From the Archives: Reagan & FBI - Feds Worked to Quash College Protests

"The broad outlines of the illegal FBI campaigns became public in the 1970s as Congress held hearings that showed the FBI and CIA had disrupted the lives of law-abiding citizens and organizations engaging in legitimate dissent.
The documents obtained by the Chronicle show just how extensive these activities were in California, how Kerr and others were targeted, and how eagerly Reagan worked to quash protests.
Gov. Reagan intended to mount a "psychological warfare campaign" against subversives, file tax evasion and other charges against them, and do anything else it could to restore moral order, Herbert Ellingwood, Reagan's legal affairs secretary, told the FBI in a request for confidential information about people on campus.
The records show FBI director J. Edgar Hoover agreed to provide such information from the agency's files.
"This has been done in the past," the director said, "and has worked quite successfully."
The Office of Ronald Reagan referred the Chronicle's questions to Edwin Meese III, Reagan's chief of staff as governor. Meese said the FBI, as far as he knew, gave Reagan no special political help, and that he did not remember planning any activities against "subversives."
"There was never any concentrated strategy to do these things," he said.
The documents also show that the FBI tried to protect Reagan from being implicated for lying about his own past as a member of several groups officially deemed subversive by altering his security clearance.
Reports that Reagan informed on his fellow actors at a time when the FBI was trying to root out suspected subversives have surfaced before, but were downplayed. In 1985, when the FBI released some documents about Reagan, a Reagan spokesman said he had only a "very minor" involvement with the bureau at a time when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild (news - web sites).
The records obtained by the Chronicle reveal who it was that Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman, named during a 1947 meeting with FBI agents: Larry Parks ("The Jolson Story"), Howard Da Silva ("The Lost Weekend") and Alexander Knox ("Wilson"). Each was later called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted in Hollywood."