WACO : Government’s Not Always the Villain

After denying for six years that federal agents used pyrotechnic devices capable of starting the fire that burned down the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in April 1993, the FBI admitted last month that it deployed flammable tear gas. It is difficult to imagine anything more damaging to the already fragile trust that Americans have in their government.

There was a time in American politics when the Federal Bureau of Investigation symbolized incorruptible integrity. Its former director, J. Edgar Hoover, zealously protected the bureau’s reputation in magazines such as Reader’s Digest. He also kept extensive files on politicians, threatening to expose what he knew about them if they did not fund the bureau at the levels to which he had grown accustomed.

The popularity of the FBI was enhanced by the unpopularity of Hoover’s targets: criminals and communists. At the height of Hoover’s power, the FBI stood as the great exception in American attitudes toward government. Liberals, who defended government, disliked the FBI, while conservatives, who attacked government, praised it.

Now, conservatives attack the FBI and, because they do, the case for government no longer has bipartisan support. One likely result is that the rights and liberties secured by government will be threatened.

Americans, an individualistic people, have a tendency to be suspicious of public authority. They also tend to be more conservative than liberal. The mutual admiration society between conservatives and the FBI meant that liberals could rely on conservatives to give support to the idea that sometimes government is necessary. At the same time, the link between the FBI and the American right made it difficult for violent right-wing extremists to operate: How could conservatives support the government and try to bomb its installations at the same time?

All this changed under Hoover’s successors. As the American left went into abeyance, the only political activists seriously threatening violence were on the right. To the degree that it monitored and tried to control their activities, the FBI came to be as distrusted by the right as it once had been distrusted by the left.

Randy Weaver, a white separatist, was one of the FBI’s targets. After Weaver purchased sawed-off shotguns from federal undercover agents and missed a court date, U.S. marshals surrounded his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992. An 11-day siege ensued, in which Weaver’s wife and son and a U.S. marshal were killed. Weaver was acquitted of murder and weapons charges, and the Justice Department agreed to pay him and his daughters $3.1 million. Revenge on Weaver’s behalf was said to be one of the motives behind Timothy J. McVeigh’s bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City.

David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, was no Weaver. He and his followers constituted a classic religious cult, not a right-wing paramilitary organization. Nonetheless, the burning of his compound, in which more than 80 people died, rapidly became new evidence for conservatives of how evil government can be.

FBI and Justice Department officials repeatedly insist that Koresh started the fire. Right-wing extremists have never believed them. Nor do they believe the FBI when it now says its tear-gas canisters were used too early and too far away to be responsible for the fire in the main compound. So deep is right-wing suspicion of government that it approaches paranoia: Anything government says in its own defense becomes further cause to distrust government.

Like just about everyone else in the United States, I have no way of knowing whether the canisters used by the FBI started the fire or whether Koresh did. As a one-time new-left radical who eventually obtained his own FBI file, I have no particular reason to trust the bureau’s word. Nor, it seems, does Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who, on Wednesday, ordered federal marshals to seize tape recordings from FBI headquarters. Government makes mistakes; in both the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents, the FBI made plenty of them. Yet, for all the incompetence--and potential malevolence--of the FBI, there is reason to fear those who attack government more than government itself.

At stake in the debate over the FBI’s role in Waco is a paradox that lies at the heart of America’s attitude toward government. Right-wing opponents of the bureau speak in the language of freedom and rights. They imagine themselves the Lone Ranger: self-sufficient, free to roam, uncorrupted by civilization and its annoying obligations. From their point of view, government is by nature oppressive. Those who defend it, they believe, have no love of freedom; they are incipient authoritarians intent on denying others the right to be left alone.

In reality, this picture is out of focus. It took those pro-government enthusiasts known as the Founding Fathers long days and nights to create a government that made individual freedom possible. It then took a Civil War before those freedoms could be exercised by all citizens. One reason why African Americans support government more than any other group of Americans is their recognition that a weak and decentralized government meant that they would remain in slavery. Only a powerful central government could give them the freedom they deserved. By the 20th century, nearly all Americans had come to understand that government was there to fight the wars abroad and correct the abuses at home that made it possible for them to live with dignity and respect.

But romantic myths die hard, none more so than the dream that life was once simpler and purer than it is now. In attacking government in the name of these myths, right-wingers are really attacking freedom. The language of rights they employ involves rights for states or gun owners or ranchers, not rights for all. To give credence to their paranoia is to undermine what it has taken 200 years to fashion. Clumsy tactics by the FBI have given them their best opportunity in decades to try to repeal the freedoms we all enjoy.

Law-enforcement officials had no trouble upholding the sanctity of the law when civil-rights demonstrators and antiwar protesters were breaking it. But they seem hamstrung and incompetent when white supremacists, militia members and anti-abortion fanatics take the law into their own hands.

Some leftists, no doubt recalling the bad old days when the FBI was their enemy, are cheered by the bureau’s current embarrassments, even if such views make them allies of the extreme right. But most liberals have come to recognize that the rule of law is as important now as conservatives believed it was then.

The FBI and the Justice Department have a hard enough job upholding the law in a society that has a soft spot for disorder. They could use some support from conservatives who once believed that their country could be strong only if its government were as well.*