Word: hooverness
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...Touch. Of course, notes Historian James MacGregor Burns, the people have always grumbled loudly at Government; back in 1932 Challenger Franklin Roosevelt attacked President Hoover's bureaucracy and big spending. But now the complaints are that the Government has lost contact with the people. Says Jack Spalding, editor of the Atlanta Journal: "It's not that the people are especially mad at Washington. Rather it is that Washington is so out of touch with the country. Those elitists up there are in orbit by themselves." Minneapolis Tribune Editor Charles Bailey feels that Washington fails to understand that...
Ungar's reformist bias leads him to emphasize the transgressions of the Hoover regime: its blatant disregard of privacy through illegal wiretapping and surveillance; its history of domestic surveillance, including the successful endeavors to stop sabotage during World War II; and the bureau's gratuitous entries into foreign espionage. In his most documented chapters Ungar details the outrageous violations made under the name of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program, to harass left-wing groups. Still, Ungar did not embark on this mammoth project with a master design. He wasn't out to prove that the FBI has been a source...
...OVERALL PICTURE of FBI activities that emerges from these documents is one of flagrant disregard for legality and constitutional guarantees in its quest to suppress what Hoover considered dangerous subversion. None of the groups against which COINTELPRO was directed has engaged in illegal activities. In fact, it was precisely the legal activities of the SWP which drove the FBI to attack them; Hoover ordered a disruption campaign against the SWP because...
...Although Hoover dismantled COINTELPRO after its cover blew in 1971, its activities continued informally for several years afterward. Only the decline of the New Left and the general furor over governmental abuses of power as a result of Watergate have brought about a major decrease in the level of its illegal activities to suppress dissent. In this context, it is worth recalling, as Noam Chomsky points out in his introduction to COINTELPRO, that such programs have been carried out under administration of both political parties. They belong to a powerful tradition of restricting the political liberties of leftists which developed...
...investigation of a teen-age girl who wrote to the SWP for a school project or the bureau's ludicrous attempts to write divisive letters in the "hip" lingo of the Movement. Many liberals would go further and argue that the whole enterprise was basically a simple product of Hoover's obsessions, because none of the groups targeted represented a plausible threat to national security. But if one believes, as I do, that the anti-war movement played a decisive role in forcing the end of the Vietnam war by limiting American military and political options, and that...