Outside Looking In by Garry Wills

doctrine” (as he put it) on riot control. When I asked to interview him, as the man responsible for riot response, he refused, saying the press had no right to know what the military was planning: “I have too often been the screwee from the press.” When I went above him and got a Pentagon official to say he must respond to legitimate questions, he received me with great and surly hostility.
    I asked permission to tape our interview and he refused. I said that it was a protection for him, against misquotation. He answered, “If the newsmen are going to misquote me, then I say to hell with them.” He brought with him two public relations people from the Pentagon, who throughout the interview regularly reduced his answers to euphemism or placation, to his obvious disgust. When he got to “making doctrine” over riots, he told me that the first priority, when trouble impends, is for the police to take all the guns from gun shops. When I ran this idea by various police chiefs, they snorted with derision. Apart from the legal problem of seizing property in this way, the diversion of manpower to the task would take officers away from dealing with crowds, just when they are most overstretched.
    Turner’s second idea was to handle snipers in a building by driving an armored car up to the building and debouching teams inside to hunt the snipers from within. When I said that most police forces did not have armored cars (yet), he said that you can hang armor on a truck. My impression, which I conveyed in the article, was that General Turner was a ninny. This so infuriated J. Edgar Hoover, when the article was brought to his attention, that he had me investigated. I would not learn this for several years, but the point is that he sent an agent to talk to General Turner and get his refutation of my opinion. I had not committed any crime. This was part of the FBI′s thought control. But though I had committed no malfeasance, Turner did. He was forced to resign as chief U.S. marshal when it was discovered that he sold 688 weapons confiscated from rioters for his own personal gain, without reporting his profit to the IRS. (No wonder he wanted police to seize guns wholesale.)
    My next experience of the turbulent years was in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1970, President Nixon was having trouble going anywhere in public without burdening the local police with control of violent protests against his appearance. He solved that problem in the spring of 1970 by going to a sympathetic area (Knoxville) to enter a locally patriotic venue (the football stadium of the University of Tennessee Volunteers) where a religious rally was scheduled by one of his most popular supporters, the preacher Billy Graham. Any protest there would be not only a disturbance of the peace but an interruption of a religious service, which is against the law in Tennessee. (Police handed out copies of the relevant law at the entrance to the stadium.) No placards would be admitted to the event. Young protesters folded up large sheets of paper with the Bible quote “Thou shalt not kill.” But when they took them out and held them up, they were hustled out and arrested. Some shouting protesters were arrested later, identified by police photographs of the event.
    I had met with young people planning to protest the rally. They were liberals and radicals in a conservative enclave. They had not been very successful activists. One confessed that he flunked Arson 101. He had tried to burn down the ROTC building. After putting gasoline-soaked rags all around the wooden structure, he lit a fuse across the street and waited to watch the empty building go up in flames. But he had bought a slow fuse, one that crept along for an hour and then fizzled. I kept in touch with these feisty people after I left Knoxville, since they told me what was happening to those arrested at and after the Graham crusade. Then, one day, one of them called me from Canada.