Why Yale preserves my FBI file from 1972
A 1972 FBI memo about my behavior at Kent State University was insignificant when I donated it to Yale’s Kent State Collection in 1977.
But by 2021 it took on a new and ugly meaning. That’s why archives are important. They save things that might grow in significance over time.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s sudden death at age 77 May 2, 1972, threw a monkey wrench into Kent State students and our previously announced plans to hold a vigil at the White House on May 4, the 2nd anniversary of the Kent State massacre.
I can just imagine that old fox and spymaster at the FBI saying, “Over my dead body will those Kent State students demonstrate outside the White House.”
If that was his wish, he got it — in reverse. His dead body literally canceled our demonstration.
Read these excerpts from a May 3rd, 1972, “urgent” memo from Cleveland FBI to the Washington, D.C., director of the FBI. Ironically, it was sent on the first day in 48 years that J. Edgar Hoover was not “director” since he had died the day before. URGENT: 5/3/72 ... TO DIRECTOR (ATTEN: DID) FROM CLEVELAND (100-NEW) CONFIDENTIAL SOURCE... TWENTY FOUR HOUR VIGIL WHICH WAS SCHEDULED FOR THE WHITE HOUSE AND UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE FOR MAY FOUR, NEXT, HAS BEEN CANCELLED. CANCELLATION WAS IN RESPECT FOR RECENT DEATH OF FBI DIRECTOR, J. EDGAR HOOVER.
VIGIL WAS BEING ORGANIZED BY KENT STATE UNIVERSITY (KSU) STUDENT PAUL KEANE, WHO HAS PREVIOUSLY SOLICITED SIGNATURES ON KSU CAMPUS TO PETITION PRESIDENT NIXON TO ORDER A FEDERAL GRAND JURY INVESTIGATION INTO SLAYING OF FOUR KSU STUDENTS BY OHIO NATIONAL GUARDSMEN DURING CAMPUS DISRUPTION, MAY FOUR, SEVENTY . ...
SOURCE FURTHER ADVISED HE WAS NOT AWARE OF ANY ATTEMPT BY KEANE TO INCLUDE LARGE NUMBERS OF KSU STUDENTS TO GO TO WASHINGTON D.C . ... (FBI caps)
I obtained this memo years after Hoover’s death through the Freedom of Information Act.
To be honest it wasn’t really “respect” for J. Edgar Hoover that caused us to cancel the previously announced demonstration. It was public relations.
We had scheduled our demonstration at the White House to occur on the second anniversary of the Kent State massacre of May 4, 1970.
If we went ahead with the vigil now two days after Hoover’s death it would have seemed sacrilegious and in poor taste.
By the May 3, 1972, date of this memo, I already had a two-year personal history with the FBI.
They had called my parents’ Connecticut home the week after the shootings in May 1970 asking to interview me.
My father, a 57-year-old Nixon Republican and a labor relations negotiator, shouted from the next room as I spoke on the phone, “Tell the FBI you will bring a witness and a tape recorder to the interview.” The FBI backed off. I was surprised to hear my father protect his son from the Nixon government he supported.
Ever since then I had assumed my phone as a graduate counselor in Kent State’s dormitories was tapped by the FBI, which had “100 agents” on the 18,000 student campus and in town by May 8, four days after the shootings “investigating” the tragedy. They were searching for weapons on the evacuated campus.
I even began signing off my phone conversations with “Goodbye J. Edgar Hoover” in defiance of possible wire-tappers, except I used a different term than “goodbye “which cannot be repeated here.
Years later I wondered if I had been unfair to J. Edgar Hoover, until PBS aired a 2021 report on his unethical wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King.
“When wiretaps revealed that King was having extramarital affairs, the FBI shifted their focus to uncover all evidence of his infidelity by bugging and taping him in his hotel rooms and by paying informants to spy on him. Eventually, the FBI penned and sent King an anonymous letter, along with some of their tapes, suggesting that he should kill himself.”
King was assassinated in 1968, two years before the Kent State killings.
I was only 25 in 1970. I’m proud that I championed free speech at Kent State for the next three years with J. Edgar Hoover — either dead or alive.
My father, a 57-year-old Nixon Republican and a labor relations negotiator, shouted from the next room as I spoke on the phone, “Tell the FBI you will bring a witness and a tape recorder to the interview.” The FBI backed off.