Word: fbi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lived through Kennedy's Boston Mafia, who calculated that all problems were rooted in politics and could be solved by a deal. A few of the staff members who came along with L.B.J. left the impression that if they were defied, the offender's tax records or FBI dossier would end up in Johnson's nighttime reading. We barely survived the season of California narrowness; around Nixon's White House, anyone who did not act, think, look and smell like a U.S.C. fraternity man was considered a candidate for the enemies list...
...days of rage" demonstration in Chicago, in which several hundred radicals went on a four-day rampage. Then, rather than answer criminal charges stemming from both episodes, Mark Rudd went underground. For seven years his face peered stonily from WANTED posters across the country. A special squad of FBI agents-up to 35 at one point-shadowed his friends, tapped their phones and examined their mail in a fruitless hunt for Rudd and other fugitive firebrands...
During the '50s, the C.P. went underground, forced to retreat in the face of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It is hard, now, to understand the kind of fear that the committee inspired; Mitford describes the terror of the blacklist, and the sense that the FBI followed suspected party members everywhere. It has all been told before, of course, but rarely from such an honest, individual stance. Mitford has a way of engaging--and holding--the reader's sympathy, and the HUAC loses any legitimacy it might have held in the face of her good-humored description...
...Mitford--unlike, say, Lillian Hellman--does not bother with name-calling or invective. She simply states what the C.P. did, and what it felt like to be constantly under FBI and HUAC observation; individual party members become much more sympathetic characters through her witty description of both their heroism and their flaws...
Bloom also said that at Lance's request, he had not even told the FBI that the comptroller had worked out a cease-and-desist agreement with the Calhoun bank in December 1975. Lance had told him this might needlessly hurt the bank's business. Bloom's action was not without basis, since the comptroller's office cannot legally reveal the existence of such enforcement agreements without approval of the affected bank. The agreement required the end of all overdrafts to Lance and his family, ordered the bank to upgrade its loose lending practices, even questioned Lance's bank salary...