Marcos de Brum Lopes on Daniel S. Chard’s *Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrilla, and the Origins of Counterterrorism*

Imagine a plot that goes like this: a Government coming up with secret plans to combat leftist guerillas in the 1960’s and 1970’s; police forces and federal investigators mobilized to neutralize bombings; policy makers overlooking the need to tackle the deep-rooted motivations of political violence such as police brutality and structural racism; top-ranked officials covering up corruption from the eyes of the public. It seems to be an ordinary political narrative about a Latin American country. Daniel S. Chard tells this story as it happened in the USA in his Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrilla, and the Origins of Counterterrorism. Besides being a well-documented research project supported by a robust amount of references, the book is successful in explaining the conceptual development of counterterrorism. His arguments show how it evolved from the rhetoric of anticommunism to one of antiterrorism, and how it encompasses both foreign policies and what the author calls Nixon’s “war at home”. To narrate such a story, Chard navigates political passions, idealized memories, shared ideological hysteria and hundreds of pages of official sources.

If there is something that precedes a remarkable addition to any historiographical field, it is the discovery of otherwise unknown documents. However, there are times when the field must patiently wait for the disclosure of evidences we know are there, although their content may – and most likely will – surprise the researcher. That is the case when classified documents are subjected to public scrutiny. Daniel S. Chard’s book is one of these remarkable additions. The result of a decade-long effort, his book relies on previously classified FBI material preserved at the Nixon Presidential Library, and also on documents the author acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests. Chard’s work builds on historical investigations about the Nixon-Era, expanding the scope of interpretation about the relation between leftist guerrillas, the FBI, Nixon’s “grab for power” and the institutional crisis that spiraled up with Watergate.

As the author points out, historiography has usually approached major political events – like the Watergate scandal – and the federal administration’s battles against leftist movements as loosely related historical developments. However, Chard makes a strong case arguing that

The FBI’s war with American guerrillas was no mere sideshow to the larger political dramas of the 1960s and 1970s. On the contrary, Nixon’s war at home and the development of counterterrorism intersected with all of the period’s major political conflicts and changes: the Vietnam War, the New Left, the Black Power movement, the women’s movement, Watergate, controversies over mass surveillance and covert operations, and the rise of mass incarceration.[1]

The book starts describing the close and complex relationship of J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic FBI decades-long director, with the Nixon administration, a relationship that fed upon the call for law and order in the midst of bomb plantings, protests against the war in Vietnam and against racial discrimination. Nevertheless, Hoover and Nixon never fully agreed on how to confront and eventually eradicate from US soil the leftist movements they both opposed, since Hoover, as Chard put it, “was just as concerned with protecting the FBI’s autonomous policing powers and his own personal reputation as he was with upholding America’s national security”. [2]

In the following chapters, Chard introduces other protagonists to his narrative: the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Liberation Army, among other components of the American New Left. In the context of the war in Vietnam, of recurring domestic police brutality and of systemic racism, left activists imported methods of the urban clandestine warfare, the guerillas more commonly associated with revolutionary movements from Asia, Africa and Latin America, as a practical strategy to fight and overcome an unjust reality. The book does not really discuss in depth the theoretical or philosophical leftist basis of the guerillas, although author-activists such as Franz Fanon are mentioned a few times. Chard is much more concerned with these movements’ strategies and actions as they are portrayed in their own accounts and mainly in the disclosed FBI documents. According to the author, the struggles between radicals and the agents of law and order of the Nixon years gave birth to counterterrorism in the US.

The historian who put aside romanticized views of the past will welcome Chard’s unwillingness to surrender to easy interpretations of his complex object of analysis, as the author subjects his arguments to empirical evidence. Take, for example, the remarks on FBI strategies towards the Black Panther Party. While historians and members of the BPP claim that the FBI targeting of the Party derived from disagreements on political principles, FBI correspondence indicates that top bureau officials wanted to prevent violence against police officers. According to these officials’ judgment, the BPP’s call for guns was too evident to be overlooked. While this could be seen as an underestimation of the role played by official forces as maintainers of the status quo and defenders of a given social order, Chard dismisses the idea of a secret conspiracy involving the FBI and the federal administration to eradicate leftist movements:

This is not to deny or downplay the existence of Hoover’s covert counter-intelligence operations against the Black Panthers and SDS, the fact that the Nixon administration and various state officials pressed charges against radicals throughout the country, or the reality that local police engaged in dozens of violent attacks on Black Panthers and other leftists, sometimes with the help of FBI intelligence, and always with impunity. The point here is that although these repressive state activities were related, they were not part of a single, nationally coordinated campaign, and they were not simply motivated by disagreement with paramilitary leftists’ political viewpoints. Much as Nixon may have wished otherwise, there was no centralized state conspiracy to eliminate political dissent in America.[3]

However, the author grants no exemption to the State. To avoid the expansion of the few radical movements, the government and its branches made use of illegal break-ins, wiretapping and arrests. Nixon desired to increase surveillance and control with the Houston Plan, while Hoover opposed it to preserve the FBI’s public image, waging what Chard names a “bureaucratic war” against the White House. In the midst of that many battles, as much as it is true that the war at home, both bureaucratic and armed, lacked a centralized conspiracy against the left, political leadership also lacked a critical view of social realities that originated political violence. Consequently, the deep roots of political dissent remained.

And this is one of the valuable lessons the reader will get from this book: terrorism and counterterrorism are not products of the 21th century. It is a story reaching far back to the Cold War era and the conceptual shift in the political discourse that gradually characterized organized leftist opposition to democratic – although corrupt and authoritarian – governments as terrorism. Yet another shift is at play in the plot, as Chard stretches his arguments to our days, considering the death tolls of white racist violent attacks: “Today, if we are going to use the word ‘terrorism’ as it came to be understood in the early 1970’s, the greatest terrorist threat to the United States comes from the Right”.[4]

In his final remarks, the author convincingly argues that the increase of surveillance and ethnic/religious targeting, and the war on terror that followed the 9/11 tragedy are  rooted in a culture of scare with its origins in the Nixon era, when white leftists, radical black movements and Arabs were regarded as enemies of the country. The anti-intellectualism of policy makers and law enforcement institutions prevented them from fully understanding the motivations of political violence, resulting in a long-lasting disregard for its social origins. Radical movements, which used violence as their main strategy, on the other hand, regarded the FBI actions as a sign of their own effectiveness; this was a view perpetuated by a romantic approach to the past. Chard concludes that the path to a more peaceful world should overcome both wrong assumptions. If Nixon made a war at home, and G. W. Bush a war on terror, Chard’s lesson is that we need – to use the phrase coined by W.J.T. Mitchell – a war on error.[5]

[1] Daniel S. Chard,  Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrilla, and the Origins of Counterterrorism(Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2021), 14.

[2] Daniel S. Chard,  Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrilla, and the Origins of Counterterrorism(Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2021), 24.

[3] Daniel S. Chard,  Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrilla, and the Origins of Counterterrorism(Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2021), 39.

[4] Daniel S. Chard,  Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrilla, and the Origins of Counterterrorism(Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2021), 266.

[5] W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).