As the antiwar movement grew across the country, President Johnson (LBJ) became obsessed with the idea that the Russians or Cubans were behind it – a familiar Washington scenario of Communist subversion at work. He tasked J Edgar Hoover to get the goods. The ‘Bureau’, as the FBI was called by insiders, created a program to monitor all anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and directed its 59 field offices and numerous satellite branches across the country to keep an eye on colleges and universities within their jurisdictions.
The Bureau had at its disposal well-tested tools for surveilling and disrupting the antiwar movement, techniques honed in its no-holds barred postwar campaign against the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and rival Marxist groups. By the mid-‘60s, the CPUSA had been thoroughly penetrated by FBI informants and was a shadow of its prewar self, although its smaller Trotskyist and Maoist rivals were going strong.
Responding to a rattled LBJ who in ’67 loudly declared to his cabinet, “I’m not going to let the Communists take this government,”* Hoover deployed the vast resources of his secret agency against the antiwar movement. Shocked during spring ‘68 by SDS’s temporary takeover of Columbia University, the Director escalated, intensifying his campaign under a code word he’d coined in 1956 for work against the Old Left, COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Program, this time directed at the New Left. The Indianapolis (Indy) Field Office took note, stepping up its surveillance of colleges and universities in the State of Indiana experiencing student unrest, most notably IU at Bloomington.
The
Indy office stood among the vanguard against the New Left in the FBI network and
was determined to confirm the President’s and J Edgar’s suspicions that the
Soviets were calling the shots in the antiwar movement. However, the problem
was they were using an investigative template in their IU operation that led
them to pose the wrong questions about the New Left, which had broken with the
Old Left modus organizational model nationally.
Out
the window went CPUSA shibboleths such as the need for a strong leader, ideological
conformity, a hierarchical organization, strict rank and file discipline,
‘front’ organizations, and the creation of misleading propaganda. Yet, like
generals fighting the last war, these were the markers the Indiana FBI was
looking for. At the time, the Bureau only distinguished between left and
rightwing targets of investigation. It was later that Hoover created an
internal division of labor between continuing surveillance of Old Left organizations
and the more active pursuit of New Left groups.
Predictably, the Special Agent in
Charge-Indianapolis (SAC-Indy), had great difficulty finding evidence of
‘Soviet influence’ among the IU New Left, but this didn’t deter him from
pulling out all the stops in pursuit of the Director’s objective. Indy’s modus
operandi included aggressively interviewing student leaders to remind them the
feds were watching and collecting covert ‘intelligence’ gathered by two student
informants rated excellent, one of whom had access to the campus New Left
leadership.† Sent on to Washington, SAC-Indy’s myriad secret reports
produced a caricature of a mini-Communist conspiracy on a conservative
Midwestern campus in a small southern Indiana town.
Although the Indy FBI’s memoranda of
40+ years ago are redacted to conceal informants’ names and even the targets of
surveillance in places, a latter day file clerk’s carelessness left the names
of targets uncensored elsewhere in the reporting. Hence, the FBI dubbed Steve
Cagan, a grad student, the mastermind of the IU conspiracy. As a founder of the
campus chapter of the Dubois Clubs of America, successor to CPUSA’s former
youth auxiliary, the Young Communist League, Cagan was a convenient leadership
candidate, especially when he formed the ‘Indiana Central Office for Peace
Action’ (ICOPA) in late June ’67 “to coordinate all the antiwar and anti-draft
organizations in the State of Indiana.”*** However, the ‘catch’, as the same
FBI report conceded, was that Cagan left IU six weeks later, leaving the ICOPA,
which had accomplished little, defunct.
The FBI’s search for ideological
coherence, not to mention consistency, at IU proved equally challenging since
neither was a characteristic of the sprawling New Left. Neither of the two marginal
campus groups that were often at sword’s point ideologically – the Young
Socialist Alliance (YSA), youth division of the Socialist Workers Party, a
Trotskyist organization that broke away from the CPUSA; and its rival, the
Dubois Club – could divine what the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the
largest campus group, stood for other than opposing the Vietnam War.
The quest for a hierarchical structure
at the heart of the IU conspiracy was especially elusive given the diversity of
student organizations and the amorphous nature of SDS. Almost lamentably, SAC-Indy
had to inform J Edgar that at IU “SDS … has no organizational structure. All of
their activities depend on individual activists and are spontaneous.”*** In
spite of its Soviet lineage, the Dubois Club seemed not much more promising in
terms of observable structure, appearing primarily as a handful of individuals.
The only hope the FBI found that met the criterion of at least “a degree” of
organizational structure was YSA.
Even more troublesome for the traditional
FBI template of a Soviet-influenced Communist conspiracy was the expectation of
a disciplined rank and file. However, absent a ‘party line’(in Bureau
nomenclature) and given the rather nebulous group structures, both the necessary
command and enforcement mechanisms were missing from the equation. To add to
the Indy FBI’s woes, nailing down the strength of these groups was a guessing
game. As Mary Ann Wynkoop, the historian of IU dissent, noted, membership among
the various IU activist outfits tended to overlap, making head counts less than
reliable and an individual’s primary allegiance somewhat of a mystery.** Long
accustomed to referring to CPUSA rank and filers as ‘card-carrying members’,
SAC-Indy’s report to the director had to acknowledge that membership in SDS was
largely “a state of mind,”*** while qualifiers such as ‘approximately’,
‘about’, or ‘estimated at’ had to be used to report the strength of other New
Left groups.
Determined to get at least a piece
of the conspiracy puzzle right, the FBI rapporteurs classified the IU chapter of the ‘Committee to End the
War in Vietnam’ (CEWV), a large and inclusive umbrella antiwar group founded at
University of Wisconsin-Madison in ‘65, as a ‘front organization’, meaning a
group manipulated from behind the scenes by a controlling organization. Since
the alleged mastermind, Cagan, had been involved with CEWV before leaving IU,
the FBI concluded it was a ‘front’ for the very small Dubois Club, presumably
Cagan’s political home, a group on the US Attorney General’s list of subversive
organizations, a designation which created problems for the Club with IU’s Administration,
but that’s another story.
Later
the FBI surmised that control of the front had shifted to the rival YSA chapter,
the distinction between a pro-Moscow group and an anti-Moscow Trotskyist group
apparently having little meaning for the single-minded Bureau back in Washington. The CEWV functioned much less
conspiratorially at IU and elsewhere as a big tent for mobilizing antiwar
demonstrations since not all New Left groups wished to march under the SDS flag
– most notably YSA members who spoke contemptuously of SDS’s lack of right
thinking as well as its loosey-goosey structure, discipline, and
countercultural habits – the very qualities of openness which attracted
thousands of students to SDS at campuses throughout the country.
Finally, as any rookie FBI man would
know, a Communist conspiracy worth its salt puts out propaganda or slanted, misleading
public information to tarnish its opponents. Other than the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the SDS bible,
most campus organizations were generally not given to issuing manifestos, especially
at a conservative institution like IU where such rhetoric would likely fall on deaf
ears, even possibly engendering hostility and hindering recruitment of
potential new members to the cause. Conveniently for the Indy FBI, in the wake
of protest actions in ‘67, IU SDS and CEWV issued public statements charging
excessive force or ‘police brutality’. Indy labeled these charges unfounded, made
“for publicity value only” [Read: propaganda].****
In fact, at the first of these
protests in Bloomington in June ‘67 led by Brother Jeff Sharlet, Jim Wallihan,
and Joe Fuhrmann, a passer-by witnessed excessive force by a plainclothes
detective who repeatedly beat a handcuffed student with his flashlight.†
In another protest jointly led by SDS and CEVW several months later, the FBI
report again defended the police, emphasizing their injuries, and minimizing
student injuries as just a cut on the mouth and an injured ear. On that
occasion campus security along with the local police, county sheriffs, and the
Indiana State Police, decked out in protective gear with riot sticks, used disproportionate
force to subdue a handful of students who refused orders to cease their sit-in.
Two of the students suffered head injuries, one serious, and had to be sent to
the hospital.
A student casualty
of the October ’67 protest†
Although extensive feedback to Washington
did not confirm the projected image of a Soviet-inspired antiwar movement at IU,
SAC-Indy assured Hoover that the student “ringleaders” (names blacked out, but
well known on campus) – Russell Block,
Steve Cagan, Joe Fuhrmann, Bob Grove,
Robin Hunter, Bob Johnson, Dan Kaplan, Jeff Sharlet, and Jim Wallihan, among
others – were either on or recommended for the “Security Index,” a list of
citizens considered a sufficient threat to national security that in event of a
national emergency they could be subjected to actions ranging from heightened
surveillance and tracking, to immediate detention.***** J Edgar responded with
a well done.
*T
Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (2012)
** M A
Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University
(2002)*** SAC-Indianapolis to Director, FBI (6/25/68)
****SAC-Indianapolis to Director, FBI (7/15/68)
***** SAC-Indianapolis to Director, FBI (6/3/68)
†
-Surveillance at IU: http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/03/surveillance-at-indiana-university.html
-Police brutality: http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/unsung-hero-of-gi-resistance.html
-Dow protest: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/omeka/archives/studentlife/exhibits/show/studentdemonstrationsatiu/1967dowchemicalsitin
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