Word: hoovers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jobs. Hoover's feud with William C. Sullivan, the former No. 3 man at the bureau, is a measure of the Administration's dilemma. At 59, Sullivan is a 30-year veteran of the bureau with an impressive reputation among intelligence officers here and abroad...
Although long a favorite of Hoover's, Sullivan quarreled with his boss a decade ago over his non-Hooverian contention that the Ku Klux Klan represented a greater threat than the U.S. Communist Party. Since 1967, they have been at odds about espionage restrictions, ordered by Hoover, that severely limited FBI investigations of spies. Alarmed at rising criticism of such practices, Hoover curtailed the use of wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping in espionage cases. He also banned what intelligence called "surreptitious entry"-meaning burglary -and a companion tactic, the "bag job," in which agents enter a home or office...
Civil libertarians have long condemned such tactics; Hoover's restrictions, however, resulted only from a pragmatic desire to avoid embarrassing incidents and from his belief that American public opinion would not condone "dirty games" by FBI agents. Along with these strictures, the federal anti-racketeering statutes of the 1960s increased FBI responsibility for organized-crime cases and hence necessarily reduced the number of agents available for espionage assignments...
...restrictions and manpower cuts, Sullivan believed, reduced the FBI's capacity to cope with spies at a time when the Soviets were expanding their espionage networks in the U.S. There is thus the irony that Hoover, so often accused of an "archaic" anti-Communist preoccupation, was actually less militant on the subject, in some ways, than Sullivan...
...Hoover's familiar thesis that Communists are behind New Left extremists. Sullivan expressed far greater concern that leftist excesses would drive the nation's moderates, its "vital center," toward a dangerous rightist reaction...