The Burglary

1

I
N LATE
1970, William Davidon, a mild-mannered physics professor at Haverford College, privately asked a few people this question:

“What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?”

Even in that time of passionate resistance against the war in Vietnam that included break-ins at draft boards, his question was startling. What, besides arrests and lengthy prison sentences, could result from breaking into an FBI office? The bureau and its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, had been revered by Americans and considered paragons of integrity for the nearly half century he had been director.

Who would dare to think they
could
break into an FBI office? Surely the offices of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country would be as secure as Fort Knox. Just talking about the possibility seemed dangerous.

But Davidon, with great reluctance, had decided that burglarizing an FBI office might be the only way to confront what he considered an emergency: the likelihood that the government, through the FBI, was spying on Americans and suppressing their cherished constitutional right to dissent. If that was true, he thought, it was a crime against democracy—a crime that must be stopped.

The odds were very low that such an act of resistance could possibly succeed against the law enforcement agency headed by this man who held so much power.
Nicholas Katzenbach, who as attorney general was Hoover's boss,
had resigned in 1966 because of Hoover's resentment over being told by Katzenbach to manage the bureau within the law. The director's power
was unique among all national officials, said Katzenbach. He “
ruled the FBI with a combination of discipline and fear and was capable of acting in an excessively arbitrary way. No one dared object.…The FBI was a principality with absolutely secure borders, in Hoover's view.” At the same time, he said, “
There was no man better known or more admired by the general public than J. Edgar Hoover.”

Such was the power and reputation of the official whose borders and files Davidon was considering invading. He knew Hoover was very powerful, but he didn't know—nor could anyone outside the bureau have known—how harshly he ruled it and how he protected the bureau from having its illegal practices exposed.
Katzenbach believed that Hoover or one of the director's top aides had even forged Katzenbach's signature in order to make it appear that the attorney general had given permission for the FBI to plant an electronic surveillance device, a bug, in civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s New York hotel room. Despite what appeared to be his signature on the memorandum, Katzenbach was certain he never approved such a procedure, which he considered the “worst possible invasion of privacy.”

Hoover's sensitivity to criticism, Katzenbach said when he testified in December 1975 before the committee then conducting the first congressional investigation of the FBI, “
is almost impossible to overestimate.…It went far beyond the bounds of natural resentment.…The most casual statement, the most strained implication, was sufficient cause for Mr. Hoover to write a memorandum to the attorney general complaining about the criticism, explaining why it was unjustified, and impugning the integrity of its author.

“In a very real sense,” Katzenbach testified, “there was no greater crime in Mr. Hoover's eyes than public criticism of the bureau.”

A congressional investigation of the FBI during Mr. Hoover's lifetime, Katzenbach said, would have been utterly impossible. “Mr. Hoover would have vigorously resisted.…He would have asserted that the investigation was unnecessary, unwise and politically motivated. At worst, he would have denounced the investigation as undermining law and order and inspired by Communist ideology. No one [in Congress] risked that confrontation during his lifetime.”

Said Katzenbach, “Absent strong and unequivocal proof of the greatest impropriety on the part of the director, no attorney general could have conceived that he could possibly win a fight with Mr. Hoover in the eyes of the public, the Congress or the President. Moreover, to the extent proof of any such impropriety existed, it would almost by definition have been
in the Bureau's possession and control, unreachable except with Bureau cooperation.”

Five years before Katzenbach made that public assertion, Davidon was planning to do something that had never been done—obtain official FBI information that was otherwise unreachable. Davidon had given a lot of thought to the question before he asked it—“What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?”

If anyone else had asked that question of the nine people he approached, probably each of them would have swiftly ended the conversation. Because it was Davidon, they took it seriously and kept listening despite being shocked. They trusted him. They knew he wasn't reckless, and they knew he believed in protest that was effective, that could lead to results. Each of them respected him so much they thought that if they ever engaged in high-risk resistance, he was one of the few people they would want as partner and leader when the stakes were high. So they listened carefully.

Some of them wrestled with the implications of his question for several days. Two said yes immediately. Only one of them, a philosophy professor, turned him down. Eight agreed with him that, repugnant as burglary was as a method of resistance, it might be the only way to find documentary evidence that would answer important questions about the FBI that no journalist or government official responsible for the FBI had dared to ask in the past or, they concluded, was likely to ask now or in the future. All of them were passionate opponents of the Vietnam War and passionate opponents of the suppression of dissent.

Davidon and the eight people who said yes in response to his question met as a group for the first time shortly before Christmas 1970 and chose their name, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. The name summed up their goal: In the absence of official oversight of this powerful law enforcement and intelligence agency, they, acting voluntarily on behalf of American citizens, would attempt to steal and make public FBI files in an effort to determine if the FBI was destroying dissent. They thought the name sounded dignified, like that of an official commission that should have been appointed years earlier by a president, an attorney general, or Congress.