PRATT

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. — Last week, Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt lumbered out of the legal jungle like one of those dinosaurs in “The Lost World,” a vestige of a political Paleolithic Age when we were told that we were in great danger and only drastic measures could save us. Twenty-five years ago, Pratt, a former leader of the militant Black Panthers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, was convicted of robbing and then killing a Santa Monica schoolteacher. The damning witness at his trial was a Panther associate and rival who testified that Pratt had confessed the crime to him. Now, however, it appears there was a slight problem: At the time, the witness was an LAPD informant with four felony pleas on his record. As a result, a judge has now ordered a new trial.

How times have changed. Pratt may just be the last victim of the old FBI mentality that infected so many law-enforcement agencies over the last 40 years, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation seemed able to destroy its enemies with cool dispatch and leave no traces. Today, of course, the FBI is seen as anything but efficient. After the fiascoes at Ruby Ridge and Waco; after letting the Unabomber slip through its fingers for more than a decade; after an agent was convicted of treason; after the recent Justice Department report condemning practices at the vaunted FBI lab, and after an FBI van full of munitions was stolen last week, the bureau seems more of a threat to itself than to our civil liberties.

But the difference between the FBI of then and the FBI of now is not only a measure of its devolution. It is also a gauge of how government itself has changed and how our confidence in its effectiveness has eroded. To anyone growing up in the ‘50s, the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover was the stuff of legend. No criminal escaped the bureau’s vigilance. Agents were brilliant, courageous and athletic; and Hoover himself seemed a paragon of virtue--a man who selflessly fought to protect his country. For a time, he was mentioned as presidential timber.

This had not come about without some effort. Back in the early ‘30s, when marauders like John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde roamed the country robbing banks, kidnapping and leaving a swath of destruction behind, many Americans demanded to know why the FBI was taking so long to catch them. The bureau was widely regarded as inept, and Hoover was routinely called onto the carpet by Congress. Infuriated, he redoubled the bureau’s efforts to nab the desperadoes and seized credit for captures when local police were responsible.

Though it may have seemed he was waging an anti-crime campaign, Hoover was really conducting a public-relations campaign. He wrote articles and books extolling the bureau. He cooperated with Hollywood on polishing the bureau’s image, with films like “G-Men.” And he cultivated journalists by putting them on his “special correspondents” list and feeding them information. Columnists and commentators like George Sokolsky, Fulton Lewis Jr., Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and, most important, Walter Winchell all became press agents for Hoover, championing the FBI and lambasting its enemies. Indeed, Hoover devoted so much time to his PR effort that one could justly have said the FBI’s real purpose was image and crime-fighting was only a means to this end.

There was, however, one crime Hoover did feel passionately about: sedition. He had come to the bureau after heading the Justice Department’s anti-sedition section in World War I, and the experience seemed to be seminal for him. A paranoid, he found enemies everywhere, and when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a directive in 1936 to investigate Nazi activities in America, Hoover broadened the authority to investigate anyone he felt might be subversive--a long, wide-ranging list that included liberals, minorities, intellectuals and artists.

It was after World War II, during the Red Scare, that Hoover perfected the tactics by which later generations would come to know him. Though the Soviet KGB was the ostensible target, it was also the model. Operating under a counterintelligence division he called COINTELPRO, Hoover launched a war against his enemies, circulating ugly rumors about them in the friendly press, sending false information to the subjects of investigations to goad them into reacting, wiretapping phones, contacting their employers. It was this sort of covert activity that Pratt would ultimately be victimized by.

Thus the writer Dashiell Hammett, who promoted and raised money for left-wing causes, became a target of an FBI operation in which the bureau tried to create schisms in the left by sending him anonymous letters and articles sowing dissension, and then invading his house without a warrant when Winchell provided a tip that four communist fugitives were hiding there. Even after his death, the bureau fought to keep Hammett from being buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

The same tactics were directed at hundreds of others in the ‘50s, but the bureau incurred little wrath from the general public because it was only doing the public’s will. There was more opposition in the ‘60s, when Hoover discovered a new roster of enemies. He harbored a special hatred for civil-rights leaders and worked mightily to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. by trying to link him to communists. When that proved fruitless, he used wiretaps to try to blackmail King by threatening to reveal sexual indiscretions. In fairness, though, he did the same to President John F. Kennedy. Hoover had the goods on them all.

One of the eeriest examples of the kind of vendettas Hoover could wage was his smear campaign against the actress Jean Seberg. Modishly left-wing, Seberg had taken up the cause of the Black Panthers and helped raise funds for them among her Hollywood friends. In Hoover’s eyes, this may have been crime enough, but Seberg had also become intimate with a Panther leader, and sex exercised the FBI director almost as much as subversion. Determined to cripple her, the FBI tipped the immigration service to have Seberg’s luggage searched, pestered her with anonymous phone calls and quite possibly, though the FBI would obviously never own up to it, poisoned her cats.

The piece de resistance of the operation, however, was circulation of a false item that Seberg was pregnant with the baby of her Black Panther lover. “It is felt the possible publication of ‘Seberg’s plight’ would cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public,” went an FBI memo. To this end, the bureau furnished the rumor to Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber, who published it as a blind item. From there, the item was widely circulated, with Seberg the obvious subject. Soon after, Seberg suffered a miscarriage--the baby was not the Black Panther’s-- and later wound up committing suicide, her ex-husband Romain Gary said, because she could never escape the trauma of what the FBI had done to her.

By the time of the Seberg operation, the FBI was no longer perceived as quite as sterling as it had once been. Most Americans may not have much liked campus radicals, civil-rights leaders and Hollywood stars who supported left-wing causes, but the public didn’t see them as automatons of Soviet domination, either. Gradually, the ‘50s image of Hoover as a righteous guardian gave way to the ‘60s image of a bitter old man who could not be controlled--even by the president.

In a sense, the FBI was a casualty of the breakdown of the old liberal consensus. So long as Americans were largely unified on policies and enemies--as they were roughly from the mid-’30s through the early ‘60s--the FBI was regarded favorably. When that consensus began to splinter, with the Vietnam War, the FBI lost its authority. Suspicious of government generally, Americans became especially suspicious of the government’s most efficient instrument. Operations once applauded were now excoriated.

It has been a long road downhill for the FBI, from overzealous activities during Vietnam to underzealous investigations during Watergate to the zealous ineptitude of today. Almost no one believes in government efficiency anymore, except the crackpot right-wing militiamen who think the FBI is now conspiring against them the way it once conspired against the left. For most everyone else, the FBI, like the KGB, is largely a shell--a reminder of another time. Pratt is a reminder, too, of those days when Americans trusted the system so much that law enforcement was given carte blanche. The events of last week show we’re not likely to pass that way again.