A Political Verdict : PRATT
A Remainder of the Old FBI

By NEAL GABLER

MAGANSETT, N.Y.Last week, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt
lumbered out of the legal jungle like one of those dinosaurs in
"The Lost World," a vestige of a political Paleolithic Age when we
were told that we were in great danger and only drastic measures
could save us. Twentyfive years ago, Pratt, a former leader of the
militant Black Panthers of the '60s and '70s, was convicted of
robbing and then killing a Santa Monica schoolteacher. The
damning witness at his trial was a Panther associate and rival who
testified that Pratt had confessed the crime to him. Now, however,
it appears there was a slight problem: At the time, the witness was
an LAPD informant with four felony pleas on his record. As a
result, a judge has now ordered a new trial.
How times have changed. Pratt may just be the last victim of the
old FBI mentality that infected so many lawenforcement agencies
over the last 40 years, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation
seemed able to destroy its enemies with cool dispatch and leave no
traces. Today, of course, the FBI is seen as anything but efficient.
After the fiascoes at Ruby Ridge and Waco; after letting the
Unabomber slip through its fingers for more than a decade; after an
agent was convicted of treason; after the recent Justice Department
report condemning practices at the vaunted FBI lab, and after an
FBI van full of munitions was stolen last week, the bureau seems
more of a threat to itself than to our civil liberties.
But the difference between the FBI of then and the FBI of now
is not only a measure of its devolution. It is also a gauge of how
government itself has changed and how our confidence in its
effectiveness has eroded. To anyone growing up in the '50s, the
FBI of J. Edgar Hoover was the stuff of legend. No criminal
escaped the bureau's vigilance. Agents were brilliant, courageous
and athletic; and Hoover himself seemed a paragon of virtuea man
who selflessly fought to protect his country. For a time, he was
mentioned as presidential timber.
This had not come about without some effort. Back in the early
'30s, when marauders like John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, Pretty Boy
Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde roamed the country robbing banks,
kidnapping and leaving a swath of destruction behind, many
Americans demanded to know why the FBI was taking so long to
catch them. The bureau was widely regarded as inept, and Hoover
was routinely called onto the carpet by Congress. Infuriated, he
redoubled the bureau's efforts to nab the desperadoes and seized
credit for captures when local police were responsible.
Though it may have seemed he was waging an anticrime
campaign, Hoover was really conducting a publicrelations
campaign. He wrote articles and books extolling the bureau. He
cooperated with Hollywood on polishing the bureau's image, with
films like "GMen." And he cultivated journalists by putting them on
his "special correspondents" list and feeding them information.
Columnists and commentators like George Sokolsky, Fulton Lewis
Jr., Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and, most important, Walter
Winchell all became press agents for Hoover, championing the FBI
and lambasting its enemies. Indeed, Hoover devoted so much time
to his PR effort that one could justly have said the FBI's real
purpose was image and crimefighting was only a means to this end.

There was, however, one crime Hoover did feel passionately
about: sedition. He had come to the bureau after heading the Justice
Department's antisedition section in World War I, and the
experience seemed to be seminal for him. A paranoid, he found
enemies everywhere, and when President Franklin D. Roosevelt
issued a directive in 1936 to investigate Nazi activities in America,
Hoover broadened the authority to investigate anyone he felt might
be subversivea long, wideranging list that included liberals,
minorities, intellectuals and artists.
It was after World War II, during the Red Scare, that Hoover
perfected the tactics by which later generations would come to
know him. Though the Soviet KGB was the ostensible target, it was
also the model. Operating under a counterintelligence division he
called COINTELPRO, Hoover launched a war against his enemies,
circulating ugly rumors about them in the friendly press, sending
false information to the subjects of investigations to goad them into
reacting, wiretapping phones, contacting their employers. It was this
sort of covert activity that Pratt would ultimately be victimized by.
Thus the writer Dashiell Hammett, who promoted and raised
money for leftwing causes, became a target of an FBI operation in
which the bureau tried to create schisms in the left by sending him
anonymous letters and articles sowing dissension, and then invading
his house without a warrant when Winchell provided a tip that four
communist fugitives were hiding there. Even after his death, the
bureau fought to keep Hammett from being buried in Arlington
National Cemetery.
The same tactics were directed at hundreds of others in the '50s,
but the bureau incurred little wrath from the general public because
it was only doing the public's will. There was more opposition in the
'60s, when Hoover discovered a new roster of enemies. He
harbored a special hatred for civilrights leaders and worked
mightily to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. by trying to link him to
communists. When that proved fruitless, he used wiretaps to try to
blackmail King by threatening to reveal sexual indiscretions. In
fairness, though, he did the same to President John F. Kennedy.
Hoover had the goods on them all.
One of the eeriest examples of the kind of vendettas Hoover
could wage was his smear campaign against the actress Jean
Seberg. Modishly leftwing, Seberg had taken up the cause of the
Black Panthers and helped raise funds for them among her
Hollywood friends. In Hoover's eyes, this may have been crime
enough, but Seberg had also become intimate with a Panther leader,
and sex exercised the FBI director almost as much as subversion.
Determined to cripple her, the FBI tipped the immigration service to
have Seberg's luggage searched, pestered her with anonymous
phone calls and quite possibly, though the FBI would obviously
never own up to it, poisoned her cats.
The piece de resistance of the operation, however, was
circulation of a false item that Seberg was pregnant with the baby of
her Black Panther lover. "It is felt the possible publication of
'Seberg's plight' would cause her embarrassment and serve to
cheapen her image with the general public," went an FBI memo. To
this end, the bureau furnished the rumor to Los Angeles Times
gossip columnist Joyce Haber, who published it as a blind item.
>From there, the item was widely circulated, with Seberg the obvious
subject. Soon after, Seberg suffered a miscarriagethe baby was
not the Black Panther's and later wound up committing suicide,
her exhusband Romain Gary said, because she could never escape
the trauma of what the FBI had done to her.
By the time of the Seberg operation, the FBI was no longer
perceived as quite as sterling as it had once been. Most Americans
may not have much liked campus radicals, civilrights leaders and
Hollywood stars who supported leftwing causes, but the public
didn't see them as automatons of Soviet domination, either.
Gradually, the '50s image of Hoover as a righteous guardian gave
way to the '60s image of a bitter old man who could not be
controlledeven by the president.
In a sense, the FBI was a casualty of the breakdown of the old
liberal consensus. So long as Americans were largely unified on
policies and enemiesas they were roughly from the mid'30s
through the early '60sthe FBI was regarded favorably. When that
consensus began to splinter, with the Vietnam War, the FBI lost its
authority. Suspicious of government generally, Americans became
especially suspicious of the government's most efficient instrument.
Operations once applauded were now excoriated.
It has been a long road downhill for the FBI, from overzealous
activities during Vietnam to underzealous investigations during
Watergate to the zealous ineptitude of today. Almost no one
believes in government efficiency anymore, except the crackpot
rightwing militiamen who think the FBI is now conspiring against
them the way it once conspired against the left. For most everyone
else, the FBI, like the KGB, is largely a shella reminder of another
time. Pratt is a reminder, too, of those days when Americans trusted
the system so much that law enforcement was given carte blanche.
The events of last week show we're not likely to pass that way
again.


Neal Gabler Is Author of "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews
Invented Hollywood." His Most Recent Book Is "Winchell: Gossip,
Power and the Cult of Celebrity" (Knopf)

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