The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State

by William W. Keller

Overview

In the super-heated anticommunist politics of the early Cold War period, American liberals turned to the FBI. With the Communist party to the left of them and McCarthyism to the right, liberal leaders saw the Bureau as the only legitimate instrument to define and protect the internal security interests of the state. McCarthyism provided ample proof of the dangers of security by congressional investigation. In response, liberals delegated extensive powers to J. Edgar Hoover—creating a domestic intelligence capacity that circumvented constitutional and legal controls. This balanced account of the link between liberal leaders in the United States and the growth of the FBI will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in the American political climate. William Keller identifies a tension between liberalism and the security of the state that can never be fully resolved, and analyzes the exact mechanisms through which liberals and liberal government came to tolerate and even venerate an authoritarian state presence in their midst.

The author shows how the liberal offensive against domestic communism succeeded both in weakening McCarthyism and in disabling the Communist party in the United States. What was the cost of these successes? Keller's answer assesses the liberal community's contribution to changes in the FBI between 1950 and 1970: its transformation into an independent, unaccountable political police.

Originally published in 1989.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691635835
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #954
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.00(d)

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The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover

Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State

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By William W. Keller

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07793-2

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CHAPTER 1

Domestic Security in a Modern Liberal State

There is a tendency to view the application of internal security measures in a liberal polity as aberrant episodes in an otherwise open and democratic process. From this perspective, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 constituted an early misunderstanding of the role of public opposition and of orderly rotation of elites in a fledgling republic. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in April 1861 "to maintain public order and suppress open treason" because Congress was not in session and could not act. A misplaced reaction to the Bolshevik revolution by an overzealous attorney general explains the Palmer raids of 1919. Mass internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942 was the product of global war and extreme national emergency. Senator Joseph McCarthy merely caught and rode a wave of public hysteria against the subversive influence of Communists in government. And in the 1960s, the FBI expanded its domestic intelligence programs to investigate and disrupt extreme elements associated with the civil rights and antiwar movements in a period of extraordinary public disorder.

But these events also suggest a broader pattern in which the liberal state attempts to deal with the tensions and limits implicit in liberalism itself. Louis Hartz was near the mark when he suggested that American society contains a "deep and unwritten tyrannical compulsion ... to impose Locke everywhere." He assumes that state-led repression is not central to this process. But his analysis lacks the hindsight provided by three decades of ideological confrontation of liberalism and communism. It is not so much that liberal society generates public opinion against non-conformity of all stripes, as Hartz thought; rather, the American state has erected internal defenses against those individuals, organizations, movements, and ideologies that appear to challenge or pose a potential threat to its continued sovereignty.

In liberal governments, force and repression are pushed out of the mainstream of the political culture. They are not regarded as integral features of the American regime. They have, instead, been relegated to the margins of political life, to a secret discourse involving intelligence agencies and executives that takes place in the twilight area of national security policy. Reluctance to apply criminal sanctions against subversive persons and ideologies was reflected in the actions of the Warren Court in the 1950s, which reconstructed internal security law from a "staunchly libertarian perspective."

As early as 1956, for example, the Court eviscerated the registration provisions of the Internal Security Act of 1950 by throwing out the government's case against the Communist party. That same year it invalidated forty-two state sedition laws on procedural grounds, and in the next term it rendered the Smith Act unenforceable at the national level. But 1956 was also the year in which the FBI implemented its first domestic counterintelligence program, or Cointelpro, that was designed to disorganize and disrupt the activities of the Communist party in a way that circumvented the legal system.

To FBI officials, the social disorder and revolutionary ideologies of the 1960s posed perhaps the most serious threat of subversion in the post–Civil War era. When challenged by a potential internal security emergency, in the form of widespread protest against the government's authority to conduct war in Vietnam and to put an end to Jim Crow in the South, the FBI responded aggressively and independently to maintain the security interests of the state. It is no paradox that the bureau moved with equal force to disrupt the Black Panther party and the southern branches of the Ku Klux Klan in the middle 1960s. Both organizations asserted a right to what Weber called the "legitimate use of violence" in pursuit of their goals, posing a direct challenge to the American state.

Understanding FBI domestic intelligence activities of the 1950s and 1960s requires a state-centered perspective. The bureau was not much influenced by social forces or pressure groups. It was, instead, captured and animated by state interests, including the need to eliminate Nazi saboteurs during the war and, later, to rid the government of Communist agents. In the main, FBI authority over domestic security was not fragmented by the constitutional system of divided sovereignty or checks and balances. Director J. Edgar Hoover learned early on to follow a prudent course between the Scylla and Charybdis of congressional oversight and judicial intervention. As the principal domestic intelligence agency of the United States, the bureau was neither decentralized in its internal structure nor easily permeated by outside forces. FBI administrators themselves adopted a statist point of view, evaluating social disorder and ideologies of the Left and Right in terms of the degree to which each — in their opinion — posed a threat to the state.

These attributes of the FBI suggest not American society and its political organization but, rather, the liberal state, particularly the ways in which such a state defends itself against the consequences of its own liberalism. The very term liberal state, itself an oxymoron, implies a philosophical discontinuity at the center of the polity. The tension between society and state is manifested when the security interests of the state conflict with political and constitutional rights of groups and individuals who assert an adversarial ideology or who organize to resist large-scale policies such as the war in Vietnam and the extension of civil rights to blacks in the South.

This conflict is acted out in the United States when Congress outlaws a political party, as it did through the Communist Control Act of 1954, or when the FBI systematically disrupts the organized activities of Klansmen and antiwar groups. The liberal political community has tolerated suppression of the far Left and has sanctioned the application of authoritarian methods to neutralize violent and organized opposition to its civil rights policies. In confronting ideological adversaries, the democratic government demonstrates its willingness to invoke the authority of the state. The tentativeness and fragmentation of the American political system end where a compelling security interest begins.

Liberal political figures promoted and nurtured a domestic intelligence apparatus in the United States beginning with the Roosevelt administration in 1936. By 1950, liberals sought to convert the issue of communism in government from a political liability to a routine process of administration located within the FBI. This strategy weakened McCarthyism as an electoral factor and disabled communism as a political force in the United States. In one stroke, liberals defined the ideological tolerance of American politics and established themselves firmly at the vital center. They understood, moreover, the need for the state to arm itself with a central police organization powerful enough to ensure the internal security of the nation. The emergence of a universal consensus against communism tended to stifle debate about the role and function of the agency of internal security in a constitutional republic.

Two central arguments serve to orient this book: (1) in the two decades following 1950, the FBI transformed itself from a bureau of internal security with delimited functions into an agency resembling more a political police and an independent security state within the state; and (2) the consistent support of a liberal constituency was a necessary condition to this transformation. Accordingly, this book assesses the contribution that the liberal political community made to the FBI in the 1950s and 1960s, including the variations in its support for the agency over time. And, second, it describes and analyzes changes in the organization, authority, programs, and security role of the bureau in the post–World War II period.

The Role of the FBI

The specific domestic security arrangements that a nation adopts are highly conditioned by the nature of the state in question. As a matter of policy and political tradition, the modern democratic state tends to limit rigorously the range of techniques available to security police and other intelligence officials; for example, acts of torture and assassination — such as those carried out in 1985 by right-wing death squads in El Salvador and the Tontons Macoutes in Haiti — have no counterpart among methods employed by the United States domestic intelligence community. The latitude within which intelligence officials and programs operate depends upon the willingness of various elements of the government and the political elites to delegate internal security policymaking to a central domestic intelligence agency. If the courts and the legislature insist on minute scrutiny of security operations and exercise legislative and judicial controls, the options and activities of the agency will accordingly be constrained.

Even when the more extreme methods and practices are ruled out, there is still a definite tension between the security measures the state imposes on the society and the core attributes of a modern liberal polity, such as the right to due process of law and freedom of political association. In an internal security emergency, or even in the shadow of the threat of such a contingency, it is natural and probably inevitable that various exceptions to established constitutional norms and legal process will be implemented. In the American setting, such exceptions have taken the form of outlawing certain ideologies and political affiliations. They have generated summary incarceration of large numbers of persons based on national origin or racial characteristics. They have included infiltration and disruption of domestic organizations thought to pose a threat to the national security. But there is a theoretical point at which the exceptions overwhelm the rule to challenge the basic principles and legal structures upon which liberalism is founded. And it is at this juncture that the democractic polity would begin to shift slowly and perhaps imperceptibly toward some other form of the state that might be less tolerant of individual freedom and political expression.

The role of the domestic security apparatus is not static, even within the deliberate limits imposed upon it in the context of constitutional, republican government. In the United States, it varies both with the specific historical and political circumstances in which security policy is forged and with the administrative and legal arrangements under which domestic intelligence programs are conceived and implemented. The cold war confrontation of liberalism and communism increased the likelihood that internal security policy would be cast in ideological terms in the 1950s and that the FBI would intercede to disable the Communist party. The FBI was able to develop large-scale programs to neutralize the party because it was granted a high degree of legal and administrative autonomy in this sphere.

In the United States, the nature of the threat has probably been less important to the determination of internal security policy than the overall consensus among political elites concerning the magnitude of the internal threat and the degree of autonomy and insularity with which the FBI was permitted to operate. Again, the fate of the Communist party in the United States is instructive. By most accounts, the party was early and easily infiltrated and thoroughly neutralized by FBI agents and informants. Many supporters and members of the party had been alienated by Khrushchev's acknowledgment in 1956 of Stalin's atrocities, by the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and by revelations of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Yet the threat of American communism remained a principal rationale for expanding domestic security intelligence programs in the fields of civil rights and antiwar protest well into the 1970s.

The act of protecting a nation's internal security is preventive in nature. If a nuclear installation is sabotaged or a political leader is assassinated, security has been breached and the security agency has failed. The differences between criminal and intelligence investigations help to illustrate this point. Unlike criminal investigations, intelligence investigations do not depend on a standard of probable cause and are not conducted pursuant to specific legislation. Historically, domestic intelligence activity has not been subject to due process, rules of evidence, and other such requirements of the law and the courts, largely because of its role in protecting the national security. There is, accordingly, a natural tendency to exempt the internal security arena from accepted constitutional practice and legal precedents.

In 1939, for example, the Supreme Court first imposed restrictions on wiretapping in the Nardone and Weiss cases. But shortly thereafter, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved to establish internal security exceptions. Although he acknowledged the Court's recent decisions limiting wiretapping, the president was "convinced that the Supreme Court never intended any dictum ... to apply to grave matters involving the defense of the nation." And on that basis he authorized Attorney General Robert Jackson to "secure information by listening devices ... of persons suspected of subversive activities." After all, he reasoned, "it is too late to do anything about it after sabotage, assassinations and 'fifth column' activities are completed." There is, accordingly, a tendency for domestic intelligence officials to cast a wide net, to err on the side of thoroughness rather than to explain after the fact a failure to detect a particular terrorist or political assassin.

Internal security operations are sensitive both to increased levels of international tension and to periods of public disorder at home, and intelligence officials have often assumed a conspiratorial connection between the two. In the event of the former, the agency may, for example, redouble its efforts to detect and arrest Soviet and other hostile spies and agents, and it may track the movements of citizens abroad to determine if they are engaged in activities on behalf of foreign powers. In times of extreme social unrest the agency may lay plans to investigate dissidents and protestors. It may attempt to regulate social protest or to socialize radical or deviant elements of the society. It may even implement programs to disrupt and neutralize individuals and groups selected according to political or ideological criteria.

Because of its centrality to the interests of the state and the secrecy with which it operates, the agency of internal security is particularly subject to political manipulation. Its administrators enjoy a privileged relationship with central decision makers. In time of war, the agency protects not only the political leadership but also critical resources such as transportation networks, energy producers, and information systems upon which a war effort depends. In time of peace, the agency may gather information on the adversaries of the regime in power or merely provide a constant flow of political intelligence to policymakers. As Otto Kirchheimer has observed, so intimate is the relationship between the agency of internal security and the state that "one might nearly be tempted to define a revolution by the willingness of a regime to open the archives of its predecessor's political police."

As the United States engaged in the politics of cold war in the 1950s and public disorder in the 1960s, administrators at the FBI implemented dozens of domestic intelligence programs intended to secure the state against what they thought were subversive groups and individuals. These programs varied substantially in the degree of autonomy with which their goals were formulated and the degree to which they were insulated from other governmental and societal forces. They can be divided into three categories: (1) investigation of Communist-infiltrated groups, extremist groups, and civil disturbances; (2) intensive investigation of classes of persons who would be detained in an internal security emergency, including infiltration of Communist, extremist, and militant groups; and (3) designation of individuals and groups for intensive investigation and counterintelligence action to disrupt their activities and neutralize them politically. The severity of intelligence methods increases progressively.

The State and Its Security: Three Models

The significant circumstance is not that the FBI encountered its Waterloo in 1975 at the hands of a group of liberal senators, but that it was able to maintain a contrary course against liberal and libertarian currents for fifteen years after the middle 1950s. Indeed, the FBI retained the support of the liberal political community throughout the 1960s, despite the fact that the bureau operated in opposition to liberal doctrine as enunciated by the courts. In part, the FBI developed counterintelligence programs (or Cointelpros) to disrupt domestic groups because the Supreme Court had made it difficult to proceed against Communists under the Smith and McCarran acts.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover by William W. Keller. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Abbreviations, pg. xi
• A Note on Sources, pg. xiii
• CHAPTER ONE. Domestic Security in a Modern Liberal State, pg. 1
• CHAPTER TWO. The Liberal Theory of Internal Security, pg. 28
• CHAPTER THREE. A Politics of Equivocation: The Liberals, the Klan, and Dr. King, pg. 72
• CHAPTER FOUR. The End of the FBI-Liberal Entente, pg. 111
• CHAPTER FIVE. Rise of a Domestic Intelligence State, pg. 154
• CHAPTER SIX. Conclusion, pg. 190
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 201
• Index, pg. 213