See, e.g., Patrick J. Buchanan, “America’s Next War,” Creators Syndicate (August 23, 2004); Max Boot, “Q & A: Neocon power examined,” Christian Science Monitor at http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/boothtml; and Jay Solomon and Neil King, Jr., “As ‘Neocons’ Leave, Bush Foreign Policy Takes Softer Line,” Wall Street Journal (February 6, 2006).
In a December 18, 2005, speech, President Bush all but conceded the point that America is provoking terror. He stated, “If you think the terrorist would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone.” George W. Bush, “Bush Says Iraqis See Democracy as Their Future,” U.S. Department of State, at http://usinfo.state.gov/mena/Archive/2005/Dec/19-15664.html. Writing in the Yale Law Journal, Jeffery Manns discusses the reality that American foreign policy’s provocation of terrorism requires the government to help with insurance coverage of terrorist activity. Jeffery Manns, “Insuring Against Terror?” Yale Law Journal, vol. 112:8 (2003). Philip C. Wilcox, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, asserted, “The administration has focused on the destruction of terrorists and terrorist groups as the solution to terrorism. Certainly, we must do this, but terrorism is a symptom of deeper conflicts. If destroying terrorists is all we do, it’s only a palliative. Unless we understand, try to eliminate or at least contain the problems that breed terrorism, we’re going to fail, and the virus of terrorism will continue to grow and spread. Some have called this approach appeasement, but it’s not. It’s common sense. Iraq is emerging to surprise the administration, as a new breeding ground for terrorism that didn’t exist previously.” Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., “Imperial Dreams: Can the Middle East Be Transformed?,” Middle East Policy, vol. 10 (Winter 2003), 1.
Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 102.
See, e.g., Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Athan Theoharis, The FBI & American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); William C. Sullivan with Bill Brown, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); and Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993).
Sullivan with Brown, The Bureau, 136–37.
Summers, Official and Confidential, 434.
Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 837.
Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 48.
Sullivan with Brown, The Bureau, 49. Sullivan documented the Kennedy situation. I have personal knowledge of the Nixon situation.
Congressman Dan Burton, a conservative Republican from Indiana, introduced legislation on July 25, 2002 (HR 5213) to rename the FBI headquarters building and remove the name of J. Edgar Hoover from the building. Burton was joined by bipartisan cosponsors: Steven LaTourette (R-OH), Christopher Shays (R-CT), William Delahunt (D-MA), John Lewis (D-GA), and John Tierney (D-MA). Even the Wall Street Journal ’s editorial pages has called for “stripping J. Edgar Hoover’s name from FBI headquarters.” Anonymous, “A Real Surveillance Scandal,” Wall Street Journal (January 10, 2006), A- 14.
In a conversation I had with Vice President Agnew in December 1970, he told me of his admiration for Hoover at a time when others in the Nixon White House were trying to get Hoover to resign.
Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 411–12.
Facts on File Yearbook 1970 (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1971), 698.
Terri Bimes, “Reagan: The Soft-Sell Populist,” in W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh David Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism & Its Legacies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 61.
Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 159–60.
