-~. ,"~,

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In

Wanted poster: Spurring the hunt

In Washington, policemen from istates massed on the steps of the Capitlto demand a crackdown on the recelrash of sniping attacks on cops. "Wearin a revolution," said their leader. Lawmen and legislators warned that politicians or government officials might blattacked or kidnaped by homegro\V1revolutionaries adapting the tactics 01Latin American guerrillas. Across theborder in Canada, that nightmare hadah.eady come true: the government in.voked emergency war power to combatQuebec separatists who had kidnapedtwo public figures and were holclingj' them hostage-and had then chosen to

kill (page 35).

DESPERATE TURN

Had Angela Davis, daughter of l..~black bourgeoisie, product of Brancleisand the Sorbonne, onetime philosophyinstructor at UCLA, taken the same des-perate turn to terrorism? Friends couldn'tbelieve she had anything to do withthe bloody kidnaping-turned-shoot-out at]the Marin County Hall of Justice in San'Rafael, Calif.-not even the secondhandrole that the charges against

The state's case-so fardisclosed-is that Miss Davistwo handguns, a rifle and athat were smuggled into theroom by. 17 :year-old Jonathan

End of the hunt: G-men bringing in suspect Davis after her arrest

two of

the trial at gunpoint,convicts and took fiveing the judge. As theyill a van, shootillg broke outthe van and from prisonand .Jackson, the judgeconvicts were all killed.

Their plan had been to trade thenap victims for the c

three black convicts ( one of themson's brother) under illdictmentillg a prison guard. And a weekCalifornia officials thickenedfurther by issuillg a warrant forrest of Miss Davis on charges ofand kidnapillg. No cshe had been at the sceneout. But four of the weapons usedJackson were allegedly purchasedher-and under California law ancomplice to a crime may be held

S he was, by the FBI's reckoning, themost-wanted woman in America-a

young revolutionary of rare intellect andbeauty accused of an accomplice's rolein one of the year's most shocking inci-dents of left-wing terrorism. There wasmore to Angela Davis than that. At 26,she was a breath of new life in the dod-dering American Communist Party, aneloquent champion of the Black Panthers,an academic cause celebre in Californiaand an icon to New Left activists fromcoast to coast. Last week, in an episodethat mingled irony with intrigue, G-menarrested her without a fight in thatquintessentially Middle American ref-uge-a Howard Johnson's motel.

The capture in New York of the mostglamorous and provocative fugitive onthe Feds' list came at a fortuitous timefor the beleaguered authorities. Thecountry is in the grip of the worst spasmof left-wing violence since anarchist days,

18D

and the national composure is clearlyshowing the strain. The rising tide ofbombing.-; and attacks on the police hasbecome the most emotional issue of thefall campaign-one that conservative can-didates especially are exploiting to goodeffect.

Last week's events pro\ided furtherevidence that the forces of law and orderwere a long way from stifling the ter-rorist onslaught. Dynamite blasts rockedthe Federal Building and seven othersites in placid Rochester, N.Y. (page 24),The librarv of Harvard's Center for In-temationaJ Affairs, long a target of radicalire, was wrecked by a nighttime explo-sion; an outfit calling itself "the ProudEagle Tribe, a group of revolutionarywomen," claimed credit for the sabotage(the police were skeptical about that}and dedicated the exploit to Miss Davis"because her actions and example haveinspired us,"

of the same offense as its perpetrator.Miss Davis promptly disappeared. She

reportedly bought a plane ticket fromSan Francisco to Los Angeles a few hoursafter the shoot-out, but for weeks later,there was no trace. The FBI mountedan elaborate search, interviewing whatseems to have been hundreds of peoplewho knew her. In view of the bureau'sdistinctly spotty record of tracking downother radical fugitives (page 22) , mostof her friends were confident that shehad successfully escaped overseas tofriendlier shores-Cuba, perhaps, or evenAlgeria.

UPI

DAPPER PLAYBOY

In fact, lawmen said, she had madeher way to Chicago and a shadowy fig-Ul.e named David R. Poindexter Jr. Poin-dexter's late father, who was black, hadbeen a Communist during the '30s; hismother is a wealthy white woman whois divorced and now lives in Hollywood,Fla. The mother reportedly had settled aconsiderable {ortune on him, and to theextent he was known in Chicago at all,he was seen as a handsome, dapper play-boy, dabbling in business deals here andthere and cruising around in a flashyCadillac. Poindexter had been divorcedonce, and his second wife recently com-mitted suicide, leaving a note reading:"David, I'm tired of you, your Mommaand your whores."

From Chicago, Poindexter apparentlydrove Miss Davis to Miami, where heregistered ( under his real name) at theGolf Lake Apartments. This was an ironicchoice of lodgings. The security chief atGolf Lake is a former Miami deputy sher-iff named Charles Celona whose grandjury testimony on police corruption re-cently resulted in 22 indictments. To pro-

Protesting cops massing on the Cap

tect this star witness, Gov. Claude Kirkhad ordered 24-hour police protectionfor Celona, and so the Golf Lake Apart-ments, during the time Angela Davisstayed there, was under constant policesurveillance. Poindexter further tempteddiscovery by buying a new car, a whiteToyota, which he registered under hiscorrect name and the Miami address.

What seems to have flushed the cou-ple, however, was neither the policedetail nor the car registration but a storysplashed through the Miami press late inSeptember. A local charter-boat captainreported that he had been approachedby a black woman with an Afro hair-doand two black men who ordered him atgunpoint to take them to Bimini. He hadpersuaded them, he said, that he didn'thave enough gas, and they fled in aCadillac. The story was later discounted,but it produced pictures of Miss Davisin local papers and more than 500 tipsto the FBI. Miss Davis and Poindexter-who had reportedly been planning totake a clandestine flight to Cuba-de-camped hastily for New York, so hastilythat when the FBI finally searched theirroom at Golf Lake, they found unmailedletters in her handwriting and the un-collected registration of the Toyota inthe mailbox downstairs.

The fugitives turned up next in NewYork. They checked into a MidtownHoliday Inn and then, for some reason,decided to move. William Slevin, man-ager of the Howard Johnson's MotorLodge, had an FBI "Ten Most Wanted"handbill pinned to his desk when "Mr .and Mrs. George Gilbert" registered onOct. 8. But he spotted no resemblancebetween the flamboyantly Afro-coifedyoung woman pictured on the flyer andthe elegant Mrs. Gilbert before him.Angela no longer wore her hair in anAfro-she was sporting a short-haired wig

Joseph Runcl-Boston GlObeHarvard blast: Tribal tribute

October 26, 1970

,itol steps: 'We are in a revolution'

and had also trimmed her eyebrows intoa new arching curve. There was no con-cealing her striking beauty-the couplein the room across the hall called the Gil-belts "simply stunning"-but she hadmanaged deftly to change her type.

Nevertheless, five days after theychecked in, the FBI closed in. MissDavis and Poindexter were out when theagents arrived and staked out their $30-a-day, twin double-bedded room on theseventh Hoof. About 6 o'clock, the cou-ple returned; they surrendered withoutany fuss. "It was done very discreetly,very quietly," said Slevin. "There wasno fanfare."

EXTRADITION FIGHT

Everything was so discreet, in fact,that some of Miss Davis's West Coastfriends wondered whether she mighthave wanted to be caught. "I just don'tthink she wanted to run any more," sug-gested one. Another thought "maybe shefigured she would have a more effectivevoice from prison as a martyr." But theFBI insisted heatedly there was nothingprearranged about the capture-and MissDavi.5 seemed to bear this out. Shepromptly engaged .John .1. Abt, a veteranOld Left attorney (sample clients: PaulRobeson, Elizabeth Gulley Flynn andthe CP itself) , and he announced shewould fight extradition back to Califor-nia. She will be held without bail, asis customary in capital cases, until herextradition hearing ( conveniently timedfor Nov. 9, which means that Gov. Nel-son Rockefeller will not have to issue anyorder until after Election Day) .Poin-dexter, who was charged with harboringa fugitive, was released in $100,000 bail.The bond was put up by his mother,who rushed up from Florida for the pur-pose. "My beautiful black prince," shehad declared earlier when she heard

19

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Revolutionary album: Angela as a IO-year-old Girl Scout in Birmingham,and (seated, top right) at a 1964 family reunion after study abroad. ..

}

~

"-

11

f h ' " d "o er son s arrest, can o no wrong.Miss Davis's adherents were just as

strenuous in her cause. They marchedup and down before the Women's Houseof Detention where she was being held,and it seemed apparent that the chant.'Free Angela!" would well up from radi-cal rallies for some time to come. Afterher arraignment, a spectator inside thecourthouse shouted "We love you fromthe West Coast to the East Coast-andyou will be free." Miss Davis, whosehands were handcuffed before her,raised them about waist high and, smil-ing slightly, gave a clenched-6st salute.

CROSSROADSTo people who had known Angela

Davis in earlier and happier times, asqualid New York jail cell seemed a gro-tesque way station in an extraordinarycareer. For she had made her spiritualhome at the crossroads of two cultures,and somehow she managed to inhabitthem both, declining the rewards thateither would have bestowed on her ifshe had been willing to live within itsrules alone. She could have opted forthe life of scholarship-a precociouschildhood, attendance at the best ofschools, junior year at the Sorbonne andgraduate study in Germany, Europeanliterature, Kantian philosophy, professor-ships, tenure and learned publications.Or she could have chosen the world ofthe streets-of swelling black conscious-ness in the nation's ghettos, mass rallies,Afro hair-do's, angry slogans, guns andviolent death. But she chose both worldsat once-and the tension lent specialpower and poignance to her story.

As the daughter of a schoolteacher(her mother has an M.A. from New YorkUniversity) and a reasonably prosperousservice-station owner, Angela had op-portunities afforded few other black chil-dren in Birmingham, Ala. At the age of2 she began piano lessons, and her par-ents rewarded her with a Wurlitzer con-sole piano on her sixth birthday. When

20

Robbe-Grillet) under the direction orProf. Murray Sachs, who became thefirst of a string of academics to pro-nounce her "one of the two or three beststudents I've ever had" or some variationon that superlative theme. Her junioryear she spent in Paris. A classmate,Vivian Auslander, recalls her as bothscholarly ("she had index cards of almosteverything we read") and shy ("youcould hardly hear her when the teachercalled on her, but she always had theright answer") .

So far, there had been few hints ofanything but a profound and original in-tellectual fascination with the themes ofContinental literature. But when Angelareturned to Brandeis, she met HerbertMarcuse. He was in his final year ofteaching at Brandeis, an eclectic Marx-ist philosopher who laid much weight onsubtle forms of repression within capital-ist democracies and the psychic need forindividual acts of refusal-to break s(J-ciety's molds. Angela found herselfstrongly attracted to his views: she tookup the study of philosophy and, at theend of the year, instead of gOillg toteach at a Southern university as herliterature teachers urged, she em.olledfor graduate work in philosophy at theMarxist-oriented Institute of Social Re-search at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Uni-versity in Frankfurt.

GOING HOME

In Frankfurt, recalls sociology profes-sor Oskar Negt, "she learned Germana remarkably short period and grasped

lKant and Hegel in equally amazing fash-ion." He particularly remembersrate seminar paper of hers on "Theception of Interest in -

the Powers of Pure Reason."doubt, refined her sophisticatedtual brand of Marxism-even as shesponded to the gathering racialtion back in the U .S. According toWittenberg, a German student toshe was very close in those days, she

she was 3, her mother took her to apoetry reading by Langston Hughes andled her up to meet the poet afterward.Angela was swift to demonstrate hercultural precocity. "I like your poems,Mr. Hughes," she allowed. "I know onetoo-'Mary had a little Iamb. ..' " Despite

such sallies, most of her teachers, boththen and later, sensed she was a shy,standoffish sort. " At school," her mother

recalls, "she'd never volunteer. But ifshe was called on, she'd know the an-swer. I'd tell her, 'Angela, you've got tospeak up. If you know something, you've

If ' "got to express yourse .There was one thing that every black

child growing up in Birmingham in themid-1950s couldn't help knowing, andthat was the racial furies abroad withinthe town. The Davis family lived, alongwith many other middle-class Negroes,on what came to be called "DvnamiteHill" after white night riders begin bombattacks on the homes of the civil-rightsleaders clustered there. She knew someof the four black girls killed in the blastthat devastated a church and Sundayschool in September 1963. "My politicalinvolvement," she declared in an inter-view last year, "stems from my existencein the South."

When Angela was 15, a representa-tive of New York's Elisabeth Irwin HighSchool, a socially progressive privateschool, came to Birmingham looking fortalented black children to recruit. Herown high school recommended her, andshe didn't hesitate an instant before ac-cepting. Things were not easy for her atElisabeth Irwin-she had never, for ex-ample, studied any French. In responseto the challenge, she majored inFrench, graduated with distinction andwent on to win a scholarship at BrandeisUniversity.

At Brandeis she pursued the literarystudies that had become her chief inter-est: French literature continued to beher major Geld. She wrote her honorsessay (a study of French author Alain

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

Nancy Chnse

...as a Brandeis student in 1965, with Marcuse in Cali.fomia, and picketing with Jonathan Jackson in June

thing of an expatriate, plucked out ofthe black community by a white elitethat had spotted her talents and reward-ed them with the best training it had tooffer. Like a number of black intellectu-als before her, e.g., Richard Wright andJames Baldwin, she had been drawn toEurope for the cultural stimulus avail-able there, and perhaps it is fair to saythat back in 1967 when she returnedfrom Germany, she seemed less Ameri-can than a product of European intel-lectual culture.

Certainly her attractioL to the Com-munist Party stemmed from a severe ra-tionalism rather than ghetto soul. As onefellow student from her San Diego daysrecalled last week, "She used to say,'What group in the country has been con-sistent in a Marxist analysis of American

UPI

society?' Because of the long commit-ment and obvious sincerity of the CP shejoined it, even though it was consideredtoo old hat, 40 years old, dull. She choseCP Marxism because it is scientific, itde-velops class consciousness and it is along-range project."

Miss Davis's Marxist commitment grad-ually led her away from Ron Karenga'sUS, an organization devoted to black na-tionalism and cultural consciousness, andtoward the Black Panthers, who wereevolving a Marxist ideology of their own.She never, as far as is known, formallybecame a member of the Black PantherParty, but by 1968 she was moving wide-ly in its circles. She had also emerged asa leading figure among blacks on campus.helping to set up a Black Students Coun-cil and drafting guidelines for the "ThirdCollege," an experimental school-within-a-school, run by and for minorities. Buther role, some of her friends sensed, washampered a bit by her tendency to talkin conceptual terms: Angela's eHective-ness was directly proportional to the abil-ity of other students to determine what inthe world she was talking about. Andthere was that old aloofness. "She wasnever really hung up on that leadershipthing," says Tyra Garlington, a San Diegogirl friend. "It was always somethingpersonal with her-if others wanted tofollow, that was their worry, not hers."

CAUSE CELEBREThen, in the middle of 1969, Miss Da-

vis had leadership thrust upon her. Notby choice but by circumstance, she be-came a cause. The UCLA philosophydepartment was looking for an instructor,and she seemed to fit the bill perfectly.Not only was she black-all major uni-versities were hungering for talentedNegro teachers by then-but she WaSstrongly schooled in the Continental Eu-ropean philosophical tradition of Kant,Hegel, Nietzsche and the existentialist-s."The rest of us," notes a UCLA philoso-phy professor, "are under the inHuence

21

a number of visitors from the States whokept her posted on racial developmentson the home front. "The amazing thingabout Angela," he says, "was that shedidn't treat this racial thing as a personalissue. She had an ability to keep herown feelings out of her assessment of theAmerican racial situation. This allowedher to arrive at rational rather than emo-tional conclusions." One of her conclu-sions was that it was high time for her tobe getting home. Theoretical specula-tions alone had apparently begun to losetheir appeal for her; in 1967 she left, asone of her teachers explained, "becauseshe could no longer tolerate the deterio-ration of the situation in the U .S. withoutbecoming actively involved."

But her career still followed orthodoxacademic contours. She made her way tothe University of California at San Diego,where Marcuse had moved, and beganstudying for her master's and doctorateunder his tutelage. Her choice of a Ph.D.thesis topic-Kant's analysis of violence inthe French Revolution-seemed to signal,however, a gradual shift in the focus ofher scholarly interests, and she also be-gan to dip into the organizing of theblack community then afoot in San Diego.

DETACHED OBSERVER«She was at all the meetings, constant-

ly around and nibbling at the edges," re-calls Tom Johnson, a journalist who washead of the San Diego NAACP at thattime. "I remember she wasn't really thatinvolved-she was always concerned butaloof. She seemed to be a detached ob-server at that time, always asking ques-tions without saying very much herself. Itseemed as if she were merely intellectu-ally curious. ..In fact, she seemed sodetermined to get a feel of what washappening on the street level in the com-munity that I first thought she was anFBI plant."

Miss Davis was feeling her way into aworld that was largely new to her. For,up to that point, she had been some-

October 26, 1970

UPl

Poindexter: Last companion

Nixon, Mitchell, Hoover (left) at Justice: A new crime bill. ..

ited. The FBI is an investigative agency,not a national police force. The basic jobof protecting individuals and institutionsrightfully belongs to local and state po-lice. But the FBI earned its proud repu-tation by stalking and capturing a seem-ingly endless procession of kidnapers.bank robbers and cold-war spies, anddirector J. Edgar Hoover's men havenowhere as good a record when it comesto bringing today's new-breed revolu-tionaries to justice once the smoke oftheir dynamite bombs has cleared.

Right now the bureau is hunting animpressive array of leftist celebrities. In-deed, within hours of Miss Davis's cap-ture, her spot on the FBI's renowned"Ten Most Wanted" list was assigned toanother female fugitive-WeathermanBernardine Dohrn, 28, who has beensought for ten months. The nationwidesearch hasn't kept Miss Dohrn from mak-ing herself heard-via tape-recordedbomb threats and other pronouncements

of British empiricists and analyticallogi-cal positivists. Her real value was thatshe filled a tremendous gap in the offer-ings of the deparbnent."

Hardly had she been hired as an act-ing assistant professor than an FBI in-former announced there was a Commu-nist on the UCLA faculty, and Angelawas publicly identified soon thereafter.Against the strong recommendation ofthe faculty and the chancellor, the Uni-versity of California's conservative-mind-ed board of regents promptly fired her.A storm of protest broke over the UCLAcampus, the ouster was challenged ( andeventually quashed) in the courts, anda crowd of 2,000 students and facultyturned out for her first lecture in Phi-losophy 199, "Recurring PhilosophicalThemes in Black Literature."

They had, perhaps, expected a dia-tribe on academic freedom. Wllat theygot was a scholarly discourse on thethought of onetime slave FrederickDouglass. The process of liberation wasthe theme of the course, and AssistantProfessor Davis began to trace what hadbecome one of her own main preoccupa-tions: the psychologically liberating forceof the act of refusal. "Resistance, rejec-tio\l, defiance, on every level, on everyfront are integral elements of the voyagetoward freedom," she declared. ". ..Thepath of liberation is marked by resistanceat every crossroad: mental resistance,physical resistance, resistance directed tothe concerted attempt to obstruct thepath. I think we can learn from the expe-rience of the slave."

NO FLAWS

Miss Davis's courses that year werethe most carefully monitored in the uni-versity: faculty members sat in, her lec-tures were tape-recorded, students werethoroughly quizzed on her performance."There were no flaws," reports Prof. Don-ald Kalish, then chairman of the de-partment. "She rated excellent in everyarea." She was, by almost all accounts,well prepared, accessible to questions inor out of class, open to points of viewdifferent from her own, and very articu-late. Even so, at the end of the academicyear last June, the regents fired heragain; this time they made no mentionof her CP membership ( so as not to beoverruled again by the courts) but citedallegedly inflammatory speeches she hadmade out of class.

Those speeches, according to most ob-servers, were certainly radical but hard-ly incendiary. She regularly denounceduniversity support of military research.And she had actively espoused the causeof the Soledad Brothers: she headed acommittee for their defense and begana correspondence with one of them,George Jackson. The speeches did, how-ever, seem to mark a turning point inAngela Davis's career. She had become,like it or not, a public personality. At first,according to one observer, she seemednervous in her new role, then to grow

(Continued on Page 24)

sought on charges stemming fromWeatherman's "Days of Rage" in Chi-cago last October and various bombplots. Among them are Mark Rudd, aleader of the rebellion at Columbia Uni-versity in 1968, and Cathlyn Wilkersonand Kathy Bouilin, the two young wom-en who disappeared after a bomb fac-tory exploded, destroying a town housein New York's Greenwich Village .

March. Another celebrity from the sub-culture, LSD guru Timothy Leary, re-cently went over the fence at & vprison colony in California and vanished,

Iapparently with the help of Weather-man radicals. And even Father DanielBerrigan, the antiwar priest, led ---

agents a merry chase for fourpopping up here and there formons and seminars before finallycaptured on Block Island ( NEWSWEEX, IAug. 24) .

The FBI itself warns of new revolu- .tionary perils to come. "Several ~ ..

22

Face it, we're in what amounts to a mailed to news media around the nation.guerrilla war with the kids. And so far, At the weekend, the Ten Most Want-the kids are winning. ed list had expanded to carry the Ilames

of a record 16 fugitives, nine of themI t was hardly the Administration's official considered radicals. Included were Kath-

line. Nevertheless, that stark admission erine Power and Susan Saxe, 21-year-oldfrom a veteran Justice Department staffer former Brandeis University coeds wholast week dramatically underscored the are charged with a bank robbery in Phil-increasing problems faced by the govern- adelphia and another in Boston durillgment-and especially the Federal Bureau which a policeman was murdered. Alsoof Investigation-in the escalating war listed: Student Nonviolent Coordinatingwith violent revolutionaries. Committee leader H. Rap Brown, who

The successful manhunt that led to dropped from sight last March; CameronAngela Davis's arrest last week was a David Bishop, charged with sabalagingrare coup nowadays-and even if she power lines to a defense plant in Colo-should prove guilty as charged, she is rado last year and four young men in-evidently not the kind of extremist whose dicted after a bomb blast in Madison attactics and life-style now confront the the University of Wisconsin in August.FBI with its toughest challenge. The More than a dozen other radicals, alsobureau's responsibility is, of course, lim- under Federal indictment, are beiI1g

NA TIONAL AFF AIRS

tic groups reportedly have plans to kid-nap government officials," reported Wil-liam C. Sullivan, one of Hoover's topassistants, in a speech to journalists inWilliamsburg, Va., last week.

The government has countered thecontinuing pattern of political terrorismwith some strict, short-term measures.To begin with, security was tightenedlast week at Federal office buildingsfrom coast to coast; unguarded doorswere locked, parcels and briefcasescht'cked, identification demanded fromsuspicious entrants. Even the Pentagonst('pped up its already snug security;guards in electrically powered cartsmarked "Special Pentagon Police" pa-trolled the corridors far more visibly thanev('r before. The heavy security blanketthrown over the 25th anniversary cele-bration of the United Nations in NewYork disrupted normal activities on Man-

their communities. And the FBI has scoredits triumphs in establishing sources with-in that other great American bureauc-racy, the Mob.

By contrast, the young revolutionariesare so decentralized and anti-bureau-cratic that they present the authoritiesno structure to pierce. They hold no reg-ular weekly cell meetings or "education-al groups" that can be infiltrated as inthe old days; often they form small ( tento twelve members) "affinity groups" orcommunes acutely suspicious of strang-ers. Being children of the middle classrather than conventional criminals, theyleave little in the way of police recordsto be traced and are unlikely to draw at-tention to themselves while on the lamby, for example, bragging about their ex-ploits in saloons. And they know how toget around in the jet age.

Difficult to catch on the fly, the revo-

..

"PIand a new member of the FBI'8 Top Ten, Weatherman '8 Dohrn

Boston. "They have no understanding ofthe subculture."

Some experts feel the bureau mustmake radical changes in its methods. "It'sgoing to take time and an entirely newapproach to the problem," says ex-FBIman Quinn Tamm, executive director ofthe International Association of Chiefs ofPolice. One suggestion is that the FBIswitch from its present "zone defense"-in which responsibility for capturing afugitive is switched from one local officeto another-to a "man-on-man" in whichthe same agents would trail a suspectwherever the scent might lead, Brandeishistory Prof. .John Roche, who workedwith the FBI as a Lyndon Johnsonstaffer, proposes that the bureau form anew special force, "a bureau of politicalanalysis, or something like ScotlandYard's Special Branch, which would spe-cialize in understanding these weirdundergrounds." "What you really need,"one Capital lawman told NEWSWEEK'SRobert Shogan, "is a domestic CIA."

There is some evidence that the FBImay be getting with it. Shortly after thebig bombing at the University of Wis-consin, a mod young man dressed in abell-bottom suit, brown shirt and orangetie walked into the student newspaperoffice on the Madison campus and askedfor one of the editors. "I'd like to rapwith him," he said. Only later did thevisitor flip open his credentials and iden-tify himself as an FBI man.

Signing: For those not satisfied by theMod Squad approach there was old-fashioned reassurance in the ceremonyattending President Nixon's signing lastweek of the new omnibus crime bill. ThePresident has asked for 1,000 newagents, partly to meet the bomb threat,and the new legislation somewhat wid-ens the bureau's authority to move inimmediately in cases involving bombingsor cop killings.

For the signing itself, the Presidentjourneyed over to the Justice Depart-ment, which was as warm with an unusu-ally large contingent of Secret Servicemen. With Attorney General John Mitch-ell and Hoover himself watching withobvious approval, Mr. Nixon invoked theAngela Davis case to underscore thegovernment determination to stamp outterrorism. In so doing, he seemed to en-gage in another bit of Presidential pre-judgment similar to the premature ver-dict he rendered on West Coast murderdefendant Charles Manson two monthsago. Said the President: ". ..The actionsof the FBI in apprehending Angela Da-vis. ..[are] an indication.that once theFederal government through the FBImoves into an area, this should be awarning to those who engage in theseacts that eventually they are going to beapprehended." Then, handing the bill toMitchell and Hoover, he said, "Gentle-men, I give you the tools. You do thejob." Replied Hoover, confidently: "Wewill, Mr. President."

hat tan's East Side for hours, and customsofficials at airports around the country setoff trafFic snarls of their own as theysearched thousands of cars for explosivesthat might be used in aircraft-hijackingattempts.

Helpful as such preventive measuresmay be, they are a long step from thekind of sophisticated effort that may beneeded to counter the terrorist threat.Today's young, free-form revolutionariespresent a new and peculiar challenge tothe time-tested methods of the FBI. Ageneration ago the bureau found it rela-tively easy to infiltrate the CommunistParty U.S.A., with its bureaucratic struc-ture and predictable methodology. (TheFBI's numerous pipelines into the partyare still operative and may in fact haveplayed a role in the successful hunt forAngela Davis. ) The bureau has alsodone exceptionally well in penetratingthe Ku Klux Klan, most of whose mem-bers are poor, ill-educated and rooted in

lutionaries all but disappear on theground in the milieu of a new youth cul-ture-or slip out of the country altogeth-er. Perhaps most important, those whoassist the fugitive radicals do not con-sider themselves accessories to a crimebut counterculture patriots, and thismakes them all but immune to one of thelaw's most persuasive mechanisms: thebribe. "Traditionally," says a veteranlawman, "the great majority of caseshave been solved on the basis of in-formation given in exchange for money.But these people don't give a damnabout money."

'Tied Up': Part of the problem is theculture gap between the G-men andtheir quan-y. The typical agent is a col-lege grad ( from a conservative campus,often as not) with a degree in account-ing or. Jaw. "Like in Vietnam, the forcesof order in this country are being tied upby their own attitudinal weaknesses," in-sists a Weatherman now free on bail in

23October 26,1970