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America loses a true patriot

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published January 15, 2006

Frank Wilkinson is not a man to whom President Bush would ever have considered awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom, yet he was more deserving than most who receive it.

George Tenet, the former CIA director, was a Bush recipient. But unlike Tenet, Wilkinson never used his position to help manipulate the United States into a war Bush wanted. Paul Bremer, the former administrator of Iraq, was a Bush recipient. But unlike Bremer, Wilkinson never wrote rules opening up the assets of a country we invaded to foreign ownership and privitization.

All Wilkinson did was stand for the freedoms that this nation promises in its founding documents. And because he devoted his life to this work, Wilkinson was tailed for 38 years by the FBI and pilloried by members of Congress during the height of the Red Scare. He had his speeches infiltrated and disrupted by agent saboteurs, and was even imprisoned.

Wilkinson died earlier this month, just when the nation needs him most. He was 91. He had lived long enough to see all the work he did in fighting against warrantless domestic surveillance start to unravel. Maybe he died of a broken heart.

I knew Wilkinson through his work with the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, an organization he directed and helped found. He was a gentle giant.

With a head of white hair and a suit to match, Wilkinson would address an audience standing tall and erect despite his advancing age. He always asked you to speak up when talking to him, due to a lifelong hearing problem, but no one had trouble hearing him. Wilkinson had a horror story to tell, and people would sit in rapt silence to hear it. The story was of this nation's systematic suspension of civil liberties. It was the story of his life.

During the years that Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee and J. Edgar Hoover were terrorizing not only Communist Party members and sympathizers but anyone with left-leaning political views, Wilkinson was a singular target. The FBI's surveillance of him started in 1942 when he was working in Los Angeles in an effort to wipe away slums and develop integrated public housing.

Wilkinson was considered such a dangerous subversive that by 1986, when a court finally ordered the FBI to turn over the entirety of its files on him, the agency had amassed 132,000 documents. In more than 38 years of surveillance, the FBI spent $17-million tailing Wilkinson, with eight agents at times assigned around the clock.

A new biography, First Amendment Felon, by Robert Sherrill, details this remarkable man's life of good works in defense of liberty and the government that was out to ruin him for it.

In 1952, Wilkinson was summoned before California's version of HUAC. When he refused to tell the committee the extent of his associations, he was branded a Communist (which he was) and drummed out of his job. His wife at the time also lost her public school teaching job. Wilkinson eventually found work as a night janitor for $1 per hour.

Soon thereafter, the large parcel that Wilkinson had been assembling through slum clearance by guaranteeing former residents first dibs on the new community of low-rent public housing was essentially given to Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley so Dodger Stadium could be built.

Wilkinson, a former president of Youth for Herbert Hoover, was politicized. He barnstormed the country in an effort to counteract the destruction of reputations and lives that HUAC and state mini-HUACs were wreaking. He was shadowed by FBI agents every step of the way. They would first try to get his speeches canceled; if that failed, they were in the audience to cause disruption.

In one memorandum, Hoover tells his field agents to be discreet as they infiltrated Wilkinson's speeches on college campuses so it wouldn't appear that the agency was interfering with academic freedom. Hoover then directs that the memorandum be "destroyed" after being read, "and I, Mr. Hoover, should be told it has been destroyed."

In 1961, Wilkinson spent nine months in jail for refusing to disclose his associations when called to testify before HUAC in 1958. He had told the committee that Congress had no right to investigate what it could not regulate, and because the First Amendment protected the right to associate with like-minded people, his membership in any group was none of the committee's business. Congress held him in contempt, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction in a 5-4 decision.

The dissent said that the case was nothing more than HUAC's attempt to use its contempt power "as a weapon against those who dare to criticize it."

In the 1970s, Wilkinson must have watched with great satisfaction as the nation finally came to grips with the excesses of the J. Edgar Hoover era. New rules were promulgated in the Justice Department to prevent infiltration of political groups, and Congress established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eliminate domestic warrantless spying even for intelligence collection.

He must have been equally distressed by the dismantling of those protections by President Bush and his attorneys general.

With Wilkinson's passing, a true patriot has left us. Now what do we do about the barbarians at the gate?

[Last modified January 13, 2006, 18:37:03]