CIA Delivers “Restless Youth” Report on U.S. Peace Groups
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on this day delivered the fourth in a series of reports on the anti-Vietnam War movement, entitled “Restless Youth,” to President Lyndon Johnson.
The reports had been ordered by President Johnson, who was convinced that the anti-war movement was supported by foreign governments. CIA Director Richard Helms told Johnson that spying within the U.S. would violate the CIA charter and be illegal, but Johnson ordered him to do it anyway. After their meeting, the secret CIA spying began on August 15, 1967. None of the CIA investigations reported any foreign government support for the anti-war movement. The first three reports were delivered to the president on November 15, 1967; December 22, 1967, and January 5, 1968.
Johnson biographer Doris Kearns (Goodwin) argues that Johnson believed so deeply in American democracy that he could not imagine how college students, among America’s most privileged people, could believe that the U.S. was committing war crimes in Vietnam and make such allegations against the government. Consequently, he was certain that the anti-war movement was inspired and supported by foreign governments. Read Kearns’ fascinating biography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (orig., 1976; later editions also available as Doris Kearns Goodwin).
The CIA spying continued and evolved into a larger program, known as CHAOS, which The New York Times exposed on December 22, 1974. Following the revelations — and enormous political uproar — about the CIA by the Times, President Gerald Ford tried to head off Congressional investigations by creating the Rockefeller Commission to investigate the CIA on January 4, 1975, but that effort failed when Congress established its own committees to investigate the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. The Senate created the Church Committee on January 27, 1974, and the House created the Pike Committee on February 19, 1975.
Read the CIA report: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000518840.pdf
Learn more about the CIA: Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007)
Read the Church Committee report on CIA domestic spying (pp. 661–734): http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm
Learn more about the anti-Vietnam War movement: Thomas Powers, The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People, 1964–1968 (1973)