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Justice, Power, and Politics
Nixon's War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism
During the presidency of Richard Nixon, homegrown leftist guerrilla groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army carried out hundreds of attacks in the United States. The FBI had a long history of infiltrating activist groups, but this type of clandestine action posed a unique challenge. Drawing on thousands of pages of declassified FBI documents, Daniel S. Chard shows how America's war with domestic guerillas prompted a host of new policing measures as the FBI revived illegal spy techniques previously used against communists in the name of fighting terrorism. These efforts did little to stop the guerrillas--instead, they led to a bureaucratic struggle between the Nixon administration and the FBI that fueled the Watergate Scandal and brought down Nixon. Yet despite their internal conflicts, FBI and White House officials developed preemptive surveillance practices that would inform U.S. counterterrorism strategies into the twenty-first century, entrenching mass surveillance as a cornerstone of the national security state.
Connecting the dots between political violence and law and order politics, Chard reveals how American counterterrorism emerged in the 1970s from violent conflicts over racism, imperialism, and policing that remain unresolved today.
Connecting the dots between political violence and law and order politics, Chard reveals how American counterterrorism emerged in the 1970s from violent conflicts over racism, imperialism, and policing that remain unresolved today.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published September 28, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 10, 2023
Daniel S. Chard's Nixon's War at Home provides a fresh, insightful glance at the US government's suppression of the Radical Left during the '60s and '70s. Chard argues that the Nixon Administration was the first to really define "terrorism" by its modern standard, both specific and broad enough to encompass a variety of groups, tactics and motives - including those who aren't actually terrorists at all. Thus, under Nixon's watch, the FBI and other law enforcement groups escalated repression against groups like Weatherman, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army and sundry freelance radicals. Chard makes clear that despite the ongoing romanticization in certain corners of the Left, these groups were often violent, targeting police, corporations and government officials with bombings, kidnappings and shootings. That said, they never posed a serious threat to the state and thus Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover's war against them was overkill. What ought to have been a law enforcement problem became magnified into a national security threat, justifying any tactics employed against it.
The FBI, confronted with an underground threat they little understood, resorted to old school countersubversion. Hoover's G-Men fomented dissension within radical groups through COINTELPRO and related sabotage, along with illegal surveillance, wiretaps and surveillance that matched the worst excesses of the '50s Red Scare. Whether such chicanery actually curbed violence is doubtful, but it certainly hastened the New Left's implosion. As the Radical threat faded, the FBI re-calibrated to other targets like Puerto Rican nationalists and Islamic terrorists; indeed, Chard shows that the Islamophobia of the Bush years has a precursor in Hoover successor L. Patrick Gray's crackdown on Palestinian nationals in '73-'75. Certainly the indiscriminate nature of these operations ensured arrests and convictions on dubious grounds; if some seriously dangerous fugitives were caught, so were activists guilty of little more than heated rhetoric.
Ironically, Chard argues that this was less the doing of Hoover, who had recently scaled back such illegal operations due to bad publicity, than Nixon, who viewed any dissent, internal or external, as an existential threat to his administration. Chard shows Nixon pushing the intelligence community to provide more concrete information on supposed foreign ties to the antiwar and Civil Rights Movements which didn't really exist. Thus he contrived to control intelligence himself, first through the Huston Plan (which receives a more thorough recounting here than in most Watergate histories), then by creating a private intelligence operation (the Plumbers) whose lawbreaking triggered Nixon's downfall. Hunt, Liddy and Co. adopted the FBI's own tactics of infiltration and provocation and even enhanced them; one mindblowing section describes an associate of Howard Hunt hawking bombs and guns to antiwar groups to provoke terrorist attacks during the '72 Republican convention. Often viewed as discreet if adjacent abuses of power, Chard shows Watergate and Nixon's anti-terrorism were one and the same; Nixon saw little difference between Weatherman bombers and his Democratic opponents, and acted accordingly.
Meanwhile, Nixon also grew entangled in the "War of the FBI Succession," a bureaucratic struggle between Hoover's successors that resulted indirectly in Watergate. Mark Felt, often lionized for serving as Bob Woodward's "Deep Throat" informant, receives a heavy focus that's not at all flattering. Overseeing the FBI's anti-terror programs, he regularly violates civil liberties while grooming himself as Hoover's successor, pushing out rival William Sullivan in the process. When Nixon passes over Felt for promotion with flunky Pat Gray, he undermines his successor and the president by leaking sensitive Watergate-related material to the press. Felt, in turn, is squeezed out by Gray's successor, William Ruckelshaus (himself a temporary appointment) and later convicted for civil rights violations, before his 11th hour redemption revealing his "Deep Throat" identity. All of this palace intrigue impairs the Bureau's investigative ability at a crucial moment in its history, while doing little to curb or change their organizational culture.
Chard explains these sordid doings with a clarity and detail lacking in other Watergate and FBI histories that only touch on them. His devastating book shows how such paranoia, petty feuds and power struggles impacted the country's security appartatus, and how leaders learned the wrong lessons from the events of 1969-1974. Anyone could be labeled a terrorist, whether they were a bomb-throwing radical or a person of the wrong belief system, political group or ethnicity, justifying crackdowns with all the coercive powers of the State. Instead of a warning for later presidents, Chard argues, Nixon's lawbreaking (and the Bureau's acquiescence) provided a disturbing template.
The FBI, confronted with an underground threat they little understood, resorted to old school countersubversion. Hoover's G-Men fomented dissension within radical groups through COINTELPRO and related sabotage, along with illegal surveillance, wiretaps and surveillance that matched the worst excesses of the '50s Red Scare. Whether such chicanery actually curbed violence is doubtful, but it certainly hastened the New Left's implosion. As the Radical threat faded, the FBI re-calibrated to other targets like Puerto Rican nationalists and Islamic terrorists; indeed, Chard shows that the Islamophobia of the Bush years has a precursor in Hoover successor L. Patrick Gray's crackdown on Palestinian nationals in '73-'75. Certainly the indiscriminate nature of these operations ensured arrests and convictions on dubious grounds; if some seriously dangerous fugitives were caught, so were activists guilty of little more than heated rhetoric.
Ironically, Chard argues that this was less the doing of Hoover, who had recently scaled back such illegal operations due to bad publicity, than Nixon, who viewed any dissent, internal or external, as an existential threat to his administration. Chard shows Nixon pushing the intelligence community to provide more concrete information on supposed foreign ties to the antiwar and Civil Rights Movements which didn't really exist. Thus he contrived to control intelligence himself, first through the Huston Plan (which receives a more thorough recounting here than in most Watergate histories), then by creating a private intelligence operation (the Plumbers) whose lawbreaking triggered Nixon's downfall. Hunt, Liddy and Co. adopted the FBI's own tactics of infiltration and provocation and even enhanced them; one mindblowing section describes an associate of Howard Hunt hawking bombs and guns to antiwar groups to provoke terrorist attacks during the '72 Republican convention. Often viewed as discreet if adjacent abuses of power, Chard shows Watergate and Nixon's anti-terrorism were one and the same; Nixon saw little difference between Weatherman bombers and his Democratic opponents, and acted accordingly.
Meanwhile, Nixon also grew entangled in the "War of the FBI Succession," a bureaucratic struggle between Hoover's successors that resulted indirectly in Watergate. Mark Felt, often lionized for serving as Bob Woodward's "Deep Throat" informant, receives a heavy focus that's not at all flattering. Overseeing the FBI's anti-terror programs, he regularly violates civil liberties while grooming himself as Hoover's successor, pushing out rival William Sullivan in the process. When Nixon passes over Felt for promotion with flunky Pat Gray, he undermines his successor and the president by leaking sensitive Watergate-related material to the press. Felt, in turn, is squeezed out by Gray's successor, William Ruckelshaus (himself a temporary appointment) and later convicted for civil rights violations, before his 11th hour redemption revealing his "Deep Throat" identity. All of this palace intrigue impairs the Bureau's investigative ability at a crucial moment in its history, while doing little to curb or change their organizational culture.
Chard explains these sordid doings with a clarity and detail lacking in other Watergate and FBI histories that only touch on them. His devastating book shows how such paranoia, petty feuds and power struggles impacted the country's security appartatus, and how leaders learned the wrong lessons from the events of 1969-1974. Anyone could be labeled a terrorist, whether they were a bomb-throwing radical or a person of the wrong belief system, political group or ethnicity, justifying crackdowns with all the coercive powers of the State. Instead of a warning for later presidents, Chard argues, Nixon's lawbreaking (and the Bureau's acquiescence) provided a disturbing template.
March 2, 2022
A very interesting and thoroughly researched look at the development of US counterterrorism policies during the Nixon administration. Chard argues that a confluence of events prompted US leaders to shift from understanding left wing political violence as subversion or guerrilla violence to terrorism. Those events/factors included the rivalry between the FBI under Hoover and the Nixon administration, the turn to violence by spinoff factions of left-wing movements, the cycle of violence between those movements and the FBI and police, and the general sense of crisis and subversion in US society at the time.
First, a mild criticism. I think Chard somewhat overstates the "constructedness" of terrorism in this period; while in one sense the shift to this term was clearly an attempt to delegitimize certain types of violence, the world also witnessed a shift to terrorist strategy and tactics in the late 1960s. The rapid surge of hijackings, diplomatic kidnappings, random attacks on civilians, bombings, and other forms of terrorism were well documented. They resulted from a variety of national and global factors: the radicalization of parts of the far left and of nationalist movements, the development of terrorist/focoist doctrines in the 60s, the expansion of mass media, air transport, and other nodes of communication and movement that were vulnerable to strikes by small groups, and contingencies like the failure of Arab nationalism to liberate the Palestinian people in the 67 War, which prompted the shift to terrorism by the PLO and other Pal groups. What makes this a strategy of terrorism rather than urban guerrilla warfare is that groups like the RAF, BSO, PLO, PFLP, Brigada Rosa, Japanese Red Army, PIRA, and so on were small groups/networks that sought to use fairly sporadic attacks on civilian and sometimes military targets that would A. dramatically raise the costs of everyday life and security for the target populations B. undermine faith in governments C. possibly provoke a harsh government response that would alienate the people and build momentum for said terrorist movement. Unlike guerrillas, who seek to materially AND morally degrade their opponents, terrorists have no real chance of materially degrading their targets in meaningful ways; instead, they aim to terrorize and thereby change the political balance and raise their own profiles, as the PLO did quite successfully in the 70s and 80s. This is a mild critique of Chard's argument; he doesn't downplay the terror and damage of terrorism at all, but I wouldn't put the terrorism of this era in air quotes even if defining terrorism can never be fully separated from politics.
Chard makes some important interventions regarding the nature of domestic terrorist groups and their cycle of violence with the FBI and police. He shows that radicals had understandable motives in that most of them had suffered real violence on behalf of the state and that by the end of the 60s change through the political process looked increasingly futile. However, he also challenges any nostalgia for groups like the Black Panthers, the openly terroristic Black Liberation Army, the Weathermen, and the SLA. These groups did sever themselves not just from "society" but from the people they sought to protect. They envisioned themselves as a vanguard that would eventually awaken the sleeping masses, but they became increasingly paranoid, internally divided, and violent over time. Descriptions of the Panthers' torturing and murdering of suspected informants, or the BLA's gunning down of police (including black officers), are chilling.
On the flip side, Chard shows that the FBI didn't just target leftist groups for break-ins, surveillance, preventive arrests, and so on just because they were leftist groups. While Hoover's FBI did harass leftists and reformers in general, it also had good reason to think that many of these groups were shifting to overt violence. Why? They said so openly and brandished weapons, and then began sprees of bombings and assassinations. The FBI may have overstepped the law in going after these groups, and their preventive measures weren't terribly effective, but there was reason to pursue these groups as dangerous. Moreover, the FBI didn't create the divisions that ultimately sunk these groups; it exacerbated pre-existing divisions. Chard demonstrates these points exhaustively and in a nuanced fashion. This is an important correction to the idea that the FBI was omnipotent and that it orchestrated the fragmentation of far left groups from within. Instead, what we saw was a cycle of violence between the state and the leftists that lasted until these groups fragmented, were captured/killed, or just burned themselves out by the mid-70s.
For my research purposes, this book was essential and highly stimulating. Chard shows the development of a sort of doctrine of domestic counterterrorism as well as a toolkit that later generations of counterterrorists would deploy: often warrantless wiretaps and break-ins, intense surveillance, informants, and overall a preventive posture designed to break up plots before they come to fruition. Chard is right that much of this was done outside the law and that these authorities/tools were rolled back in the mid-late 70s as they were exposed to the public. I don't necessarily see what the problem is with this law enforcement if it stays within legal boundaries and has outside checks (a big if). What Chard explains is the foundation of the law-enforcement paradigm of domestic counterterrorism; there's little in here about the international/foreign policy/military dimension. Timothy Naftali and LIsa Stampnitsky talk more about that in their books, and I'm hoping to develop the international/transnational dimension in my own work. Still, what Chard does in this book is a huge contribution to our understanding of counterterrorism, the history of the FBI, and the history of radical movements in the US. He does all of this is a pretty concise, readable book.
First, a mild criticism. I think Chard somewhat overstates the "constructedness" of terrorism in this period; while in one sense the shift to this term was clearly an attempt to delegitimize certain types of violence, the world also witnessed a shift to terrorist strategy and tactics in the late 1960s. The rapid surge of hijackings, diplomatic kidnappings, random attacks on civilians, bombings, and other forms of terrorism were well documented. They resulted from a variety of national and global factors: the radicalization of parts of the far left and of nationalist movements, the development of terrorist/focoist doctrines in the 60s, the expansion of mass media, air transport, and other nodes of communication and movement that were vulnerable to strikes by small groups, and contingencies like the failure of Arab nationalism to liberate the Palestinian people in the 67 War, which prompted the shift to terrorism by the PLO and other Pal groups. What makes this a strategy of terrorism rather than urban guerrilla warfare is that groups like the RAF, BSO, PLO, PFLP, Brigada Rosa, Japanese Red Army, PIRA, and so on were small groups/networks that sought to use fairly sporadic attacks on civilian and sometimes military targets that would A. dramatically raise the costs of everyday life and security for the target populations B. undermine faith in governments C. possibly provoke a harsh government response that would alienate the people and build momentum for said terrorist movement. Unlike guerrillas, who seek to materially AND morally degrade their opponents, terrorists have no real chance of materially degrading their targets in meaningful ways; instead, they aim to terrorize and thereby change the political balance and raise their own profiles, as the PLO did quite successfully in the 70s and 80s. This is a mild critique of Chard's argument; he doesn't downplay the terror and damage of terrorism at all, but I wouldn't put the terrorism of this era in air quotes even if defining terrorism can never be fully separated from politics.
Chard makes some important interventions regarding the nature of domestic terrorist groups and their cycle of violence with the FBI and police. He shows that radicals had understandable motives in that most of them had suffered real violence on behalf of the state and that by the end of the 60s change through the political process looked increasingly futile. However, he also challenges any nostalgia for groups like the Black Panthers, the openly terroristic Black Liberation Army, the Weathermen, and the SLA. These groups did sever themselves not just from "society" but from the people they sought to protect. They envisioned themselves as a vanguard that would eventually awaken the sleeping masses, but they became increasingly paranoid, internally divided, and violent over time. Descriptions of the Panthers' torturing and murdering of suspected informants, or the BLA's gunning down of police (including black officers), are chilling.
On the flip side, Chard shows that the FBI didn't just target leftist groups for break-ins, surveillance, preventive arrests, and so on just because they were leftist groups. While Hoover's FBI did harass leftists and reformers in general, it also had good reason to think that many of these groups were shifting to overt violence. Why? They said so openly and brandished weapons, and then began sprees of bombings and assassinations. The FBI may have overstepped the law in going after these groups, and their preventive measures weren't terribly effective, but there was reason to pursue these groups as dangerous. Moreover, the FBI didn't create the divisions that ultimately sunk these groups; it exacerbated pre-existing divisions. Chard demonstrates these points exhaustively and in a nuanced fashion. This is an important correction to the idea that the FBI was omnipotent and that it orchestrated the fragmentation of far left groups from within. Instead, what we saw was a cycle of violence between the state and the leftists that lasted until these groups fragmented, were captured/killed, or just burned themselves out by the mid-70s.
For my research purposes, this book was essential and highly stimulating. Chard shows the development of a sort of doctrine of domestic counterterrorism as well as a toolkit that later generations of counterterrorists would deploy: often warrantless wiretaps and break-ins, intense surveillance, informants, and overall a preventive posture designed to break up plots before they come to fruition. Chard is right that much of this was done outside the law and that these authorities/tools were rolled back in the mid-late 70s as they were exposed to the public. I don't necessarily see what the problem is with this law enforcement if it stays within legal boundaries and has outside checks (a big if). What Chard explains is the foundation of the law-enforcement paradigm of domestic counterterrorism; there's little in here about the international/foreign policy/military dimension. Timothy Naftali and LIsa Stampnitsky talk more about that in their books, and I'm hoping to develop the international/transnational dimension in my own work. Still, what Chard does in this book is a huge contribution to our understanding of counterterrorism, the history of the FBI, and the history of radical movements in the US. He does all of this is a pretty concise, readable book.
April 29, 2024
the archive he uses of FBI documents is interesting, but the author fundamentally does not understand the ideology of the Weathermen, the Panthers, the BLA, or various Palestinian groups. Instead he attempts to do a deeply unserious academic grandstanding of so-called objectivity.
December 29, 2023
To a certain degree, I'm reading this book as a trip down memory lane, as it was at the peak of Watergate that I started developing some political consciousness. I can still remember seeing Nixon near the end of his presidency engaging in political theater by staging a slow motorcade through my home town of Northfield (OH), and how it brought home in what bad shape the man was in.
As to the thrust of this book, Chard wants to link certain contemporary theories of counter-terrorism, emphasizing preemption, to Nixon's efforts to suppress the movement against his war effort in Vietnam. However, what Chard mostly does is to paint a picture of the FBI in the final years of J. Edgar Hoover's tenure as the agency's director, as a self-serving entity, mostly concerned with maintaining its status as a state within a state. This led to the destructive interaction generated by Hoover's conflict with Nixon, as Hoover was unwilling to damage his personal empire to empower Nixon's drive for control; the blow-back of which heavily contributed to the whole Watergate scandal.
Besides that, Chard also provides a narrative of various increasingly risible secret wars that the FBI found itself waging against the likes of the Weatherman, the more violent factions of the Black Panthers, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. While Chard doesn't want to glamorize the so-called "urban guerrillas," the petulant unwillingness of Hoover's FBI to recognize the limits of intimidation and innuendo as a response to persistent social conflict shines through. This culminates in how Hoover's attempts to label the Berringer Brothers as violent terrorists led to their supporters raiding a second-class FBI field facility, and the resulting haul of leaked documents denting Hoover's reputation in such a way that his prestige never recovered.
I found this book useful, but it will probably be most valuable to the undergrad students who are its most likely readers. I'm being a little generous when I give Chard 4 stars; 3.5 is more like it.
As to the thrust of this book, Chard wants to link certain contemporary theories of counter-terrorism, emphasizing preemption, to Nixon's efforts to suppress the movement against his war effort in Vietnam. However, what Chard mostly does is to paint a picture of the FBI in the final years of J. Edgar Hoover's tenure as the agency's director, as a self-serving entity, mostly concerned with maintaining its status as a state within a state. This led to the destructive interaction generated by Hoover's conflict with Nixon, as Hoover was unwilling to damage his personal empire to empower Nixon's drive for control; the blow-back of which heavily contributed to the whole Watergate scandal.
Besides that, Chard also provides a narrative of various increasingly risible secret wars that the FBI found itself waging against the likes of the Weatherman, the more violent factions of the Black Panthers, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. While Chard doesn't want to glamorize the so-called "urban guerrillas," the petulant unwillingness of Hoover's FBI to recognize the limits of intimidation and innuendo as a response to persistent social conflict shines through. This culminates in how Hoover's attempts to label the Berringer Brothers as violent terrorists led to their supporters raiding a second-class FBI field facility, and the resulting haul of leaked documents denting Hoover's reputation in such a way that his prestige never recovered.
I found this book useful, but it will probably be most valuable to the undergrad students who are its most likely readers. I'm being a little generous when I give Chard 4 stars; 3.5 is more like it.
July 17, 2022
This book inevitably prompts one of those thumb-sucking theoretical questions:
Which is worse, when a U.S. president (Nixon) authorizes a massive, illegal program to break into the homes and offices of Americans who are legally protesting government policy, or when a U.S. president (Trump) encourages a mob of protestors to illegally try to break into the U.S. Capitol in order to illegally keep him in office?
The answer, of course, is: Why should we have to choose -- or suffer through -- either of them?
The other answer is that we must keep reading and writing books about these abuses, so that future generations never forget.
This particular book doesn't really break new factual ground, although the author explores some interesting analyses. He argues that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover disagreed with the nuances of Nixon's tactics -- because he wanted to protect the FBI's reputation, not the protestors' civil rights -- and that Hoover was driven by a genuine fear of Communism and chaos more than racism. The book draws an interesting line from the Vietnam-era government crackdown to the War on Terrorism three decades later. But it's dreadfully padded and repetitive, and I think it would have made its point much more sharply as, say, a cover story in The Atlantic.
Which is worse, when a U.S. president (Nixon) authorizes a massive, illegal program to break into the homes and offices of Americans who are legally protesting government policy, or when a U.S. president (Trump) encourages a mob of protestors to illegally try to break into the U.S. Capitol in order to illegally keep him in office?
The answer, of course, is: Why should we have to choose -- or suffer through -- either of them?
The other answer is that we must keep reading and writing books about these abuses, so that future generations never forget.
This particular book doesn't really break new factual ground, although the author explores some interesting analyses. He argues that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover disagreed with the nuances of Nixon's tactics -- because he wanted to protect the FBI's reputation, not the protestors' civil rights -- and that Hoover was driven by a genuine fear of Communism and chaos more than racism. The book draws an interesting line from the Vietnam-era government crackdown to the War on Terrorism three decades later. But it's dreadfully padded and repetitive, and I think it would have made its point much more sharply as, say, a cover story in The Atlantic.
June 10, 2022
Definitely presented a ton of information I didn’t know before… meaning I learned a lot and that there is probably a lot more that didn’t stick.
January 14, 2024
Great look into the legal and illegal tactics the Nixon administration and the FBI used to attempt to capture members of the anti war movement, the Black Panthers, Arab terrorists and other organizations. This book pulls no punches on what all parties above mentioned did right and wrong. I could have done without the authors liberal bias in the epilogue, but everything else about this book is worth the read
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews