The Mr. Bill Show

In an article that ran in the April 12, 1980, issue of The Nation, Sigmund Diamond, Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, printed a series of Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] confidential memoranda that resulted from an article which ran in The Crimson in June, 1949. The Crimson investigative feature on FBI activities at Yale claimed that undercover agents at Yale were interfering with faculty appointments by providing secret reports on professors suspected of Communist leanings to Yale administrators.

The memoranda, obtained recently through the Freedom of Information Act, trace the consequences of that article. William F. Buckley Jr., then-chairman of the Yale Daily News, worked with the FBI over the next year, assuring it that the News disapproved of the Crimson article and supported the FBI. Buckley also arranged the first-ever FBI open forum to allow Bureau officials to tell their side of the story.

This article reconstructs the controversy of those years through FBI documents, past issues of both the Crimson and the Yale Daily News, and recent interviews with participants in the conflict.

The Investigative Article

WILLIAM S. FAIRFIELD, managing editor of The Crimson in 1948, wrote an article on June 4, 1949, which reported that undercover FBI agents "wander in and out of (Yale) Provost Edgar S. Furniss's office every day" to inform on young faculty up for tenure. The physics department received the most extensive surveillance. Fairfield reported. The FBI approached Henry Margenau, a professor in the Physics Department and now Higgins Professor of Physics and Natural Philosophy Emeritus at Yale, to reproach him for speaking before the New Haven Youth Movement, a group with supposedly leftist leanings, Fairfield claimed. He noted that Margenau later nervously checked with the FBI every time he gave a speech before an unknown group.

And that was one of the minor incidents. Fairfield alleged that the FBI provided Yale President Charles Seymour with clandestine, often inaccurate reports on faculty members' politics. That procedure clearly broke the president's official policy of accepting no secret, unsolicited information, even though he also did not want to hire any Communists. The university did allow one official liaison from the FBI but prohibited the presence of the other informants, whom faculty members told Fairfield were "suspected of watching their homes and in one case of opening their mail." Fairfield also reported that Robert S. Cohen, a post-doctoral student in Yale's philosophy department, was denied an instructorship when the university's Prudential Committee overrode the recommendation of the philosophy department and the unanimous vote of the faculty. The committee reversed its decision when information on Cohen's alleged Communist activities--which Furniss said came from the FBI--proved grossly inaccurate.

Finally, Fairfield cited a third "probable case" in which the FBI "again definitely violated its own code of ethics" by using scare tactics. Furniss told Fairfield that late one night "an eminently respectable" Yale faculty member, "a one-time refugee from Nazi Germany," received a mysterious phone call:

Why aren't you a naturalized American citizen?

I am.

Oh. Well you better report it. It isn't on the records.

The voice continued to ask probing questions. The next day the professor showed up in Furniss's office, extremely disturbed by the mystery caller. Furniss called the FBI liaison man into his office and warned him to tone down his information-gathering techniques. Fairfield's story ended by reporting rumors that Yale officials supplied "complete appointment lists" to the FBI.

The FBI Response

THE CRIMSON received an official-looking letter, six days after Fairfield's article ran, from J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, labeling the piece "inaccurate, distorted and untrue." Hoover insisted that: no undercover agents or general informants operated at Yale; no secret files were provided to "Yale or any other educational institution"; no FBI agents "influenced Yale academic and political activities; and no FBI agent ever investigated "applicants for teaching positions in Yale or any other college or university." Finally, Hoover asserted, two people quoted in Fairfield's story had denied the statements attributed to them. The letter ran in The Crimson with a defense from Fairfield, in which he claimed to have spoken to about thirty people at Yale.

The following September, J.J. Gleason, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's New Haven office, wrote to Hoover. Subject: discussions between himself and FBI Assistant Director L.B. Nichols about the Fairfield story "which was derogatory to the Bureau." Gleason warned Hoover that he had received a call from a Yale Daily News reporter, tipping him off that the News planned to run a follow-up story, featuring an interview with Cohen. The post-doctoral student's "identity was known to the Bureau" (FBI-speak for a person who is on file with the FBI), Gleason made sure to note.

Gleason added that he had called H.B. Fisher, the FBI Liaison Officer at Yale, and asked him to look into the matter. Fisher told Gleason that Yale administrators were attempting to "have the News story killed inasmuch as it was entirely inaccurate and would only tend to prolong the effects, if any, of the original article in The Harvard Crimson." He also noted that Margenau, the Physics professor, and Provost Furniss had officially denied the Crimson statements attributed to them.

Fisher apparently succeeded because the next FBI memo from Gleason noted that Buckley contacted him and said "he had changed his mind considerably about the matter and was now of the opinion that the articles appearing in The Harvard Crimson were vicious and insidious in addition to being journalistically poor." Buckley then wrote a letter, now part of an ever-expanding FBI file on The Crimson, to arrange a forum between the FBI and members of the Yale community to "outline to them the actual roll [sic] of the FBI in the state and community levels." Buckley offered himself as an "impartial" moderator.

The Yale Forum

THE FBI ACCEPTED Buckley's offer, and in October, Nichols--the main FBI speaker--reported the meetings details to Hoover. One full page of that five-page memo was later inked out "to protect the name of an individual interviewed by the FBI." Nichols elaborated, rather proudly, on his ability to dodge questions at the forum. One professor barraged him with questions, Nichols boasted in the memo, and "in answering him I would pick out the part that lent itself to the easiest discussion and then launch into a discussion of the Bureau. There were some questions he asked that I never did answer."

Nichols also heaped praise on a certain young man:

I was very much impressed with William Buckley, the editor of the Yale Daily News. I have a definite feeling that we will hear from this young man in years to come. I would say very definitely that he is pro-FBI. I invited him to visit the Bureau and told him I would like for him to meet the Director.

Nichols said he "got quite a kick" out of Buckley's strategy of sprinkling News reporters among the audience so that every time the Crimson reporter would take notes "his men would jostle him."

Buckley then wrote to Hoover after the event, stressing, "I don't think you can possibly realize the good that was done here last night...You have contributed more than a dozen classes and a score of periodicals to the enlightening of the student mind on all-important question [sic]." Attached was a blind copy from Buckley of a letter he wrote to Simon suggesting that the Crimson president "exercise a little control over the flamboyance of some of your men." Buckley continued to send blind copies of his correspondence with Simon to FBI officials.

A year later, in 1950, the New York Times Magazine published a letter by Simon which questioned federal wiretapping policies. His FBI file expanded a fraction more. M.A. Jones of the FBI Washington office reviewed his case and "recommended that no action be taken in answer to Simon." A handwritten message at the bottom of the memo read, "I agree--JEH."

The Retrospective

THE CRIMSON files have expanded since then, but most of the early players have died: Yale president Charles Seymour, Provost Furniss, the "badgering" professor at the forum. But some still remember the incident.

Despite the FBI story that Henry Margenau, the physics professor, formally denied that his encounter with the FBI ever took place, Margenau now says, "I was visited by an FBI agent on several occasions--once or twice a year for several years--then nothing." He recalls the speech before the New Haven Youth Movement and confirms that "the FBI admonished me for speaking" to a group with "red tinge." He adds that he "probably" did inform the FBI of subsequent offers to lecture when he didn't know the political orientation of the audience. Margenau says he is still puzzled over the FBI's excessive interests in his speechmaking plans. "I thought it was very strange" when the FBI "quizzed me...After all, I was a scientist, no communist."

Margenau was close to Cohen at the time of the Cohen controversy, and he helped to clear the post doctoral student's name. "There were people in the philosophy department who thought he was a threat," Margenau said. Cohen left Yale two years after his Yale appointment and is a professor at Boston University. (He is presently traveling in Europe and was unavailable for comment.)

One of the Harvard participants, Fairfield, continued to investigate intelligence activities and wrote a series called "The Wiretappers" that filled The Reporter, a now-defunct periodical, almost cover-to-cover in 1952 and 1953. Fairfield, who now lives in Wisconsin, says Buckley made up the story about News staffers jostling a Crimson reporter at the Forum because no Crimson reporter covered the event.

He did hear, however, that Buckley "waved a sheaf of papers at the audience--later to be stylized by Joe McCarthy as 'I held in my hand'--and announced that they were affidavits from everyone the Crimson reporter had interviewed at Yale, each denying the quotes attributed to him." Fairfield says he asked Buckley for copies of these affidavits but Buckley "icily informed me that he had no intention of honoring my request. I could then only concluded that he had lied about the affidavits."

S. William Green, managing editor of The Crimson in 1949 and now New York State congressman, says he checked Fairfield's facts and "talked to some of his sources, especially in the philosophy department, before the story ran," and he is "confident that it was true."

Former Crimson president John Simon is now, oddly enough, a professor at Yale Law School. In looking back, Simon says he considers the Crimson experience with the FBI "not out of character" with the series of 1975 revelations on counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO), which revealed FBI pressure tactics in the Universities of Chicago and Arizona, among others.

The Buckley Rebuttal

BUCKLEY NOW REFUSES to comment on the matter except for a formal statement by letter sent to The Crimson after The Nation article. Buckley, editor of the National Review, only states that the "principal point" of Diamond's Nation article was "its pointlessness." He also addresses a lesscentral point or two. First, on the evidence that he sent blind copies of his correspondence with the Crimson president to the FBI, Buckley notes unabashedly, "I sent (sic) blind copies of letters I write half of the time, usually to friends who I suspect would be interested." Second, he claims "I don't see any record for not keeping files on Congressmen if they are suspected of illegal activity." (He does not explain the relation of this statement to the issue.) Third, he "feels no obligation to apologize for other people's lies."

Buckley, Simon and Fairfield have had little contact in their post-college years. But Fairfield does recall one brief encounter. While still working for the Reporter in 1951, he was waiting alone in a ground-floor elevator of the National Press Building when Buckley entered the car:

"Hello, Bill," I said in all amiability, not being one to hold grudges.

He glanced at me, saying nothing, then faced the blank rear wall of the car and remained in that position until I got off at my 8th-floor office.

When Buckley chaired the Yale debate team 30 years ago, he always won. But in his last round in 1950, the orator lost to Harvard after The Crimson coached the Harvard team by providing it with Crimson files. The subject: academic freedom.