FBI Files on the Free Speech Movement

In December 1984, the San Francisco Chronicle published files it received after a 17-year litigation, revealing the important role of the FBI and CIA in spying on UC administrators, faculty and students during the Free Speech Movement and the Cold War era. The documents can be read here, at SF Gate: The Campus Files.

Important Dates

1950s – The “loyalty oath” controversy at UC. Cold War the paradigm of American politics.
1960 – Students and left protest House UnAmerican Activities hearing in SF, arrested and hosed down City Hall stairs. FBI’s Hoover and HUAC are allies. Hoover report announces “communist plot” to take over universities, with Berkeley at center.
1962 – Pat Brown defeats Richard Nixon for governor of California.
1963 – Berkeley students involved in CORE sit-ins against discrimination in Bay Area hotels.
1964 – Mississippi Summer Project.
Sept. 1964 – FSM begins. One month before US attacks North Vietnam at Tonkin Gulf. In same month, MFDP rejected at Democratic convention.
1964-66 – Hoover and CIA director John McCone carry out plan to harrass students and faculty, putting 72 on a “security index”, to be rounded up and detained in on Angel Island in a national emergency. 22 UC professors identified in “illicit love affairs, homosexuality, sexual perversion, excessive drinking...mental instability.”
1964-65 – Edwin Meese, Alameda County DA prosecuting FSM. He becomes US attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, 1982.
1965 – McCone, director of CIA, is former chair of Atomic Energy Commission, tied to UC Livermore nuclear labs. McCone resigns from CIA to lead advisory committee of  the Reagan gubernatorial campaign in Aug. 1966.
1966 – Reagan elected governor on platform of  “law and order” against Berkeley “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates.” Reagan wins.
1968 – Nixon is elected President on the same platform.
1972 – Nixon is re-elected, and later forced to resign in 1974.
1976 – Reagan runs for president in GOP primary. Jimmy Carter wins national election, issues amnesty for draft and war resisters.
1982 – Reagan elected president.