Johnny Maverick has decided, at this late date, to simply shred any last bit of honor he used to have, and go for broke:
Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama’s character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat’s judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said.
With just a month to go until Election Day, McCain’s team has decided that its emphasis on the senator’s biography as a war hero, experienced lawmaker and straight-talking maverick is insufficient to close a growing gap with Obama. The Arizonan’s campaign is also eager to move the conversation away from the economy, an issue that strongly favors Obama and has helped him to a lead in many recent polls.
“We’re going to get a little tougher,” a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. “We’ve got to question this guy’s associations. Very soon. There’s no question that we have to change the subject here,” said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
To that end, Sarah Palin has been dispatched to…well, lie, evidently:
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists” because of his association with a former 1960s radical, stepping up the campaign’s effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters.
The terrorist in question is Bill Ayers. “Wait,” you say. “You mean the Bill Ayers that Larry Johnson, Gun Counter Gomer, and the Cornerites have been claiming would destroy Obama’s campaign for 15 months now? The one that Obama isn’t actually close to, much less ‘pals’ with?” Yeah, that one. Now, Ayers was an idiot forty years ago, and while his existence did occasionally get my parents out of college classes as professors went to Chicago to attend Weatherman-related trials, well, that’s the main positive contribution he made. Still, it was the late ’60s, and if you were alive to remember that time, you know that the wheels had pretty much come off the wagon. If, like me, you’re not old enough to remember the ’60s, then you probably don’t really give a damn about what a guy did before you have a memory.
For the record, Ayers did some stupid, dangerous things, and while the only people his group killed were members of his group, he probably should have ended up in jail. But he didn’t, and the government has made its decision on that, and in the end, he’s now a professor at the University of Chicago, and he’s worked with Mayor Richard M. Daley, D-Chicago, as such, he’s crossed paths with former University of Chicago professor and Chicago politician Barack Obama. Were they best friends? Compatriots? Comrades? No. Ayers is Obama’s terrorist pal in the same sense that G. Gordon Liddy is John McCain’s terrorist pal.
Of course, Palin didn’t mention Ayers by name, and no doubt that’s intentional; if you mention that Obama knows a college professor who used to be a ’60s radical…well, hell, who doesn’t? But say Obama knows terrorists, and you’re implying that he’s buddies with Osama bin Laden. No doubt, McCain knows this, which is why he had his campaign give Palin that particular cue card with that particular phrasing.
My suspicion is that this won’t work, and may even backfire. Palin’s approach today was anvillicious to say the least, and the fact is that while Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko will inevitably surface yet again, their juice was exhausted long ago. (Incidentally, Democrats who wanted Hillary Clinton to drop out early: you owe her a big thanks for ignoring you. If Clinton’s campaign hadn’t pushed these things in the primary, they’d be news now. Instead, they’re “old news,” stuff everyone knows, and just as John McCain’s role in the S&L crisis isn’t being rehashed, neither will Wright, Rezko, or Ayers draw media scrutiny.)
But the GOP will start slinging mud, all the mud they can find. I expect it will get ugly, and the racist subtext will become overt racism by the time we’re done — because I have no faith whatsoever that McCain will behave honorably. He hasn’t thus far.
Jesus Christ once asked, in Matthew 16:26, “For what does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” John McCain won’t know. For while he is assiduously giving his soul away with each passing day, he will not gain the presidency from it. He will just lose all that he once claimed to hold valuable.
Bill Ayers should have gone to prison. People died, the fact that they were part of his group doesn’t change anything. One of the people who died is an alumna of my college, another alumna went to prison and was recently released while Bill Ayers got away scot free. But Barack Obama did not know Bill Ayers when Bill Ayers was involved in crininal activity and could not have given the difference in their ages and locations at the time. In 1968 Obama was 6 and 7 years old. Even the Weathermen did not recruit children and bring them across state lines.
McCain is stooping to guilt by vague association. By his logic, no one who graduated from my college, Bryn Mawr, should be allowed to win political office if they attended during the years 2 Weatherwomen were at Bryn Mawr, because they DID know them. Instead a Bryn Mawr alumna is now the first female president of Harvard.
This smacks so much of McCarthyism it makes me sick to my stomach. I didn’t live through McCartyism but I know folks who did and grew up hearing the stories. We can’t let this stand. The media needs to call McCain and Palin on their willingness to use McCartyite tactics. McCain has no decency.
Alison, Ayers should have gone to prison for what he did do, but the fact that the only people who died in activities he was part of were fellow Weathermen is relevant to distinguishing him from terrorists who seek to kill their enemies. That means the dead weren’t innocent victims. If you blow yourself up with your own bomb, that’s poetic justice and not something for which other people should be held morally responsible.
Ayers fundamentally is most comparable to the kind of asshole anarchists who routinely screw up protests by smashing Starbucks windows — they talk an ugly game of violence, but at most they’re doing property damage. You can replace a window; you can’t replace people. Ayers and Dohrn recognize the distinction. Chicago Magazine reported that “just before the September 11th attacks,” Richard Elrod, a city lawyer injured in the Weathermen’s Chicago “Days of Rage,” received an apology from Ayers and Dohrn for their part in the violence. “[T]hey were remorseful,” Elrod says. “They said, ‘We’re sorry that things turned out this way.'”
Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, not at UChicago. This actually is a notable distinction, because it means that a state-supported school, in a state that has a fair number of Republican state legislators who decide how much funding the schools gets, went ahead and hired Ayers, gave him tenure and even has given him awards. It’s odd how Obama seems to be the only person or institution who cannot shake hands with Ayers and Dohrn. The white shoe law firm Sidley & Austin hired Dohrn even though she couldn’t pass NY’s character & fitness requirement due to her past; no boycott of Sidley (I know literally half a dozen people, including a couple of Republicans, who work for the firm). Northwestern Law hired Dohrn to be a clinical professor; again, no big alumni organized to refuse to donate to Northwestern until she was kicked off the faculty. The Annenberg Foundation gave money to a project that they knew would involve Ayers heavily; didn’t seem to give them pause. Ayers and Dohrn seem to be deemed socially acceptable right up until Barack Obama was on a board with Ayers and drank coffee Dohrn had made.
Stanley Kurtz’s whole “Ayers’s educational philosophy is radically anti-American and would disqualify him from being a respectable person even if he hadn’t bombed anything” is ludicrous. If that were true, why keep bringing up the bombings? He knows very well that he can’t convince anyone except committed conservatives that an educational philosophy that emphasizes anti-racism is radical and anti-American. Moreover, Ayers’s leadership has been in school movements that are now widely accepted, such as the small-schools movement that has become particularly important to minimizing the need for police-state style schools of metal detectors and armed policemen.
Kurtz also has no compunction about dishonesty with regard to Ayers. For example, he refers to “Ayers’ infamous conduct on 9/11,” which refers to an article about Ayers that the NYTimes had interviewed him for several days before 9/11 and coincidentally published on that day.
Ayers seems to regard his conduct in protest of the Vietnam War in a manner that P.J. O’Rourke might sympathize with (if O’Rourke weren’t contractually bound to loathe the people he used to hang out with). O’Rourke once remarked that the people he saw at Christian fundamentalist rallies were really just like the people he saw in Hezbollah. Sure, Hezbollah acts more extremely, but their circumstances are more extreme.
Similarly, Ayers felt himself to be in an extreme situation of a government that was shipping unwilling young men to a foreign country in order to bomb that country to pieces and in the process kill millions of innocent civilians. He chose the absolute wrong way to cope with that situation from a pragmatic as well as moral perspective — longhaired hippies destroying stuff did not cause the electorate to vote out warmongers — but I see why he refuses to apologize for the crimes he committed.
You make good points. Are we a society that believes in redemption and rehabilitation or not for one, although you did not bring that up directly. The lack of remorse bothers me. I do remember those times, I wore a black ribbon to high school every day for at least a year. I went to the protests, I leafletted, I did all the non-violent things that a young person could do. I never thought violence would stop the war. I never thought we were in a Nazi occupied or run country situation in which one would have to examine one’s passivism or have it tested at the least. They were bombing symbols, not tools of war and certainly not train tracks leading to the camps or earlier in our own history markets where slaves were bought and sold. Symbolic civil disobedience can be effective but people who do it take the consequences, such as Swords Into Plowshares for hammering and denting a helicopter outside Philly years ago.
But you raise an important question: is shunning the way we want to be as a society/culture? Does it work? Does it make us better or worse? Does it make the people we shun better or worse? I tend to think the latter but that does not mean I am innocent of shunning those who break some laws such as child molesting. Lots more questions than answers here.
See this is why I feel out of place on Alas now. There are arguments to be made against Bill Ayers and the weatherman, but this post doesn’t even make them, just takes them for granted.
If the argument is against bombs, then Bill Clinton’s bombings killed far more people than the weathermen ever did. And if Obama gets elected then by the end of his term, history indicates he’ll be responsible for more bodies as well.
The argument isn’t against bombs. Bombs sometimes are necessary. However, a government by definition is supposed to have a monopoly on the legal use of force. Other uses of force are extra-legal and therefore punishable. The Weathermen were not legally authorized to use force and therefore were subject to punishment under the law. Nor do I see the law that punishes extra-legal uses of force as being in any way an unjust law; I believe it is necessary to our society.
Intent is important. People remember the firebombing of Dresden and nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they were blatantly targeting or at the very best recklessly indifferent to the civilians who would die. I don’t think Clinton ordered any bombings with the intent of or reckless indifference to killing of civilians. Yes, civilians died, but they were not the intended targets and their deaths may have been compensated (my understanding is that the U.S./ Iraqi government have been compensating families for innocent civilians who are killed or injured by U.S. forces as well).
But PG, I don’t think it’s sufficient to say that people who are not the state, and who use force, deserve punishment. There are unjust states; there are justified rebellions against states.
I’m not saying the Weathermen were justified. My point is, if the Weathermen are to be condemned, it must be based on something other than them not being the state. And they arguably operated with the intention of not killing anyone — which doesn’t, in my view, much mitigate the fact that they did kill several people. Killing people was a predictable (if not intentional) outcome of using arms to rob an armored car.
Not unlike dropping bombs. A pox on both houses.
PG – and that’s what I mean about feeling out of place. I think that state violence is illegitimate, and used to maintain capitalism, and all forms of oppression and dominance. Your analysis seems completely out of the context that the weathermen were created them. How can you talk about the legitimate violence of the state and avoiding civilian casualties at the time of the weathermen? The role of the US state in Vietnam is clear.
My criticisms of the weathermen are about vanguardism, isolating themselves, lack of organising, misogyny, and stupidity.
Amp – I don’t remember anything about robbing an armoured car. Was that the weathermen or something someone from the weathermen did later? I thought the only deaths caused by the weatherman was from the bomb that was set off by accident killing their own. And that from that point forward they ensured they avoided any casualties. (if you’re talking about the armed robbery in 1981, which is included in wikipedia, that was after Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers turned themselves in).
PG:
Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, not at UChicago. This actually is a notable distinction, because it means that a state-supported school, in a state that has a fair number of Republican state legislators who decide how much funding the schools gets, went ahead and hired Ayers, gave him tenure and even has given him awards.
The fact that William Ayers received a distinction at the hands of UIC does not elevate William Ayers; it degrades UIC.
And you misinterpret the roles of parties in Illinois politics. If you’re a Chicago politician, you’re a Democrat. If you’re Downstate, you’re a Republican. They tussle over the suburbs, but what really matters is if you’re a part of the Combine or not. This is why you occasionally see Democratic politicians donating money to Republican campaigns. This is why the Illinois GOP actively drove out a sitting Republican Senator rather than support him against Barak Obama. It didn’t matter what party they were in; what mattered was whether or not they were part of the Combine. William Ayers is a minor but real part of it. As such, the Downstate politicians aren’t really going to worry about what awards he gets. Kind of like how the Mafia doesn’t care who you kill as long as it’s not another Mafia member or someone like a cop who brings a lot of heat on the organization.
It’s odd how Obama seems to be the only person or institution who cannot shake hands with Ayers and Dohrn.
Actually, any decent person or institution shouldn’t shake hands with Ayers and Dohrn. You just don’t see too many such people in power or politics in Hyde Park.
Alison:
You make good points. Are we a society that believes in redemption and rehabilitation or not for one, although you did not bring that up directly. The lack of remorse bothers me.
We are a society that believes in redemption and rehabilitation. But only after one expresses regret and remorse, accepts a burden of responsibility, and at least tries to make amends. What has William Ayers done for the parents and other relatiaves of Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins?
But you raise an important question: is shunning the way we want to be as a society/culture?
Well, you can shun such a person. Or you can engage them and seek to get them to see the error of their ways. The latter should be tried and may well work if you can reach the humanity in the person you’re dealing with. But some people are obdurate (at least past one’s skills of persuasion). At some point shunning them is what you’re left with.
Maia, there was at least one other death. Go to the section of the Wiki on the Weathermen entitled “Anti-personnel bomb set on window-ledge in San Francisco”. Police Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell was killed and Officer Robert Fogarty was severly wounded and partially blinded by an anti-personnel bomb. Ayers didn’t make or place the bomb. But he was a very active part of the overall group that encouraged and enabled this kind of thing. He apparently did at least know who did commit this murder and how to find them but did nothing to bring them to justice (they were not married at the time).
What I have found rather astonishing in this whole thing is how Ayers and Dohrn are socially accepted and even lauded within the academic community overall and the Hyde Park community in particular. I’m not astonished at how they’re also accepted in the Chicago Democratic organization; they’ll do anything for votes. Association with Mayor Daley is not a positive recommendation. But as this story has developed there have been a few stories in the Chicago papers revolving around intereviews of Mayor Daley and people in the Hyde Park and UIC community. Some have even written letters to the papers – all of the “my good friend Bill Ayers” variety. Some try to justify what he did. Some take the “it was a long time ago and he wasn’t convicted of anything” approach. It has lowered my estimation of that community seriously. I am greatly surprised that you see no one in public take the approach of “Oh, my God. I had no idea. This man has something to answer for” attitude. I wonder if any of them have done so in private.
I think that state violence is illegitimate, and used to maintain capitalism, and all forms of oppression and dominance.
Maia, I’m interested in your definition of “state violence”. I accept that there is such a thing, and that the actions of military forces, especially overseas, would be an example. But is there anything else you’d qualify as such?
For example, would the actions of police qualify as such? Let’s say that someone broke into your house and threatened your person and the police showed up and used violence to subdue them. Would that qualify as state violence?
Can state violence be justifiably used to defend against the violence of another state? When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 12/7/41, American military personnel were killed and American sailors and soldiers and Marines fought back. I should think that their actions in attempting to shoot down Japanese planes would be “state violence”. Was that justified?
If he has not expressed remorse to the parents of Diana Oughton (if they are still living) and the others killed and does not think he needs to, than I do not understand how anyone can write letters saying “it was a long time ago” etc. Frankly there was some disagreement on the Bryn Mawr alumnae listserv when Kathy Boudin was paroled about what one’s attitude should be towards her and she DID express remorse, serve prison time, do community type service in prison and lost custody of her child due to her imprisonment. I would come down that she did her time and took responsbility and deserves acceptance at this point.
The war in Vietnam did not justify the deaths of innocent policemen who just happened to be doing their jobs on the day an action was planned. The willingness to sacrifice the lives of others who have not agreed to be sacrificed for one’s cause is not an attitude I can condone in anyone at that time in that place. We were not living under slavery nor fascism in this country at that time. This was not a revolt against slavery before the civil war by slaves and non-slaves, such a non-state violent plan that ended in the deaths of slave holders or even police who upheld slavery laws would be entirely different morally to me, but such was not the case no matter how much we want to say the ’60’s was a special case. People are dying in Iraq today, innocents. Does it justify violence in the U.S. by U.S. citizens against other U.S. citizens? I say it does not.
Maia, you’re right, Ayers can’t legitimately be held responsible for an incident that happened after he left the group. I didn’t mean to imply he was responsible for the robbery; I was talking about The Weathermen as a group.
Ron, as far as I know — and I could be wrong — the only evidence of the Weathermen’s involvement with the February 1970 window ledge bomb is the claim of an FBI plant. (Unlike other bombings committed by the Weathermen, where they claimed responsibility). The FBI during COINTELPRO days is not a credible source.
Allison and Ron, is there any evidence that Ayers has any responsibility at all for the deaths of Diana Oughton and the other two Weathermen members who were killed when a nail bomb they were building went off? If it was somehow his fault, then I agree that he should express remorse; but I tend to think that the people who killed themselves while trying to build a bomb, are the ones most at fault for their own deaths.
I’m still puzzled by the idea that people who get together to do risky things (like making a nail bomb) owe such a great responsibility to one another that if some of them get hurt or killed in the process, the rest owe an apology to the families of the deceased. I went to trapeze school at a friend’s invitation; if I had gotten hurt or killed in the process, of course she would feel sad and sorry about it, but I don’t think she should have accepted any responsibility for it. I agreed to do it; she didn’t force me. So far as I know, all of the Weathermen who were killed by the bomb were present willingly and therefore took responsibility for any harm they might come to. I am sure that Ayers and Dohrn expressed the same remorse to those families as they did to Elrod: we do not think we acted wrongly, but we did not want anyone to get hurt and we are sorry that this happened.
There can be an unjust state, for example an apartheid state, and I still will think that people who use force except in direct defense of self and others (which under Anglo-American common law is a defense against prosecution for a crime) should be punished for doing so except as they successfully mount an open armed revolution against the governing state (the Weathermen did not do this), at which point they’re the new boss and can’t be punished by the old boss. We simply cannot have a society in which people use force whenever they feel justified in doing so — that’s a society of bullies, psychopaths and Weathermen. In a democratic society in which all adults may exercise the franchise, the use of force even for a revolution is highly questionable.
RonF,
Actually, any decent person or institution shouldn’t shake hands with Ayers and Dohrn. You just don’t see too many such people in power or politics in Hyde Park.
As I described, Ayers and Dohrn have had associations far beyond Hyde Park politicians. You are describing as indecent the people at Bank Street College and Columbia University’s Teachers’ College, both in NYC, who admitted Ayers for the MA and PhD programs; the people at Sidley & Austin – NY and Northwestern Law who hired Dohrn to work there. If you are serious about whom you consider indecent, I can easily formulate a blacklist of the folks who have done something to benefit Ayers and Dohrn — and who, being their contemporaries at the times of their crimes, were far more likely than Barack Obama, who spent most of the 1960s in Indonesia and the 1970s in Hawaii, to know who the Weathermen were.
I suspect this guilt-by-association will end up stretching further than you or most of those who condemn Obama will want to stomach, but if America must be morally cleansed of Weathermen associates, I’m ready to answer the call by documenting who was on the Bank Street and Columbia admissions committees, as well as their superiors stretching up to Columbia’s president; who was on Ayers’s thesis committee; who was on the Sidley hiring committee; who is on the Northwestern Law faculty hiring committee; who has ever commended Ayers’s books and work as an education advocate, or Dohrn’s work for women and families. Let’s round up those guilty of letting Ayers and Dohrn make something better of their lives than their activities in the 1960s and ’70s would have predicted.
Anassa Kata, Alison!
Ron, how do you feel about people who shake hands with (and say that they’re proud of) G. Gordon Liddy?
G. Gordon Liddy is full of … big talk. All he ever actually DID was to break into an office, an action which I condemn and for which he deservedly served his time. Now, John McCain should have nothing to do with the man, and I do consider that it diminishes him to associate with the man. But Liddy didn’t kill anyone.
William Ayers actually DID help with a plan that led to 3 deaths and whose intent to plant bombs was thwarted by incompetence, not a lack of will or planning. You do that and you’ll find yourself on trial for 3 counts of murder (or manslaughter, depending). I don’t find the fact that the people who died were the people who were planning to set the bombs particularly relevant. He helped plan an activity that killed 3 people. They’re dead. And I don’t see that he particularly gives a shit about their loss or that of their families, or any remorse for the concept that planting bombs was an appropriate way to express anti-war opinions. And Ayers has been much more central to Obama’s career (especially the start) than Liddy has ever been to McCain’s.
I would be interested to hear why John McCain would have anything to do with Liddy.
You and I will have to disagree on the veracity of the FBI in the matter of the death in San Francisco.
PG, there’s rather a big difference between inviting someone to engage in an activity run by someone else whose intent is to train or entertain someone in a legal activity, vs. encouraging and enabling someone to build bombs and use them to at the least destroy property and possibly injure or kill people.
As far as Ayers’ and Dohrn’s other associations go; first, I don’t see where someone sitting on an admissions committee for degree programs at colleges are necessarily responsible for digging into someone’s past history. So it’s entirely possible that they didn’t know anything about it. The same goes for his employers, at least when it gets past the standard “were you ever convicted of a felony” type of question (to which he could legitimately answer “No”). Then there’s the issue of what legal questions are involved; could the schools legally deny him admission to their schools or could employers refuse to hire them based on this part of their personal history?
OTOH, if they DID know about these things and they DID associate with them beyond what was legally necessary, then yes; they deserve condemnation. And give what I’ve been reading about the general reaction in UIC and Mayor Daley’s circles towards what’s been publicized about them so far, it would neither surprise nor bother me if the list was lengthy.
PG, there’s rather a big difference between inviting someone to engage in an activity run by someone else whose intent is to train or entertain someone in a legal activity, vs. encouraging and enabling someone to build bombs and use them to at the least destroy property and possibly injure or kill people.
There’s a difference for the people who own the property you’re trying to destroy. How is there a difference in your liability, moral or legal, to your willing accomplices?
William Ayers actually DID help with a plan that led to 3 deaths and whose intent to plant bombs was thwarted by incompetence, not a lack of will or planning. You do that and you’ll find yourself on trial for 3 counts of murder (or manslaughter, depending).
You might want to check on Ayers’s federal indictment before you start pontificating about the charges on which one would find oneself on trial. He was indicted for crossing state lines to incite riot (Days of Rage in Chicago) and conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.
As far as Ayers’ and Dohrn’s other associations go; first, I don’t see where someone sitting on an admissions committee for degree programs at colleges are necessarily responsible for digging into someone’s past history. So it’s entirely possible that they didn’t know anything about it. The same goes for his employers, at least when it gets past the standard “were you ever convicted of a felony” type of question (to which he could legitimately answer “No”).
If you were old enough and knowledgeable enough to be on an admissions or hiring committee in New York in the mid to late 1980s, you were old and knowledgeable enough to have been reading the NYTimes in 1980 when Dohrn and Ayers came aboveground and made headlines, and to remember their names a couple years later. Contrast with Obama, who graduate from high school in Hawaii in 1979 and didn’t come to NYC until 1981. He’s a lot closer to my generation, and I’d never heard of Ayers or Dohrn, and barely had heard of the Weathermen, until it came up in relation to Obama.
Then there’s the issue of what legal questions are involved; could the schools legally deny him admission to their schools or could employers refuse to hire them based on this part of their personal history?
Yes, of course. There’s no anti-discrimination law that protect felons, anarchists or unpleasant folks generally. It was actually peculiar for Sidley & Austin to hire Dohrn considering that she had passed the NY bar exam but couldn’t be admitted to the bar because she failed the “character & fitness” requirement, but of course there’s a lot of good work someone can do even before being admitted to the bar (I know tons of law school graduates who don’t bother applying to join the bar for years because they never go to court). So far as I know, Dohrn isn’t eligible to practice in Illinois either, yet she’s on Northwestern Law’s clinical faculty. FYI, that’s on the Michigan Mile, not Hyde Park — Hyde Park is for UChicago folks.
Ron, regarding your comment #15:
1) For a popular radio host to encourage his audience to shoot ATF agents isn’t just talk; it’s dangerous, and shows (at best) reckless indifference to human life.
2) So if Obama appeared on the radio show of a radical leftist who advocated killing cops — but had never done anything further — you’d have absolutely no problem with that?
Of course you would. But John McCain will never be held to the same standard that you hold Obama to.
3) I don’t care to defend William Ayers. But I also don’t think that proving that Ayers acted like an asshole, and with incredible indifference to the harm he caused, means much.
4) Are you saying that the FBI in the late 60s or early 70s never lied or broke the law?