Chavez a Commie? : What a ludicrous and money-wasting effort by Hoover’s FBI

For more than seven years, starting in 1965, the FBI spied on California farm labor leader Cesar Chavez. The genesis of this project was the admittedly “vague” allegation by a nameless accuser that Chavez “possibly has a subversive background.” As demonstrably thin as that claim was, it sufficed to launch hundreds of agents on thousands of hours of nationwide effort following Chavez, monitoring his meetings, talking to his friends and enemies and noting allegations from the usual and ubiquitous “confidential sources.”

In time the bureau compiled a dictionary-thick, 1,434-page file. And what in that dossier justified the enormously costly work that gave rise to it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The file, obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, contains no evidence whatever that Chavez or his union, the United Farm Workers, were ever under communist influence or in any way a threat to U.S. national security.

Chavez was, of course, just one of many thousands over several generations whose names and activities drew the attention of the FBI under the obsessive leadership of its de facto director-for-life, J. Edgar Hoover. It didn’t take much to get a file started. As in the communist world or Nazi Germany, an anonymous denunciation, a suspicion of political heterodoxy or simply knowing someone on whom a file was already being kept was sufficient.

An FBI spokesman says that under today’s laws and guidelines, the bureau would not initiate the kind of investigation on Chavez that it began three decades ago. Americans can be grateful for that, though gratitude that constitutional rights are not being routinely stepped on by the government’s chief investigative arm should hardly have to be expressed. The Chavez file story is another reminder of how resources were wasted--what real threats to security might the FBI have missed as it pointlessly snooped on people like Chavez?--and, far more ominously, of how protections against official nosiness were ignored. Yes, we need the FBI. No less do we need unremitting vigilance against such excesses of government.