How the FBI Fought the 1960s Student Movement & Aided Reagan's Rise to Power

based on more than 300,000 pages of records Rosenfeld received over three decades through five Freedom of Information lawsuits against the FBI. The book tracks how then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to investigate and then disrupt the Free Speech Movement that began in 1964 on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The protests prevailed and helped spawn a nationwide student movement. Rosenfeld outlines in great detail how ... Full Story »

Posted by Dwight Rousu

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Randy Morrow
4.6
by Randy Morrow - Aug. 27, 2012

So, for example, if students wanted to hand out a leaflet for the Republican National Convention, which in the summer of ‘64 was at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, they were prohibited from doing that. If they wanted to hand out a leaflet saying, “Come to this civil rights demonstration,” they couldn’t do that, either. The students felt that this was an unconstitutional abridgment of their First Amendment rights. And that’s what the protest was about. —- As you mention in the book, often the allegations that the FBIpassed on were wrong, were erroneous, and people were tarred just because they may have been—had met with somebody who was politically active in a left-wing movement, so that much of the information the FBI passed on was erroneous. —— But you’re following the trajectory of Ronald Reagan, who famously said in 1970, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” He’s talking about the students. —- And one of the arguments in my book is that his covert relationship with the FBI had a profound influence on his political development. This relationship begins in Hollywood in the years immediately after World War II, when FBI agents approached Ronald Reagan, and he becomes an informer. And he names other people in Hollywood, actors, who he suspects of subversive activity.

Can you imagine what the reaction would be if the tactics (like the “Security Index”) described in this article were to be employed against right wing groups? Rush (the drugster) would burst into self righteous indignant flame, among other things. Good info on St. Reagan too.

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