Back at PLO, Flint and I were greeted with congratulations. We wanted to push the Hampton case, but it seemed stuck in slow motion. The defendants filed motions to dismiss, challenging the sufficiency of our conspiracy allegations and claiming Hanrahan was immune from civil suit because he was the prosecutor. Judge Perry was in no hurry to decide the motions or to allow us to begin deposing the defendants.
By 1971 the Panthers in Chicago and nationally had diminished in size and influence. They weren’t recruiting new members and the Chicago chapter never regained the size it was before Fred’s murder. No one could replace Fred’s charisma, energy, or organizing ability.
The Panthers’ primary activities became the selling of the Black Panther paper, the maintenance of the office on Madison Street, and administering a now-diminished breakfast program and health clinic. Many municipalities, including Chicago, began to implement their own free breakfast programs, taking away one of the Panthers’ primary sources for community outreach and support. While the Panthers could rightfully claim they had initiated the breakfast programs, they received only the continued harassment from the city officials who had copied them. Years later, with the community pressure gone, the city abandoned the breakfast program.
The split between most of the West Coast Panthers, including Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who was living in exile in Algeria, took its toll on all the Panther chapters. Many Panthers left because they sympathized with Eldridge, who espoused the need for underground armed units. The Chicago chapter allied itself with the West Coast Panthers, who had given up much of their militancy. With their leadership constantly being arrested and put on trial, the West Coast Panthers devoted most of their energy to freeing them.
Some revelations in 1971 suggested additional reasons for the Panthers’ decline. In March antiwar protesters who later identified themselves as the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. After the break-in, they clandestinely began releasing documents they had seized. These documents exposed the secret FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). One of the documents they released was a memo from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to all FBI offices, ordering FBI agents in all cities with Panther chapters to develop “hard-hitting programs designed to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” black nationalist organizations, including SNCC and the Nation of Islam. Another stated objective was to “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.” Stokely Carmichael, Dr. King, and Elijah Muhammad were named as potential “messiahs.” Hoover ordered that COINTELPRO’s existence be kept secret. Every office was to report directly to him on its efforts to carry out the program’s mandates.
“Do you think this COINTELPRO had something to do with the raid?” Dennis asked Flint and me when the documents were first published.
I was wondering the same thing. “We always thought this was Hanrahan’s thing,” I answered. “But maybe he had help.”
In 1971, William O’Neal left the Panthers. He became the lessee and manager of an Arco gas station in Maywood, only a few blocks from the Hampton home. When Dennis and I visited O’Neal, he told us “this gas station supports Panthers involved in underground activities.” He said he was sure clandestine work was “what Fred would have wanted” and he was carrying out Fred’s intentions. He claimed a vague connection to the politics of armed struggle that Eldridge Cleaver espoused. O’Neal was particularly vehement in denouncing the Chicago Panthers for having no military capability.
Even with his businessman aura, O’Neal tried to impress Dennis and me by bragging about how he could go in and out of the business and criminal worlds. He claimed he and his friends Robert Bruce and Nathaniel Junior, two ex-Panthers, were regularly committing burglaries.
In June of 1971 the New York Times and the Washington Post printed the Pentagon Papers. These were top-secret documents smuggled out of the Defense Department and copied by Daniel Ellsberg while he was working for the Rand Corporation. The files demonstrated that military advisors in the Johnson administration understood that the war could not be won and that continuing would lead to many times more casualties than the government admitted publicly. Ellsberg faced possible life imprisonment if he released the documents but took the risk because he was convinced the war in Vietnam had become so destructive that militant and courageous resistance was needed.
The Pentagon Papers confirmed everything we in the antiwar movement already believed about the government’s willingness to carry out heinous crimes and inflict mayhem in a war it knew it could not win. The publication of these documents greatly increased the antiwar movement’s credibility with the media and intelligentsia.
Nixon’s paranoia about leaks brought on by Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers led to the creation of the White House–directed “Plumbers unit.” These ex-CIA recruits carried out the burglaries at Watergate and at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, which led to Nixon’s impeachment when he tried to hide his knowledge of the burglaries. The country’s repulsion for the government overreaching and the intrusions of the Plumbers and the cover-ups that followed eventually created the atmosphere for uncovering other clandestine government activities, including COINTELPRO.
Years later, Ellsberg said it was the daily, relentless protesters outside the Rand Corporation where he worked that caused him at first to question, then repudiate his role in supporting the war in Vietnam, and ultimately to risk years in prison to help end it.