Nixon's War at Home

The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism

Daniel S. Chard

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469664514
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

During the presidency of Richard Nixon, homegrown leftist guerrilla groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army carried out hundreds of attacks in the United States. The FBI had a long history of infiltrating activist groups, but this type of clandestine action posed a unique challenge. Drawing on thousands of pages of declassified FBI documents, Daniel S. Chard shows how America's war with domestic guerrillas prompted a host of new policing measures as the FBI revived illegal spy techniques previously used against communists in the name of fighting terrorism. These efforts did little to stop the guerrillas—instead, they led to a bureaucratic struggle between the Nixon administration and the FBI that fueled the Watergate Scandal and brought down Nixon. Yet despite their internal conflicts, FBI and White House officials developed preemptive surveillance practices that would inform U.S. counterterrorism strategies into the twenty-first century, entrenching mass surveillance as a cornerstone of the national security state. Connecting the dots between political violence and "law and order" politics, Chard reveals how American counterterrorism emerged in the 1970s from violent conflicts over racism, imperialism, and policing that remain unresolved today.

1 Nixon, Hoover, and America’s Homegrown Insurgency

Before sunrise on January 20, 1969, four young white radicals bundled up in winter coats, hats, and gloves and came down from the mountain. Leaving the cabin they shared in snowy Idaho Springs, Colorado, Cameron David Bishop, Linda Goebel, Steven Knowles, and Susan Parker drove the steep grade of the Rocky Mountains’ eastern slope. In their car, they transported a homemade bomb.

Over the past few days, members of the group had built the bomb with dynamite and other materials stolen from a local mine. Their target was one of the hundreds of colossal steel towers that held up the Public Service Company of Colorado’s sprawling electricity grid servicing the Denver metropolitan area. These lines powered one facility in particular: the massive Coors Porcelain Plant in the Denver suburb of Golden. Lugging the device to the base of the tower, they set the timer and fled the scene.

The explosion destroyed the tower, knocking out electricity at the Coors factory and surrounding areas of Jefferson County for several hours. During the blackout, Coors workers were forced to halt construction of two of the Coors Company’s most lucrative products: nose cones for Sidewinder missiles and armored plates for military helicopters. These were essential components of weaponry the U.S. military used in Vietnam, where America’s ongoing war had killed over 30,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese since 1964.¹ The bombing was a success as far as temporarily slowing the war machine was concerned—even more important, however, was the timing.

More than 1,500 miles away, President Richard Nixon was delivering an inaugural speech espousing peace, urging Americans to move on from the domestic turmoil of the Johnson administration.² Arrayed against him were thousands of nonviolent protesters who had descended on Washington for the day’s “counterinaugural” events, as well as several hundred members of a rowdy faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who hurled stones, bottles, smoke bombs, firecrackers, and paint-filled lightbulbs. Police met violence with more violence, clubbing protesters with their batons and making 119 arrests, in what the New York Times called “the first at an inaugural ceremony in the 180 years of the Presidency.” Nixon also made history as the first American president to give an inaugural speech behind a barrier of bullet-proof glass.³ Meanwhile in Colorado, Cameron Bishop and his crew sent Nixon a message by greeting his presidency with an exploding bomb.

---

Nixon had narrowly won the 1968 election on a campaign to end the war in Vietnam and restore law and order to American society. The latter pledge appealed to a large constituency of working and middle-class white Americans—a group Nixon soon referred to as the “Silent Majority”—who felt threatened by increasing Black radicalism, white youth counterculture, rising crime rates, and violent civil disorder on America’s college campuses and city streets. Despite the peaceful rhetoric in his inaugural address, Nixon had no intentions of eliminating the root causes of violent social conflict, problems that social scientists of the day and peace activists such as the late Martin Luther King Jr. had identified as racism, economic inequality, and militarism.⁴ Instead, the new president sought repression.

Suppressing America’s domestic insurgency would not come easy. As a matter of fact, Nixon’s election seemed to inspire increased militant resistance. During the fall of 1968, membership of the Black Panther Party (BPP) mushroomed from only a handful of chapters to over forty in cities throughout the country.⁵ The BPP stood out from other protesters for both its visibility and its advocacy of armed revolution. The group’s black-leather-clad African American male leaders were staples of international television news, and the Black Panther newspaper reached tens of thousands with its calls for retaliatory violence against police and other state figures. Amid its sudden growth, the BPP also attracted heavy police violence. As Nixon entered office, Panther cofounder Huey P. Newton awaited trial behind bars on murder charges for the 1967 death of an Oakland cop, and fellow Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver was in socialist Algeria, where he had fled to escape separate felony charges. During the first half of 1969, local police staged at least ten armed raids on BPP offices and homes throughout the country and arrested hundreds of the group’s members.⁶ In multiple instances, Panthers responded to police violence with violence of their own, injuring officers in the process. SDS members stepped up their confrontational tactics as well, clashing violently with police on several occasions in the months after the counterinaugural melee.⁷

FBI mugshots of Cameron David Bishop, the first leftist radical to appear on the bureau’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. FBI.gov.

Bombings also became increasingly popular. Just a week after the inauguration, on January 28, Cameron Bishop and company were already planting more bombs in the Denver area. These bombings targeted powerlines servicing the Martin-Marietta Corporation and Dow Chemical Company, two other companies with factories that manufactured weapons for the U.S. military.⁸ And they weren’t the only ones.

A small number of young radicals had first adopted bombing as a political tactic in 1968. Over fifty bombs were set by the end of the year, and as Nixon escalated the U.S. air war on Vietnam and police amplified attacks on radicals in 1969, incidents of revolutionary violence surged. Between January 1969 and April 1970, leftist militants carried out over 400 bombings and acts of arson in the United States.⁹

Nixon’s reaction to militant resistance was to use the tools of law and order, issuing federal felony indictments against activists. On March 20, 1969, just a few weeks after his inauguration, Attorney General John Mitchell indicted a group of radicals known as the Chicago Eight on a slew of felony charges, including conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot. Mitchell accused the men—peace activist David Dellinger, SDS leaders Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, Yippie leaders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, antiwar activist professors Lee Weiner and John Froines, and Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale—of orchestrating the massive antiwar protests that disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention.¹⁰ The Justice Department lodged at least a half dozen other federal conspiracy indictments against leftist radicals during Nixon’s first term.¹¹ Such high-profile, politically motivated indictments were characteristic of the style of law-and-order policing and prosecution Nixon encouraged.¹²

Yet the first American radical the Nixon administration indicted was accused Colorado bomber Cameron Bishop. On February 14, 1969, less than a month into Nixon’s presidency, Attorney General Mitchell charged the twenty-six-year-old radical under an obscure antisabotage law from the World War I era. When Bishop went into hiding, Director J. Edgar Hoover put him on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. He was the first leftist radical to earn such a distinction.

The president hoped to go further, pressuring Hoover to intensify FBI surveillance of American dissidents. Nixon had been an outspoken anticommunist since the late 1940s, when his leadership of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) investigation of Soviet spy Alger Hiss elevated his status to that of the Republican Party’s most prominent figure.¹³ As a member of HUAC, Nixon worked closely with Hoover, developing a lasting professional relationship.¹⁴ Two decades later, Nixon found it almost impossible to believe that American radicals’ increased proclivities for mass protest and bombings were purely homegrown. Nixon insisted that foreign Communist governments must be funding SDS, the Panthers, and other radical groups and demanded that Hoover escalate his tactics in response.

The problem, however, was that Nixon and Hoover disagreed over what tactics to use. They also feared that leaked disclosures of secret state actions could result in political fallout that would damage their careers. For this reason, both men were reluctant to authorize illegal intelligence activities in writing. Nixon and Hoover agreed on the need to combat leftist violence with militaristic, law-and-order strategies of preemptive surveillance, covert operations, and criminal prosecution. But how to carry out these tasks led to a power struggle with outsize consequences.

Law and Order

The rise of counterterrorism and law-and-order politics was not inevitable. The late 1960s was a period in which mainstream political figures openly discussed addressing the root causes of violent social conflict. In the spring of 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (better known as the Kerner Commission) issued a 511-page report commissioned by the Johnson administration following the devastating 1967 riots in Newark, Detroit, and dozens of other cities. This document called for robust federal spending on programs to eliminate the economic and racial inequality that gave rise to violent unrest. Doing so, the report argued, could help America realize “common opportunities for all within a single society.”¹⁵ The Kerner Report’s recommendations echoed Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal the previous year to end the war in Vietnam and guarantee jobs, education, health care, and economic security for all Americans. The United States, King declared, required a nonviolent “radical revolution of values” to eliminate the “triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”¹⁶ In other words, people like King and the authors of the Kerner Report sought not merely to suppress insurgent violence but to reduce all forms of violence, including the police and military violence that inspired most insurgent violence.¹⁷

But instead of addressing the roots of violence, Nixon pursued law and order, a deliberate appeal to both racism and fear of increasing violent crime.¹⁸ The racist white vote had been much less of a consideration during Nixon’s earlier political career, when he represented California in the House and the Senate and served as vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Back in the late 1940s and 1950s, segregation was a given. Both political parties made modest overtures to northern Black voters, but Democrats ruled the “solid South,” where under the Jim Crow system of legalized racial segregation, white Democrats and the Ku Klux Klan used local laws and vigilante violence to maintain political, social, and economic dominance over African Americans. The Democratic Party’s voter base was a paradoxical coalition of southern “Dixiecrats,” farmers, and northern white and African American workers stitched together during President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s. The Republican voter base consisted of small-town and middle-class whites throughout the North and West. Liberals dominated the Democratic Party and maintained important influence among Republicans. Despite racial and gender inequality that seems obvious in retrospect, white male intellectuals spoke of a Cold War political “consensus” that united Americans in a commitment to upholding New Deal economic regulations and social programs, fighting Soviet-backed Communism at home and abroad, and maintaining America’s post–World War II dominance of global affairs.

The civil rights movement and white backlash reshuffled this system from top to bottom. Conflicts over racial equality in the 1960s forged the greatest overhaul of America’s political parties since the Civil War.

Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign had been a critical part of this transformation. Nixon campaigned with a calculated “Southern strategy,” calling for law and order in an effort to break up the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition. Nixon specifically courted white voters in the South and in industrial cities in the North, playing on their fears that a rise in African Americans’ status would diminish their own social standing. As his close advisor John Ehrlichman put it, “That subliminal appeal to the anti-bla...