In the 1960s and 1970s one of the most controversial policies of the American
government was its intervention in the Vietnam War. A whole nation was divided into so
called doves and hawks, the former were fighting and demonstrating for peace whereas
the latter supported the government’s policies concerning Vietnam.
A very influential and large group of the Antiwar Movement was the New Left, the main
platform of the white students.
In the following, the author will give some information about this group and examine the
actions of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) taken to harm or even destroy that
part of the Antiwar Movement. These actions were manifested in the so called
Counterintelligence Program, which was shortened to the abbreviation Cointelpro.
As there is just one source on which all the literature concerning this topic is based its not
that easy to evaluate in how far all the published material is really true or just serves some
conspiracy theories, which were very common in that time. Especially in the Sixties, when
the Cold War reached its climax in the Cuban Missiles Crises in 1963 and the
assassination of famous people like John F. Kennedy in the same year and Martin Luther
King five years later supported the offspring of many conspiracy theories. So in the
aftermath of that turbulent decade these theories continued to spread and were seen as true
by the majority of the American people because of the Watergate Affaire in 1972 and
other revelations of scandals by the press. Even today after September, 11th 2001 a lot of
conspiracy theories arose. [...]
Contents
1. Introduction
2. What was Cointelpro?
3. General aspects about the New Left
4. Means taken by the FBI to weaken and destroy the New Left Antiwar Movement
5. Summary
6. Bibliography
1. Introduction
In the 1960s and 1970s one of the most controversial policies of the American government was its intervention in the Vietnam War. A whole nation was divided into so called doves and hawks, the former were fighting and demonstrating for peace whereas the latter supported the government’s policies concerning Vietnam. A very influential and large group of the Antiwar Movement was the New Left, the main platform of the white students.
In the following, the author will give some information about this group and examine the actions of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) taken to harm or even destroy that part of the Antiwar Movement. These actions were manifested in the so called Counterintelligence Program, which was shortened to the abbreviation Cointelpro. As there is just one source on which all the literature concerning this topic is based its not that easy to evaluate in how far all the published material is really true or just serves some conspiracy theories, which were very common in that time. Especially in the Sixties, when the Cold War reached its climax in the Cuban Missiles Crises in 1963 and the assassination of famous people like John F. Kennedy in the same year and Martin Luther King five years later supported the offspring of many conspiracy theories. So in the aftermath of that turbulent decade these theories continued to spread and were seen as true by the majority of the American people because of the Watergate Affaire in 1972 and other revelations of scandals by the press. Even today after September, 11th 2001 a lot of conspiracy theories arose.
The author is aware of these facts, but nevertheless tries to give an insight into the actions of the FBI in the Sixties and Seventies for it is seen as obvious, that the American government is supposed to have tried everything to stop the so called dissenters from increasing the antagonistic atmosphere against the war in Vietnam. Due to the limited extend of this work the focus lies on a twelve - point - plan, the FBI worked out with which the techniques the Bureau used to try to destroy the New Left can be explained.
The amount of literature used for this work is also limited for as it will be further elucidated in the following all of the material concerning this topic is based on one original source.
2. What was Cointelpro?
On March, 8th 1956 the National Security Council held its 279th meeting, where J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, made a presentation about the increase of Communist actions in the United States. He tried to persuade the President and the council that the Communists were a threat to the American democratic system. So he asked the President to take every possible measures to persecute and destroy the CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America). Eisenhower agreed to Hoover’s proposal and after the meeting the first Counterintelligence Program with the acronym Cointelpro was established. The Cointelpro against the CPUSA was the first one out of five main programs against political formations or protesting groups, which were considered as subversive before it ended officially in 1971.1
After the Cointelpro against the Communists the next target were the Socialists, especially the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) in 1961, followed by Cointelpros against so called White Hate Groups, especially the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party in 1964 and Black Nationalist - Hate Groups, e. g. the Black Panthers Party and Black Student’s Union in 1967. The last Cointelpro against the New Left started in May 1968 after the incident at the University of Columbia.2
To reach their aims, the destruction of these groups, the FBI used various techniques. Surveillance via telephone, agents and microphone plants were very common, because new technologies made this possible. Moreover they sent anonymous letters with false or threatening information to an ally or a member of these groups. Therefore they faked signatures, press credentials, membership cards and everything that helped to let the letters look authentic. Even blackmailing was used to threaten not only members but also their families, so that they were forced to leave the group they belonged to. In some cases there were even brought up forged prooves against group members to start a trial against them and sent them into prison, where they did not have the possibility to join group actions.3 The revelation and publishing of the secret FBI Cointelpros was made by Carl Stern, an NBC anchorman who fought a legal battle (Freedom of Information Act) to publish documents given to him in December 1973 and March 1974.4
3. General aspects about the New Left
First of all the term New Left implies that there existed already an Old Left when the students movement in the early 1960s emerged. The Old Left was mainly represented by the CPUSA and the SWP, two parties which could be compared to European Communist and Socialist parties.5 In contrast to these more intellectual and disciplined political formations the New Left was a conglomeration of many groups, out of which the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was one of the largest and most popular. Joiners of this formation were mostly white middle - class and above all upper - middle - class students, who enrolled at the universities to avoid being drafted for the war in Vietnam. The campuses of unversities like Berkeley, California or Columbia, New York were the basis for protesting against the Vietnam War and the fight for civil rights.6 The main ideas of the SDS were manifested in the Port Huron Statement, which was drafted by the SDS president Tom Hayden in 1962. “ It summarized what a number of people had been talking about, diffusely and inarticulately, for some time. [...] It stood for decolonization, education, and civil rights. It was against poverty, elitism, American “ Russophobia ” , the Cold War and the “ military - industrial complex ” . ” 7
Before the Vietnam War emerged as an issue of protest, the SDS had been very engaged in the Civil Rights Movement and had not been as radical as it became later on in the Antiwar Movement. Moreover it represented the so called counterculture, a term which was in that time connected with protest, sex, and drug use, associations that were mainly supported by the Woodstock Festival, which is still today the event of the counterculture. When in 1965 the American intervention in the Vietnam War increased with the air bombardment campaign “Rolling Thunder” and the number of soldiers sent to Vietnam exploded from 23000 to over 1840008, the basis for dissent against the war broadened and the organization of protest demonstrations became more structured and grew larger.9 In April 1968 students of the University of Columbia, New York occupied the campus for a whole week, a demonstration against the war in Vietnam led by the SDS. This is just one example out of a long list of protest actions of the Antiwar Movement, which happened in the late 1960s and the early 1970s until the war ended in 1975.10
4. Means taken by the FBI to weaken and destroy the New Left Antiwar Movement
Not until the student’s take over of the Columbia University campus in spring 1968 the FBI had established an extra Cointelpro for the New Left. However, that did not mean, that the movement was not surveilled and infiltrated. In the early 1960s white activists where recognized as “Friends of the SNCC (Student Non - Violent Coordinating Committee)”, a student organization founded by black students in the course of the Civil Rights Movement. When in 1961 some members of the SDS accompanied the SNCC’s “Freedom Rides” into southern states to protest against segregation in public transport and the Jim Crow laws, which still forbade interracial marriages in these regions, the FBI gave the police of Alabama a detailed plan of the route, the protesters were going to take. Moreover they paid one member of the Ku Klux Klan, who was later on involved in the beating of the protesters. That was a common strategy by the FBI, they used klansmen and the police to stop members of the Civil Rights Movement from protesting.11 In the mid - 1960s the dissent among students led by the SDS grew, the successfull sit -in tactics, used at the University of California at Berkeley, where a police car was surrounded by more than 1000 students to stop it from arresting SDS leader Jack Weinberg, spread over the country and were used in other demonstrations against the war on campuses. So J. Edgar Hoover “ [...] ordered intensified coverage of SDS as of April 1965 in order that the Bureau “ have proper coverage similar to what we have ... [on] the Communist Party ” . ” 12 In the course of the events as many members of the SDS as the FBI was able to identify were interviewed and surveilled, therefore the FBI tried to strengthen its cooperation with campus administrations and police forces.13
[...]
1 Davis, James Kirkpatrick: Assault on the left. The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement. Westport 1997, p. 4f.
2 Donner, Frank J.: The Age of Surveillance. The Aims and Methods of America ’ s Political Intelligence System. New York 1980, pp. 184 - 233 passim.
3 Ibd., p. 181
4 Ibd., p. 178f.
5 Garfinkle, Adam: Telltale Hearts. The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement. New York 1995, p. 118
6 Ward, Churchill; VanderWall, Jim: The Cointelpro papers: documents from the FBI ’ s secret wars against domestic dissent. Boston 1990
7 Garfinkle, Adam: Telltale Hearts. The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement. New York 1995, p. 62
8 for further information about the increasing American intervention in Vietnam see: Chomsky, Noam: Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and U.S. political culture. Boston 1993, passim.
9 Ibd., p. 64f.
10 Davis, James Kirkpatrick: Assault on the left. The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement. Westport 1997, passim.
11 Ward, Churchill; VanderWall, Jim: The Cointelpro papers: documents from the FBI ’ s secret wars against domestic dissent. Boston 1990
12 ibd., p. 11
13 ibd., p. 10f.
- Quote paper
- Bettina Nolde (Author), 2003, The FBI's secret counterintelligence program against the New Left Antiwar Movement, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/15367
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