Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement

The New Left movement was founded in 1962 with the idea of organizing a massive protest against the Vietnam War. Historians have written extensively about the movement and its crusade to expose the American people about how the war became a quagmire with no end in sight. However, little is known about the federal government's reaction against the New Left, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Thanks to James Krikpatrick Davis, we know way more about the FBI's counterassault against the antiwar movement with his intriguing book Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement. Using more than 6,000 declassified FBI documents and other primary sources, Davis provides an in-depth look of the Bureau's counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO; it's goal was to "infiltrate, disrupt, and neutralize" the entire movement. The FBI operation, Davis contends, had no oversight by either the Justice Department or Congress and allowed to run rampant in order to disrupt the New Left. As the oldest republic in the world, the author contends that America "should perhaps know more than any nation on earth about individual liberties" (page 214) and that the federal government failed to provide a check on the COINTELPRO operation to safeguard individual liberties. This book somewhat fits in with the rest of the historical literature of the 1960s despite the author of not being a professional historian but rather a student of history for over thirty years. It provides a good, detailed description of the FBI counterintelligence program against the New Left but sometimes the writing style was a little choppy and repetitious. Finally, this book is recommended for any history buff and for professional historians as well to get a glimpse of the FBI's COINTELPRO operation against the antiwar movement. Therefore I give it 4 out of 5 stars.