Why US Imperialism Is Keeping Ronald Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover Alive
By Obi Egbuna, Jr.
If the quality and substance of a people’s culture is best determined by how they choose their heroes, it would appear the Western world would find this process more difficult and challenging than all other citizens on the planet—combined! However, inside US borders the racist and dogmatic charade commonly referred to as the melting pot has yet to be abandoned. What this illustrates is that as long as our former colonial and slave masters are able to maintain their political, economic and military powerbase, the battle lines are drawn for all to see. For Africans, the struggle to resist all manifestation of Western cultural imposition remains as intense as ever.
When 2011 came to a close, Africans based in the states have witnessed imperialist forces use television and Hollywood to reinvent two of their beloved war criminals: the former director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover and the 40th US President, Ronald Wilson Reagan. As we know this numerical year marks Reagan’s 100th birthday and a biographical film titled J. Edgar was recently released. The internationally acclaimed actor Leonardo DiCaprio portrays Hoover on the big screen in what many film critics are calling the finest performance of DiCaprio’s career. The cable television station HBO also aired a documentary titled Reagan, which was directed by Eugene Jarecki who openly professes to be an Eisenhower Republican. When African people at home and abroad study US history, we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the enemies of progress attempting to wipe clean the slates of the most evil perpetrators of injustice.
Because of the countless atrocities committed by Hoover during his 48 years of terrorism, which began in 1924 when he was appointed the director of the FBI’s precursor the Bureau of Investigation, the US Government now only permits FBI directors to serve a maximum of 10 years. The only way a FBI director can receive an extension is if it is approved by the US Senate. While this gesture appears on the surface as an attempt by the FBI to disassociate itself from Hoover’s crimes against humanity, creating Homeland Security and launching the Patriot Act along with the decision to name its national headquarters in Hoover’s honor demonstrates otherwise.
The awards that have been bestowed upon Reagan after his presidency expose US Imperialism and its ally’s obsession with this period in their history. The British made Reagan an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, the Polish presented him with the Order of the White Eagle for his role is dismantling the Communist Party in Poland, and the Japanese presented him with the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum. The Washington National Airport was renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport, and a US Naval Ship was named after him. Reagan also has in his trophy case the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom. This wave of momentum prompted Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was the Governor of California, to declare Reagan’s birthday a national holiday and pay tribute to a real life terminator. For those amongst our people who view political trends and developments through the narrow confines of the Democratic and Republican Party exclusively, they must find Reagan a fascinating and irresistible case study. When Malcolm X warned Africans that the Democrats were foxes and the Republicans were wolves and in the final analysis both belonged to the canine family, he didn’t live long enough to let us know that at any given moment these canines were capable of undergoing a metamorphosis and politically transforming before our very eyes.
This is exactly what Reagan did. As a Democrat he claimed to be influenced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but when he became the Governor of California was obsessed with crushing the Black Panther Party of self defense. As a Republican President his hands became stained with the blood of Maurice Bishop, Samora Machel, and Thomas Sankara, all beloved sons of Mother Africa who fought and died in our Liberation Struggle. Although Africans have a tendency to present our modern history as if it began and ended in the 1960’s, the atrocities committed by Hoover when he was the face of the FBI force us not to restrict ourselves to this era out of sentiment and blind faith.
The litmus test for the Nazi/Israeli Mossad like tactics that became the heart and soul of Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, were originally put to the test when they were used against Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the UNIA-ACL. Garvey was deported for being an undesirable alien, which should serve as an eye-opener for people organizing around immigration issues today. While Garvey and the Communist Party organizer and journalist Claudia Jones were shown the door by Hoover for not meeting US citizenship criteria, the real issue is people who migrate to the US in pursuit of either citizenship or permanent residency status and are not protected by the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. When it came to limiting the expression of people not born in the US Hoover took no prisoners. He even went as far as to deport the silent movie icon Charlie Chaplin at the peak of his career because of his ties to the Communist party.
There is also an extremely important connecting point between Garvey’s deportation and Malcolm X’s assassination, which Hoover arranged for his agents to work hand in hand with the local police, whom he viewed as the first line of defense of the Military Industrial Intelligence Police Complex. The first African recruited to join the FBI was James Wormley Jones, formerly a detective in the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, who also served in the US Army during World War I. Using the code name agent 800, Jones infiltrated the UNIA and became the adjutant general of the African Legion, the organization’s defense branch. Hoover also recruited another agent to infiltrate the UNIA. Herbert Boulin’s code name was p-138 whose contribution was to sabotage the Black Star Line shipping program by portraying Garvey as a con artist and embezzler of funds. The NYPD had a branch called BOSS (Bureau of Special Services) that in conjunction with the FBI kept a joint file on Malcolm X, up until the time he was assassinated in Harlem at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. What was extremely disappointing about Spike Lee’s epic film about Malcolm X is most people left the theatre blaming the Nation of Islam for his assassination. That notion implies that the FBI and CIA deserve a pass for their role in Malcolm’s demise. For Lee, the affluent lifestyle of a big shot Hollywood producer took priority over exposing that the US Government has Malcolm’s blood on their hands.
In addition to recruiting Jones to infiltrate the UNIA-ACL, Hoover found four more Africans to join the FBI: James Edward Amos, Arthur Lowell Brent, Thomas Leon Jefferson and Earl E. Titus. Because the integrationists define success and failure by our ability to penetrate the established society, we wonder if they consider these agents men of achievement or modern day slave catchers. What started for Hoover as a plan to get rid of Garvey, whom he considered a “notorious negro agitator,” came full scale many years later when the FBI produced a memo called the Rise of a Messiah. The memo exposed Hoover’s obsession with African Freedom Fighters who possessed both the organizational skills and willingness to unite our people. If the annals of history are our guide, we can all see that after Communism, it was the spreading of African Nationalism that caused Hoover to have many sleepless nights. This explains his fear of Dr. King despite that in the eyes of many Africans King never be viewed as a nationalist, but his calls for both reparations and a radical redistribution of the wealth have made all of us who came after him eager to study nationalism and communism to see what they have to offer theoretically and practically.
In other documents Hoover expresses fears and concerns about nationalist forces gaining respectability and having strong coalitions. The methodology that Hoover and his colleagues came up with to derail these efforts was to identify what he called responsible Negro components and discredit African nationalists to white liberals because he felt they were sympathetic to our cause. When the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall during his tenure with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund began providing the FBI information about the Robert Williams, the Branch President of their chapter in Union City, North Carolina, Hoover had to feel like he hit the jackpot. In the book Thurgood Marshall American Revolutionary written by Juan Williams, the chapter titled Marshall and the Militants reveals that Justice Marshall in June of 1959 reached out to the FBI’s New York office concerning Williams’ affiliations with the Communist party and his leaning towards self defense. The justification Marshall gave was a concern he had in relationship to the mixture of African militants and Communists, which would have justified increasing FBI surveillance of the NAACP. After meeting with the FBI agent in charge of the New York office, Marshall provided three documents about the Robert Williams Defense Committee being linked to Communists. While Justice Marshall’s place in our history is secure, serving as a stoolpigeon for Hoover and the FBI hardly qualifies as the work of what his teacher and biggest influence, Charles Hamilton Houston, called a social engineer.
The first African to integrate major league baseball Jackie Robinson, like Justice Marshall also allowed himself to be baited by Hoover into believing that attacking courageous Africans whose political expression was anti-imperialist in form and content was the responsibility of Africans who were the key faces and voices of our efforts to integrate the capitalist system. Because Robinson is considered in the eyes of many a Civil Rights pioneer, he was never forced to answer for testifying against Paul Robeson before the house of Un-American Activities Committee and condemning Muhammad Ali for refusing to enlist in the Vietnam War.
In hindsight it becomes easier to understand in this type of atmosphere why US Attorney General Robert Kennedy did not hesitate to overlook his supposed hatred for Hoover and approve the bugging of Dr. King’s phones and private space, including his bedroom and hotel rooms when he was on the road. While the history books, political pundits and academicians that have studied 20th century US mainstream political figures would declare Hoover and the Kennedys archenemies in every sense of the word, when it came to sabotaging Dr. King’s work and attempting to tarnish his reputation they found common ground. The only difference was Hoover made absolutely no apologies whatsoever, while Kennedy years later attempted to exploit King’s death for political mileage by telling African voters there was a connection between the assassinations of King and his brother as he paraded through the ghetto as their knight in shining armor. While Malcolm’s stance on white liberals like the Kennedys was more deliberate and consistent, we must remember King in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, emphatically stated “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White Moderate.” If Africans born and raised in the US built a museum as a tribute to white liberals it would be logical to conclude that the apologists for the Kennedys amongst our people would attempt to forget Kennedy’s choosing to collaborate with Hoover in spying on King from the historical record.
These same forces cheered like soccer fans during the world cup, when US Secretary of State Hillary Rodam Clinton used the African Proverb “it takes a village to raise a child”, but looked the other way when she described US Imperialism’s role in the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi by saying “we came we saw he died.” The one thing that any African based in the United States who is active on the frontline will never hesitate to tell you is that existing tensions between certain spokespeople and organizations can easily be traced back to the damage done by Hoover’s COINTELPRO strategy. This was evident a few years ago when former members of the Black Panther Party, including Bobby Seale and members of the Huey P. Newton Foundation, decided to publicly condemn the New Black Panther Party, which caused division that was cross generational in scope and character. The decision to attack NBPP in this manner was dangerous on a multitude of levels. In the first place it implied the activists who did so should have the last word on the history of the Panthers, and the numerous mistakes made by the Panthers of their generation were all corrected. It would have been more sophisticated and uplifting, if Seale and the Huey P. Newton foundation had given the NBPP some room to develop and maneuver, similar to the way members of SNCC who formed the original Black Panther Party in Loundes County, Alabama in 1965, behaved when they allowed Seale and Newton to borrow the panther name and symbol from them in order to get started in Oakland, California one year later.
In the Civil Rights Movement there is a dehumanizing concept called “carrying water” when veteran organizers determine if younger organizers are ready to assume positions of leadership. This has caused tension and bad blood on a cross generational level. After all these years conventional wisdom tells us the time has come to focus on historical responsibility instead of continuing to embrace a leadership doctrine that is rooted in capitalist tradition and automatically hinders any meaningful progress, especially if the end result is the best frontline soldiers from both generations establishing and maintaining an unbreakable bond.
In staying true to the tradition of all aspiring candidates for the Presidency, Reagan’s biographical profile deliberately magnified past US Presidents whom he admired. However anyone who looks deeper can see Hoover’s influence on him remained completely intact. During his stint as the President of Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952, Reagan was also a confidential informant for the FBI who was known to the agency as Informant T-10. In this capacity he provided the FBI with a list of entertainers, who were either members or sympathizers of the Communist Party USA. While Reagan never testified against the people he named publicly, they were many warriors in our cultural army whose careers and lives were damaged by Reagan’s contribution to the Red Scare campaign. The list includes Canada Lee, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Hazel Scott and Lena Horne to name a few. If Reagan’s obsession with turning Hollywood into an anti-communist hotbed appeared to be extremely militaristic in form, it is because he served in the first motion picture unit of the US military in Culver City, California. By the time Reagan became a corporate pitchman for General Electric, which required touring 16 cities a year and making 14 pro corporate speeches a day, this explains why as President he fired the Air Traffic controllers for striking in a country that masquerades as the world’s model for democracy and human rights. When Reagan became known as the great communicator he had become a master propagandist schooled in the art of justifying the unjustifiable. When he bombed Libya in April of 1986, not only did he use that opportunity to label Muammar Qadaffi the mad dog of the Middle East, the inspiration to attack our Mother continent came from watching Sylvester Stallone’s film Rambo. This helps people understand when Colonel Qadaffi’s death was confirmed by mainstream media, the first congratulatory statement President Obama received was from none other than Senator John McCain who proudly calls himself a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution.
The names that Reagan would use to describe military invasions of Sovereign nations demonstrated complete mastery of the craft he learned between Hollywood, Corporate USA and the US Military. His tenure in the White House displayed a propensity to give imperialist military invasions the most colorful names possible. The invasion of Grenada in 1983 was called Operation Urgent Fury, which means that Reagan was angry with Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement for attempting to follow the socialist model of the Cuban Revolution. The 1986 bombing of Libya was called Operation El Dorado, which is often referred to as the Holy Grail or the ultimate prize. When the torch was passed to Reagan’s successor and former Vice President George Bush who invaded Panama in 1989, the modern day Buffalo Soldier General Colin Powell stated “even our severest critics would have to utter just cause when denouncing us.” During this same period Reagan decided to defend the Duvalier regime in Haiti, after Baby Doc declared himself “President for life,” by sending in the CIA’s National Intelligence Service branch to strengthen Duvalier’s military by suppressing popular revolts through torture and assassination. The Reagan administration appeared to have a love affair with the CIA; he deployed their special activities division to Afghanistan and Pakistan, in what his propaganda machine called saving these countries from Soviet occupation.
If Africans are looking for a phrase to discuss the tactical shift made by the US military industrial intelligence police complex, we can say from COINTELPRO to OINTELPRO, this process began when Reagan created the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983. At some point Reagan came to the realization that while dismantling Socialist countries and liberation movements, the trail of blood he was leaving behind that would be impossible for even his most loyal apologists, therefore he needed mechanisms that enabled him to attempt high level damage control. It is this type of sentiment that was at the core of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s statement about Reagan after his passing. She said “Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War and he did it without a shot being fired.”
When the anti-Castro terrorists in Miami formed an above ground organization called CANF (Cuban American National Foundation), Reagan was the keynote speaker at the founding conference. Their slogan was “from proletarians to profiterians,” which was in harmony with Reagan’s self destructive obsession with putting socialist governments and movements six feet under.
While it is quite understandable why Thatcher sees the need to distance herself from Reagan’s reign of terror, which filled up many cemeteries in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, her dubious claim about Reagan’s peaceful nature will never sit well with the families whose dignity and honor should not be mocked by our former colonial and slavemasters.The Zionist state of Israel also saw Reagan as a maverick and trail blazer, and therefore decided to make him the first Republican President they would openly endorse. This was no surprise because Reagan and the Israelis were partners in that both supported Apartheid in Southern Africa, by unconditionally defending and aiding UNITA in Angola and RENAMO in Mozambique. The African world was very angry when Reagan told Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister Robert Mugabe that he refused to honor the Lancaster House Agreement that President Carter and Prime Minister Thatcher negotiated with ZANU and ZAPU leadership in 1979. The rationale used by Reagan is since he wasn’t involved in the initial negotiations it was his prerogative to ignore the agreement. This maneuver by Reagan was not only arrogant and racist but sent a statement to Africans in the Diaspora who supported Zimbabwe’s historic second Chimurenga which over toppled the second most powerful colonial army ever assembled, that he felt invincible and Africans based in the US did not want to invest too much energy defending two liberation movements with ties to China and Russia. The historical space occupied by Hoover and Reagan are without question a painful chapter in African history. It is for this reason that Africans must show the enemies of progress attempting to hide atrocities they have committed in the past is equally deplorable as committing the atrocity itself.
Obi Egbuna is the US Correspondent of the Herald (Zimbabwe’s National Newspaper) a US based member of the Zimbabwe -Cuba Friendship Association. Mr. Egbuna is also a frequent contributor to Your World News Media.
