Armed Marxist Revolutionaries and the FBI's Attempts to Curb Domestic Upheaval, 1968–1978

Daniel S. Chard, Nixon's War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 355 pp. $32.95.Daniel Chard's Nixon's War at Home is a study of terrorism and counterterrorism in the United States as it developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is a well-written but flawed book that raises serious questions about the effectiveness of government action against small radical groups committed to violence.“Terrorism” is typically defined by researchers as political violence carried out by nonstate actors in order to instill fear (p. 280, n. 28). But Chard finds the terminology of “terrorism” vague and politically loaded, favoring the government. He prefers “leftist urban guerrillas” as a more informative description of the armed Marxist-Leninist groups that were targets of the U.S. government from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s: the Weather Underground Organization, the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, perhaps a few Palestinians. Historians usually also posit that a unified set of government counterterrorism methods emerged only in reaction to the massacre perpetrated by the Black September Palestinian terrorist group at the Munich Olympics in September 1972. The repertoire then greatly expanded after the horror of the attacks by al Qaeda in September 2001. But Chard argues that the methods used against al Qaeda—warrantless wiretaps and burglaries, warrantless eavesdropping, tracking-devices on cars, the new National Crime Information Center computer to trace people—had already begun to be used against terrorists in the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. In other words, the tactics date from 1968–1969; no one waited until Munich (p. 211–212). Yet in 1970–1972 the director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, opposed any major expansion in the use of these “extra-legal” methods against the revolutionary left—for fear of discovery and scandal. Feeling frustrated and angry, key figures in President Richard Nixon's White House set about developing their own private secret police force, the infamous Plumbers Unit, and the Plumbers led to Watergate.Chard has impeccable leftist credentials (as he himself readily acknowledges), so some of his judgments are surprising. For instance, he sharply attacks Ward Churchill, the academic who headed the Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado from 1990 to 2005 and who claimed (apparently falsely) to be of American Indian descent, for his shoddy and exaggerated work on the FBI and his equally shoddy work on indigenous history. Chard is troubled that a misleading book such as Churchill's Agents of Repression (about the FBI) has earned more than 630 citations in scholarly books and articles (pp. 279–280).Chard's conclusion about the Black Panther Party is equally striking. The Panthers are often idolized on the Left, but Chard stresses that from the outset they were beset by an internal culture of violence. They intentionally recruited people from what they themselves called the “lumpenproletariat”—drug dealers, hustlers, and petty thieves, all of whom brought their own criminal culture into the party (p. 51). For example, the violent Slauson gang in Los Angeles, led by “Bunchy” Carter, miraculously transformed itself into the municipal chapter of the Black Panther Party in the summer of 1968 (p. 58), leading in short order to a dramatic shootout on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, between Carter and a rival Black Power faction (leaving two dead) over control of the university's Black Student Union. As for the famous Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, Chard depicts him as little more than a violent ex-convict (pp. 50–52).The foundation of Chard's negative view of the Panthers is his wariness of the “cult of the Gun.” In 1968–1969, groups within the Panthers—as well as within the overwhelmingly white Students for a Democratic Society—called on their members to “pick up the gun” for immediate revolution. They were inspired by the writings of Che Guevara and Regis Debray on the Cuban revolution and by the pursuit of guerrilla wars of liberation in Africa and Vietnam. Adoption of this revolutionary strategy meant that the revolutionaries could skip the difficult, slow work of community organizing at the grassroots level and instead leap right into armed Marxist insurrection as a small, militarized group. The masses would then supposedly follow. “At least that was the theory,” Chard notes (p. 44). The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 also propelled this desperate strategy forward among some of the Panthers. But Chard stresses that guns all along had been pivotal in the Panthers’ transformation from a group of neighborhood organizers in Oakland into a militarized force seeking international publicity—as when the Panthers launched an armed invasion of the California State Legislature in May 1967, a great public relations triumph. He argues that successes like this trapped the Panthers in their own violent rhetoric (pp. 37–38, 72). Although Chard does not downplay police repression against the Panthers, he emphasizes that most of the lethal gunfights with the police were initiated by the Panthers themselves (pp. 49, 51–53, 67–68, 75, 92), not to mention the deadly gunfights among rival groups of Panthers (p. 171).The problem with this analysis is that, as the subtitle of Chard's book indicates, his focus is strictly on “leftist guerrillas,” and his discussion of the Panthers focuses mostly on the people who became the underground Marxist guerrillas of the “Black Liberation Army.” However, most Panthers were not guerrillas and did not become members of the Black Liberation Army. Nor was Eldridge Cleaver merely a violent ex-convict. He was also the author of the best-selling memoir Soul on Ice, and he was a prolific writer over the next three decades, wherever his changing politics led him (including eventually becoming a Republican). In the late 1960s he was the ideologist behind the Panthers’ attempt to link themselves to the broader international revolutionary left. He leavened his activities with a sense of humor, challenging then-Governor Ronald Reagan to a duel with marshmallows (p. 50). Cleaver could certainly be violent, but he was more complex than Chard depicts.1Moreover, the idea that Panther leaders were so entranced by “the cult of the Gun” that they immediately set out to create a violent ultra-vanguard party is off the mark. Outreach to the black community began right away, with Panther armed surveillance of the police when they were found arresting black people, as Chard notes (p. 43). But outreach continued with programs not aimed directly at the police. The Panthers began providing free breakfasts to children in early 1969 and were soon serving thousands each morning. The Panthers also transported people to visit incarcerated relatives free of charge, escorted elderly people to and from the bank, and pressured the Oakland city council to put up traffic lights at busy ghetto intersections. A young Panther leader in Chicago, Fred Hampton, was arrested for distributing stolen ice-cream bars to neighborhood black children. A driving force behind these Panther programs of community outreach was Bobby Seale, the official head of the Black Panther Party, who receives little attention in Chard's book. The individuals involved in the community-organizing efforts were far-left radicals, but many (including Seale and Hampton) did not become urban guerrillas.2Chard goes astray in his characterization of the impact of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (“COINTELPRO”) against the Black Panthers. COINTELPRO operations against the Panthers did intentionally exacerbate their factional divisions, but Chard goes too far in ascribing a central place to COINTELPRO in the Panthers’ eventual disintegration. The bitter factionalism that beset the Panthers came mostly from within (pp. 64–72).3 Chard himself stresses that the FBI did not even begin COINTELPRO operations against the Panthers until some two years after the group was founded in October 1966. Hence, the Panthers’ general political stance is not what triggered alarm bells. When COINTELPRO operations began in September 1968, it was because senior FBI officials sensed that the Panthers had “picked up the gun” and were embarking on violent insurrection (pp. 53, 54, 73–74).It is worth noting that the Panthers had a unit led by Donald Cox that actually trained as an underground guerrilla force—but the FBI remained unaware of this for years (p. 58). Cox's unit began independently of the Panthers and was staging shootouts with the police as early as November 1967 (pp. 49–50). The military training of Cox's guerrillas was encouraged by Panther leader Huey Newton, who expected that the Panthers would soon be driven underground (pp. 46, 49). Not until 1971 did Cox's armed guerrillas openly emerge as the Black Liberation Army, at a time when the Panthers were breaking apart thanks to Huey Newton's violent purges. Ten years later, in October 1981, the BLA's last “action” was an abortive holdup of a Brink's armored car in Nanuet, New York, that resulted in the murder of a bank guard and two policemen and the capture of most of the BLA robbers. The BLA carried out the attack in cooperation with Kathy Boudin and three other former members of the Weather Underground (none of whom ever later expressed remorse for their participation).Chard is on firmer ground with his discussion of the defective “picking up the gun” strategy as adopted by the Weather Underground (initially known as Weatherman) faction of the radical leftwing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Weathermen had strong elements of the hippie counterculture and took their name from a Bob Dylan song (“You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” from the album Bringing It All Back Home). The Weathermen, who eventually became the most prominent white terrorist group of the 1960s and 1970s, believed that large-scale violence was the only way to end U.S. military operations in Vietnam and combat racial inequities. They shared the BLA's belief in a tiny but highly disciplined and armed “vanguard party” (p. 81) that would inspire “the masses” to rise up in violent revolution. As a splinter group from the much larger SDS, the Weathermen effectively destroyed the parent organization after seizing control of it in June 1969.Chard recounts the startling fact (first revealed elsewhere) that the FBI originally supported the Weathermen within SDS, based on the mistaken assumption that they were the least dangerous of the SDS factions.4 This was not the final time the FBI was mistaken about the organization. COINTELPRO operations began against the Weathermen soon after they seized SDS, in an effort to alienate the organization from the rest of the New Left. But that was hardly necessary. As Chard notes, the group, with its bitter sense of total moral superiority and its devotion to immediate armed revolution, viewed all other leftists with contempt, accusing them of cowardice. The enmity was mutual (p. 86). In the autumn semester of 1968 SDS had numbered perhaps 80,000 members, making it the largest far-left student organization in U.S. history. A year later, SDS under the Weathermen had dropped to only about 500—the opposite of community organizing.5Chard also tells the now well-established story of how on 6 March 1970 the explosion of a huge Weatherman bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse (killing three of the organization's bombers), combined with the discovery of two other Weatherman bombs planned for the same day against police targets in Detroit, convinced senior FBI officials that they now faced a lethal leftist guerrilla threat—and one with a nationwide range. These were no longer a bunch of local kids playing at being radicals (pp. 98–103). The Weathermen disappeared underground immediately after the townhouse explosion, to begin their guerrilla war. Now the task of the FBI became one not of undermining the Weatherman political project on the far left but of finding the bombers and preventing further bombings (pp. 109–111).For the FBI, however, going after the revolutionaries to stop them before they acted was difficult. The original goal of the FBI had been to solve crimes already committed. Even though President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939–1940 had given the FBI a national intelligence and security function, the bureau had never faced a real network of underground urban guerrillas before. FBI officials had to improvise methods for combating this threat (pp. 104, 109). Enormous resources were allocated to the effort, and in this way the basic tools of “counterterrorism” emerged.Chard rightly emphasizes that FBI efforts against the Weathermen—who soon began calling themselves the Weather Underground, to avoid “sexism”—were a total failure (pp. 107, 131–132, 135, 141, 148–149, 232, 258). The Weather Underground detonated 25 dynamite bombs in the first half of the 1970s—originally mostly in police and government headquarters, and later in the headquarters of banks and industrial corporations. Their most daring successes included the bombing of New York City Police headquarters in June 1970; the bombing of the U.S. Capitol in March 1971; the bombing of the Pentagon in May 1972; the bombing of the U.S. State Department in January 1975; and the bombing of Kennecott Copper headquarters in Salt Lake City, in September 1975. They even helped the psychedelic drug guru Timothy Leary escape from prison in California. For a while, the Weather Underground seemed able to strike anywhere at will. Moreover, aside from a couple of low-level fugitives arrested on minor charges early on (in April 1970), the FBI never caught a single Weather Underground terrorist despite seven years of a strenuous counterterrorism campaign.6The outcome with the BLA was different. Partly because BLA terrorists did not have financial resources equivalent to those of the middle-class Weather Underground group, they were involved in robberies and stickups to support themselves—and lethal ambushes of the police, in the service of their politics of ghetto liberation by a violent vanguard party. But every violent action ran risks and left clues, and most of the BLA fighters (never a large group) were killed or captured in shootouts with the police and FBI in the months following their emergence in May 1971 with the murders of two New York policemen, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini (pp. 173–177, 243–245). The of the BLA for the FBI's against the but also a (pp. the BLA's “vanguard party” of revolution, and the of black against the U.S. the armed group never developed support within the broader black community (p. 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