J. Edgar and the Gipper on the Berkeley Barricades

The transition from writing short, descriptive newspaper articles to authoring a book-length, analytical work of history can be challenging; and Seth Rosen-feld—a prize-winning investigative reporter—has not had an easy time of it. His Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power has been sharply criticized by veterans and historians of the Black Panthers, the Berkeley Third World Strike, and the Bay Area's Asian American community over its naming of the late Richard Aoki as an FBI informant in the 1960s and 1970s. Rosenfeld based this charge on FBI files and interviews with two FBI agents; and he writes that Aoki, known for his role in arming the Panthers, helped to set the Panthers on the road to "violence, legal trouble, and discredit. . . . Did Aoki help the Panthers fight for justice, or did he set them up?" (p. 424). Rosenfeld also implied that Aoki served as an agent provocateur on the Berkeley campus when he "encouraged physical confrontations" during its Third World Strike (p. 419). Aoki, a widely respected '60s movement veteran, had been the subject of a recent admiring biography and documentary film; so his friends, biographers, and political compatriots reacted to the informant allegation with denial, disbelief, and disdain for Rosenfeld's work. They charged that the evidence from the FBI files was too thin for definitive conclusions and that Rosenfeld's interview with Aoki (in which Aoki denied having been an informer) did not inspire confidence in Rosenfeld's conclusions. Some accused Rosenfeld of having kept the informer charges secret and springing them on the public in a newspaper article the week of his book release so as to make headlines that would maximize sales of Subversives. Rosenfeld responded by charging his critics with bias and publishing a newspaper article on yet more recently released FBI files confirming Aoki's work as an FBI informant.¹

Rosenfeld's discussion of Aoki in Subversives seems a better fit with his old genre, a newspaper story, than an in-depth historical study. Though Rosenfeld writes that he conducted "a lengthy interview" with Aoki in 2000, Subversives offers from that interview only a paragraph of convoluted Aoki quotes on the informant charge and less than a chapter portraying Aoki (p. 422). Rosenfeld's intimation that the Panthers fell into their romance with guns because one FBI informant "set them up" is absurd and reflects a lack of awareness of the precedents for armed black self-defense that influenced the Panthers, including those set by both Robert Williams and the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Rosenfeld's critics have suggested that such claims reflect a lack of familiarity with the growing historical literature on the Black Panthers—a critique that seems accurate.² Had Aoki not provided the Panthers with guns, they surely would have acquired them elsewhere—something that would almost certainly have come out had more Panthers been interviewed and the discussion of Aoki been balanced by sources outside the FBI. Still, Rosenfeld deserves credit for uncovering the FBI sources. Unless historians of the Panthers want to descend into hagiography, they must grapple with the possibility that informants of all kinds of political backgrounds—including some on the Left—spied on the Black Power movement. It also needs to be said that, since there were occasions in which some Panthers descended into criminality, including torture and murder, the presence of informants in the Panthers ought not be surprising.³

Identifying Aoki as an informant, however, should not have been an end in itself but an opening for probing—via oral history and other sources—the fascinating story of why someone who had apparently once served as an informant would have remained a Left activist long beyond the 1960s, and long after any possible FBI connections had ended. There are many unanswered questions as to the nature, quality, and quantity of...