Outside Looking In by Garry Wills Page B

are you and then you have to wait for all the legal reviews and redactions to take place—I thought that by now I had enough radical acquaintances that J. Edgar Hoover might have some record of them. But when I got my files, seventy-two pages of what are called “Bufiles,” I learned that the Bureau was ignorant of what was really questionable. Hoover was interested in nothing but my views. The Bureau put extra and useless energy into thought-police activity rather than crime control.
    Hoover began his scrutiny of me because of the interview with General Carl Turner. Because of the Esquire article, he asked that an agent go see Turner. Since the general was in Europe at the time, the agent could talk with only one of the public relations people who had sat in on my interview. The PR man said that I was hostile (it was Turner who had bristled at the very idea of the interview) and that I was “sensational” and “twisted the truth.” The only factual point the Pentagon challenged was that I said the FBI manual on riots had been written by a military man. The PR rep said that, in fact, a military man had been heavily drawn on and quoted in the manual, though he had not written the whole of it.
    Okay, why was it “sensational” to claim that he had? I had not said that this made the manual less important or less true. It was not relevant to the main point I made about the interview: that Turner’s claim that seizing guns and using armored cars in sniper control was the basic “doctrine” of riot control. On that the Pentagon said nothing. Nonetheless, when several people—journalists and Hoover acolytes (their names crossed out in the files released to me)—wrote to J. Edgar Hoover asking if he “had anything” on Garry Wills, he answered that the Bureau had made an investigation and found that I was “sensational” and “twisted the truth,” quoting the public relations person as if that were the result of a Bureau investigation.
    But the thing that most upset the Bureau was a newspaper column I wrote when a congressional investigation turned up the facts about the “COINTELPRO” (counterintelligence program) operation of the FBI. Hoover himself wrote a letter protesting my column to the head of the syndicate that distributed my column. That person, John McMeel, sensibly ignored the protest. What I referred to was the way the FBI tried to foment violence between the Black Panthers and other radical black organizations in Chicago and San Diego—faking letters of vituperation between them, sending forged insulting cartoons, and making anonymous phone calls. The Bureau argued in internal documents that it was trying to prevent violence by making it impossible for these activist groups to cooperate.
    It could not be preventing violence when one of the forged letters, sent to Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers leader Jeff Fort, ostensibly from a black sympathizer, said: “The Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there’s supposed to be a hit out for you. . . . I know what I’d do if I was you.” The latter invitation to murder was like the invitation to suicide in the FBI′s famous anonymous letter to Dr. King. The same files that brought me Hoover’s letter saying I was egregious in suggesting that the Bureau was fomenting violence brought me the confirming documents that proved that it was. God bless the Freedom of Information Act.
    In 1972, I got a phone call in Baltimore from a man saying he had a message for me from my Chicago police friends, Hutch and Duke. It was too important to discuss on the telephone. Could I meet him in Washington? I went to the hotel he named as our meeting place. When I got there, he said he had rented a room: we could not talk in a public area. We had to wait for an empty elevator to go up to the room—he refused to get on one with other people. When we got there, he patted