Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement

In this workmanlike study, Davis, coauthor of Kelly: The Story of an FBI Director, relies on more than 6,000 declassified documents to analyze the FBI's Cointelpro (counterintelligence program) against the New Left, which lasted from October 1968 to April 1971. (Other Cointelpro targets were the Ku Klux Klan, black nationalists and the Socialist Workers Party.) It is a troubling episode in domestic history: though ""agents were told that the New Left represented a `subversive force,'"" their targets were arbitrary and their means underhanded, Davis demonstrates. Agents sent anonymous mail to university alumni and benefactors to discredit student protesters, used informants and anonymous letters to provoke tension between black-power and New Left leaders and called on an enormous number of resources to spy on people such as Abbie Hoffman. After the reign of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, new guidelines for domestic intelligence investigations were adopted; only groups likely to engage in violence could be monitored, not merely those with unpopular opinions. Because he does not include interviews and writes blandly, Davis has not made his book as textured as it might have been. However, he has assiduously unearthed details worth exposing. (June)