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were growing fears that there were FBI spies in their midst. Fear of informers was having a poisonous impact, he was told. People worried about whether the person who stood beside them at a demonstration was an informer. Some wondered about their neighbor, their colleague at work, or the new volunteer in the peace organization office—were they informers? Trust was fraying. Some people considered colleagues with such concerns to be paranoid and dismissed them.
    Davidon listened carefully, but he was cautious. At first, he did not take the concerns very seriously. True to his reluctance to accept either speculation or conspiracy theories, he thought people might be exaggerating, or that their frustrations about the war, after so many years of failing to stop it, might be fueling irrational fears. But the concerns were repeated to him again and again. Very reasonable people from a diverse range of peace organizations expressed them.
    By the fall of 1970, Davidon no longer doubted what people were telling him. He concluded that the rumor probably was true: Peace organizations had been infiltrated by informers. One of the nation’s most powerful leaders, J. Edgar Hoover, he now feared, might have turned thepower of the FBI against people who opposed the war. Davidon thought about it constantly. If it turned out that the U.S. government was suppressing Americans’ right to express dissent—including and especially dissent about the most crucial issues: the war, the use of apocalyptic weapons in the war, and racial equality—then much was at stake. Without the freedom to dissent without being spied on, Davidon thought, dissent was empty, erased, useless. Such spying, he thought, was gravely hypocritical in a nation that expressed great pride in being the land of the free. How could a government that claimed to be fighting a war for people’s freedom in another country at the same time suppress its own people’s right to dissent?
    Finally, Davidon decided that it was as important to answer this question—was the FBI suppressing dissent?—as it was to oppose the war. Most people would have recognized the enormous inherent impediments to answering the question and concluded it would be impossible to do so, but Davidon decided the implications were simply too big, too important—too damaging to the heart of democracy—to let it go unanswered. As he had done when he became deeply concerned about the development and use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, he now quietly did what he thoughtwas a citizen’s obligation: He took responsibility for finding the answer to the question.
    Davidon focused his scientifically trained mind on how to prove or disprove the persistent rumor that the government was spying on Americans for reasons unrelated to suspicion of crime. He analyzed what was known about how J. Edgar Hoover operated.Little had been written about the FBI or the director, except for what had been ghostwritten by FBI staff and by the people the director referred to inside the bureau as “friendly” journalists. Prior to 1971, there had been very little public criticism of the director or the bureau except for occasional commentary byAlan Barth in the
Washington Post
and Tom Wicker in the
New York Times.
The only reporting that raised questions about the FBI had been done byJack Nelson in the
Los Angeles Times
, a book by Nelson andJack Bass, andFred Cook’s book and articles in the
Nation
magazine. As FBI policy dictated, journalists had been hampered by never having access to FBI records or officials, even after the Freedom of Information Act became law in 1966. From what he had absorbed about the director, Davidon had the impression that he was an extremely bureaucratic manager and an extremely conservative ideologue. That combination, he thought, could be a potentially potent and dangerous pair of defining characteristics when embodied in an extraordinarily popular and