" Bottom, and Albert "Nuh" Washington) were sentenced to long prison terms after rigged trials. In the case of the New York 3, FBI ballistics reports withheld during their mid-1970s trials show that bullets from an alleged murder weapon did not match those found at the site of the killings for which they are still serving life terms. The star witness against them has publicly recanted his testimony, swearing that he lied after being tortured by police (who repeatedly jammed an electric cattleprod into his testicles) and secretly threatened by the prosecutor and judge. The same judge later dismissed petitions to reopen the case, refusing to hold any hearing or to disqualify himself, even though his misconduct is a major issue. As the NY3 continued to press for a new trial, their evidence was ignored by the news media while their former prosecutor's one-sided, racist "docudrama" on the case, (Badge of the Assassin,) aired on national television. _________________________________________________________________

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to another story about secret government agents and surveillance. Today we continue the conversation we began Thursday with Seth Rosenfeld, longtime investigative reporter and author of a new book, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. The book is based on more than 300,000 pages of records Rosenfeld obtained through five Freedom of Information lawsuits against the FBI over the course of three decades. It looks at how then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to investigate and then disrupt the Free Speech Movement that began in 1964 on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The protests prevailed and helped spawn a nationwide student movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Seth Rosenfeld reveals how FBI records show agents used, quote, "dirty tricks to stifle dissent on the campus" and exposes new details about howfuture U.S. President Ronald Reagan's secret role as an FBI informant. In the book, Rosenfeld interweaves stories of four main characters: the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover; Ronald Reagan, who was running for governor of California at the time; Clark Kerr, then the University of California president and a target of scorn from both Reagan, Hoover and student activists; and legendary Free Speech Movement leader and orator, Mario Savio.
Seth Rosenfeld, welcome back to Democracy Now! When we were speaking yesterday, we left it at Reagan, who was not yet governor, whoyou have uncovered, in a way that has not been revealed before, the level of spying he was doing for the FBI.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, in response to my Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the FBI was forced to release more than 10,000 pages concerning Ronald Reagan in the years prior to his becoming president. And these records show that he was much more involved with the FBI than previously known. He was more active as an FBI informer in Hollywood, reporting on other actors who he suspected of subversive activities, and that later, in response to this, Hoover and other FBI officials returned the favor by giving Reagan personal and political help that went beyond the FBI's proper jurisdiction.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Seth, you also point out how Reagan actively sought to disrupt or divide several major Hollywood organizations that he believed, or had reason to believe from the FBI, were being controlled by communists. Could you talk about some of that?
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes. Reagan talks a little bit about his involvement with left-wing groups in Hollywood and how the FBI opened his eyes to the alleged communist infiltration of these groups. And one of these groups was called the Hollywood Independent Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions. It was a broad-based group that had many members from all different political perspectives. And Reagan, on being informed by the FBI that it was allegedly run by communists, proposed a resolution for this group, and he and other members brought this forward at a meeting of the group. And the resolution was to the effect that the group repudiates communism. And this was a very divisive measure, and it led to a split within the group. And Reagan says that hein testimony, in court testimony, he says he proposed another divisive measure to a second group, the American Veterans Committee, in Hollywood in the '40s. And the reason the measure was so divisive is that, at this time in history, there were very broad coalitions within Hollywood that included people from all ranges of political backgrounds who would come together around specific issues. So, that's one of the ways that Reagan sought to disrupt these groups. He also states that he took the minutes from one of these groups, the Hollywood Independent Committee. He actually pilfered the minutes, and the FBI records show that these minutes later found their way into FBI files.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: He also tried to undermine a very bitter strike of the set builders, didn't he? Even though he was, himself, a member of and later a president of the Screen Actors Guild.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes. While Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, there was a very bitter strike in Hollywood led by the Conference of Studio Unions, which was kind of an independent union challenging the status quo. And Reagan and other members of the Screen Actors Guild board of directors took the position that the Screen Actors Guild should not support that strike. Reagan later wrote that he was convinced that communists were behind the strike, although the evidence is that the strike had some legitimate issues that they were pursuing.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip of a speech of Ronald Reagan when he was running for governor in '66 and spoke out about the Free Speech Movement.

RONALD REAGAN: There is a leadership gap in Sacramento, a morality and a decency gap. And there's no more tragic evidence of this than what has been perpetrated on the campus of Berkeley across the Bay. Therethere, a small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates have brought shame on a great university, so much so that applicationsapplications for enrollment have dropped 21 percent, and there's evidence they will continue to drop even more.

Now, we've all read the press reportings of the report that was handed in by the Senate subcommittee and its charges that the campus has become a rallying point for communists and a center for sexual misconduct. I've never seen that report. I only know what I've read in the paper about it. But I've had in my position information that verifies, at least in part, what the press has said about that report. As a matter of fact, I have here a copy of a report of the district attorney of Alameda County. It concerns a dance that was sponsored by the Vietnam Day Committee, sanctioned by the university as a student activity, and that was held in the men's gymnasium at the University of California. The incidents are so bad, so contrary to our standards of human behavior, that I couldn't possibly recite them to you here from this platform in detail.

This is not only a sign of a leadership gapor not the only sign. It began a year ago, when the so-called free speech advocates, who in truth have no appreciation for freedom, were allowed to assault and humiliate the symbol of law and order of policemen on the campus. And that was the moment when the ringleaders should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university once and for all.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Ronald Reagan speaking as he ran for California governor. In that same speech, he called for hearings to investigate allegations against professors accused of being communists and for said facultyshould be required to sign a code of conduct. Talk about these files that Ronald Reagan, who then became governor, is talking about.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, well, that speech was given in May 1966 at the Cow Palace during the Republican primary. And you can hear Reagan focusing on the University of California, the Berkeley campus, in particular. And by this time in his campaign, he has made the campus protest, the Free Speech Movement, antiwar protest and civil rights protest, a major issue. And he's not only complaining about those protests, he's using them as a way to attack the incumbent Democrat, Pat Brown. He's saying that these posethese show that there's a leadership gap and a morality gap at the center of the state's Democratic Party.
Reagan, by this time, had formed a very close and cordial relationship with the FBI. That's a phrase that FBI officials used to describe their relationship with Reagan. This relationship was based on his years in Hollywood, where he was more active as an informer. He had named a number of people to the FBI, sometimes on very scant evidence. In one instance, in the documents, he meets a young actress at a cocktail party, and she comes up to him and says, "You know, I have serious concerns about the blacklist. I think it's unfair to people." And Reagan disputes this with her and later reports her to the FBI. And the FBI, as a result of that, opens a file on her. So, by the time he's running for governor, he has a very close relationship with the FBI.
And soon after he's elected in November 1966, he phones the FBI, as one of his first acts in office, and he requests a secret briefing about the protests at UC Berkeley, not only about students and professors engaged in dissent, but also about members of the Board of Regents, specifically liberal members of the Board of Regents, and about the university president, Clark Kerr.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, Seth, you also
SETH ROSENFELD: Not long after this, Reagan attends his first meeting of the Board of Regents, and at this meeting, Clark Kerr is fired.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, you've mentioned that not only was Reagandid Reagan particularly target Clark Kerr, but J. Edgar Hoover also felt that Clark Kerr was a menace as the president of the University of California. Could you talk about Kerr himself, his history and his role, in terms of the FBItargeting him, and Reagan? Because a lot of people also forget that Reagan was the first person to institute tuition at the University of California, which, before him, had been free to all people who were able to get into the California university system.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes. Clark Kerr is one of the towering figures in American higher education. He was born in 1911, coincidentally the same year that Ronald Reagan was born. Kerr came from a rural part of Pennsylvania. His father was a farmer and a teacher. And Kerr worked on the farm as a boy and attended a one-room schoolhouse. Kerr has written in his memoirs that he had a teacher at this one-room schoolhouse named Miss Elba, who took an interest in him and had a profound impact on him. She helped him become a good student, and as a result of that, he went on to attend Swarthmore College. So, Kerr has always felt, from his very early days, very strongly about the power of education to transform people's lives.
At Swarthmore, Kerr becomes a Quaker. He believes in nonviolence, and he works for social justice through the American Friends Service Committee and then moves to California, does graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, and later becomes the first chancellor at Berkeley in the 1950s. In 1958, he's electedhe's appointed president of the University of California system. Kerr helps expand the University of California into one of the greatest public universities in history and opens the door to higher education for thousands of people. One of the things that Kerr accomplishes is called the Master Plan for Higher Education. This was a system of junior colleges, four-year colleges and public universities, graduate schools, like UC Berkeley, that was set up around California and was then emulated around the country and internationally. And this really transformed the educational system and opened it up to many, many people.
At the same time Kerr was doing this, he openedalso opened the University of California campus to free speech in many ways. He lifted the ban against communist and socialist speakers. And his explanation at the time was, the university is not engaged in making ideas safe for students, it's engaged in making students safe for ideas. He believed that if students were well educated, they could hear ideas from any point of view and then make the right decisions. However, J. Edgar Hoover didn't appreciate that point of view. He viewed Kerr as potentially subversive and certainly as somebody who was not in sympathy with Hoover's own political views. He blamed Kerr for opening the campus to activism and was very angry at Kerr later, during the Free Speech Movement, for not cracking down more severely on student protesters.
So, in my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, I requested any and all records concerning Clark Kerr. And the FBI released over a thousand pages on him. And what these documents show is that theFBI did normal background investigations of Kerr, because he was in a high position at the university and was overseeing the nuclear radiation labs, but that the FBI also used these background investigations as a pretext to try and sabotage his career. And one way the FBI did this, under J. Edgar Hoover, was by gathering allegations against Kerr and then sending them to the White House to LyndonPresident Lyndon Johnson, even though the FBI had investigated the allegations and knew that they were untrue.
And the FBI also leaked information to conservative members of the Board of Regents in an effort to convince the Regents to fire Kerr. But Kerr had a very staunch ally in Governor Pat Brown. And as long as Pat Brown was the governor of California, Kerr would remain as president of the University of California. So when Ronald Reagan was elected in November of '66, FBI officials saw this as a breath of fresh air. They finally had an ally in the governor's office. And they complied with Governor Reagan's request to meet with him soon after he was elected. They gave him an extensive briefing about Berkeley, about Clark Kerr, about his opponents on the Board of Regents. And then, very shortly thereafter, Kerr was fired at the University of California.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to
SETH ROSENFELD: MovingI'm sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to an interview from the '60s with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover speaking about how the American Communist Party was committed to the overthrow of the government by force and violence.

J. EDGAR HOOVER: I think that communism is as serious a menace to the United States as it ever was, if not more so. The tendency to judge the strength of the Communist Party by its membership in numbers is fallacious and, I think, can be acan lead us into very serious trouble, because today you have in charge of the Communist Party a hardcore fanatical group of members who are dedicated to the overthrow of our government by force and violence. The Communist Party itself is a part of an international criminal conspiracy for the destruction of the American way of life.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was J. Edgar Hoover. If you could, Seth Rosenfeld, fit this into how the government dealt with Clark Kerr, but also, though, thehe was also unpopular among the students, ultimately.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, he was. In the early years of the Cold War, particularly right after World War II, there was great concern about communism. There were links between the Communist Party in the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union did attempt to use some Communist Party officials in the United States to gather nuclear secrets and other information from the University of California. But by 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that being a member of the Communist Party was not, in and itself, illegal. There had to be further evidence that a member of the Communist Party was engaged in espionage or breaking a law. Despite this court ruling, the FBIcontinued to intensively investigate communists, socialists and, according to congressional findings, in the '70s, virtually anybody who challenged the status quo, and amassed more than half a million files on American citizens.
So, at Berkeley, Hoover was extremely concerned about dissent, and he focused on Clark Kerr and tried to get him fired. At the same time, the students, student activists, viewed Clark Kerr as their adversary. Clark Kerr had in fact opened the campus in many ways to free speech. He believed in public debate. But he had not responded quickly enough to the students' challenge in 1964 against a campus rule that still prohibited free speech on campus. Kerr came from the point of view that keeping politics off campus would protect the university from outside political influences, and therefore protect academic freedom. But many of the students, particularly Mario Savio and other people who had been involved in the civil rights movement, saw this rule as an outrageous limitation on their free speech rights. Savio had spent that summer in the South registering blacks to vote. He had faced down the Ku Klux Klan. He had been assaulted by the Ku Klux Klan. And he returned to campus in that fall of '64 only to find that this rule prohibited him from even handing out a leaflet on campus. So, when Clark Kerr failed to lift this rule, the students came to view him as their enemy.
Clark Kerr was really the man in the middle. On the one hand, he had Ronald Reagan challenging him, accusing him of being weak on student protesters. On the other hand, he had Mario Savio and other student activists who viewed him as their enemy. And then, behind the scenes, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, was J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, secretly working to get Clark Kerr fired and, meanwhile, secretly giving Ronald Reagan personal and political help.
AMY GOODMAN: Seth Rosenfeld, we just have 30 seconds, but what were you most shocked by? I mean, that's a big question to ask for someone who's done this research and gotten so many hundreds of thousands of pages from the FBI and done this research for 30 years. But as you publish this book this week, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, what most shocked you?
SETH ROSENFELD: I think what I found most shocking is the extraordinary breadth and depth of the FBI's activities concerning the University of California and its focus on First Amendment activities under J. Edgar Hoover. The documents show that the FBI took techniques developed for use against adversaries during wartime and turned them against people involved in legitimate public dissent at UC Berkeley. And ultimately, my book, Subversives, is a cautionary tale about the dangers that secrecy and power pose to democracy.