-Caveat Lector- http://sfgate.com/news/special/pages/2002/campusfiles/
Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare Seth Rosenfeld, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, June 9, 2002 On the gray Monday morning of Jan. 16, 1967, two senior FBI agents were ushered into the governor's Victorian mansion in Sacramento, then led up to a second-floor suite, where a flu-stricken Ronald Reagan was propped up in a bed piled with working papers. Gov. Reagan had just been elected after campaigning to restore order at UC Berkeley, where "beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates" were proof of what he called the "morality and decency gap in Sacramento." Now he was "damned mad" at campus officials, one agent recalled, and he was asking the FBI to tell him "what he was up against." Back in Washington, D.C., FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover saw Reagan's request for confidential information as a chance to finally quell the protests at Berkeley, which were sparking demonstrations at schools across the country. "This presents the bureau with an opportunity to . . . thwart the ever increasing agitation by subversive elements on the campuses," he noted in a memo. Hoover had long been concerned about the University of California, the nation's largest public university and operator of top-secret federal nuclear laboratories. In 1960, he warned Congress of an international communist conspiracy plotting to "control for its own evil purposes the explosive force which youth represents." But as the Cold War waned, the FBI departed from its mission of protecting national security and engaged in sprawling covert intelligence operations that involved thousands of UC students and faculty participating in legitimate debate about public policy. For years the FBI has denied engaging in such activities at the university. But a 17-year legal challenge brought by a Chronicle reporter under the Freedom of Information Act forced the FBI to release more than 200,000 pages of confidential records covering the 1940s to the 1970s. Those documents describe the sweeping nature of the FBI's activities and show they ranged far beyond the campus and into state politics. The FBI records -- in addition to other official papers and scores of interviews with current and former FBI agents and university officials -- reveal that the FBI: conspired with the head of the CIA and a senior member of the university's Board of Regents to pressure the board to "harass" faculty and students involved in protests, misled the White House by sending the president information the bureau knew to be false, and mounted covert public relations efforts to manipulate public opinion about campus events and embarrass university officials. Along the way, the FBI campaigned to destroy the career of UC President Clark Kerr -- even though the bureau's own investigations repeatedly found him to beloyal. At the same time, the FBI forged a close relationship with Reagan -- a more aggressive informer than previously disclosed -- catalyzing his transformation from liberal movie star to the staunch conservative who became one of the 20th century's most powerful figures. The office of Ronald Reagan declined to comment and referred questions to former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Meese, who was Gov. Reagan's chief of staff, said Reagan had a "longtime relationship with the bureau" and that the FBI's assistance to the governor in handling campus unrest was "strictly appropriate and lawful." Meese said that, to his knowledge, the FBI did not give political assistance to Reagan. Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on the bureau's campus files. "Things are done a lot differently today," he said, adding, "The files speak for themselves." Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, who was Hoover's third in command, said the FBI gave Reagan no special help and responded properly to domestic unrest that posed a "considerable threat to the country." In court papers, the bureau has maintained that its activities were lawful and intended to protect civil order and national security. But in ordering the release of the FBI's files in 1995, a federal appeals court concluded that some of the bureau's activities extended far beyond its law enforcement mandate and "came to focus on political rather than law enforcement aims." And as U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel earlier ruled, "The records in this case go (to) the very essence of what the government was up to during a turbulent, historic period of time." The FBI's secret history at UC begins at the dawn of the Cold War, when the bureau's intelligence-gathering authority was expanded in response to threats at home and abroad -- and civil liberties collided with concerns about national security. Campus Files Home 1. Introduction 2. FBI's Secret UC files 3. Trouble On Campus 4. Governor's Race 5. The Legacy -- Epilogue 6. The 17-Year Legal Battle 7. Where Are They Now? A Note On Sources The FBI Files Censored and uncensored docs Timeline 1945-1960 1961-1965 1966-1973 Galleries Decade of Student Protest An Era of Secrecy ™ © 2002 Hearst Communications Inc. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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