While Hollywood looked for perfect villains, they were hiding in plain sight
“HANS, are we the baddies?”
That’s the punchline in a classic bit from the British sketch comedy series “That Mitchell and Webb Look,” wherein David Mitchell plays a Nazi soldier who’s beginning to think he might be on the wrong side.
“Are we the baddies?” might as well be the unofficial motto for the massive intelligence and security failures surrounding the riot at the US Capitol on Jan 6. In the days following the insurrection, as footage has been inspected and suspects have been arrested, it’s become soberingly clear that among the miscreants, enablers and criminals whose mob attack resulted in at least five deaths, there were military veterans, lawmakers, police officers – even an Olympic athlete. The very embodiment of what we’ve been taught to think of as “good guys.”
The fact that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond nearly aggressively enough to credible warnings of the coming insurrection has prompted “difficult discussions” within those agencies,” Washington Post reporters Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky wrote on Jan 12, adding that those conversations center on “race, terrorism and whether investigators failed to register the degree of danger because the overwhelming majority of participants at the rally were White conservatives fiercely loyal to (President Donald) Trump.”
Put more succinctly by John Miller, deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department, in an appearance on MSNBC on Thursday: “It’s taken us aback to see people who look like ‘normal people’ cross that line.”
Miller’s blunt assessment raises the question of what, exactly, passes for “normal people” today. But we know what they’ve looked like for the past several centuries: White. Male. Christian. “Real Americans” – or at least what people mean when they use that term, usually in the course of insisting why someone else doesn’t qualify.
In fact, the White, male, Christian version of normal was precisely what J. Edgar Hoover was going for when he recruited for the FBI, the investigative agency he ran with an iron fist for nearly 50 years. It’s the beau ideal that served to inspire laudatory portrayals of special agents by the likes of James Cagney and Jimmy Stewart; for an entire generation, the bureau was personified by the preternaturally professional Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who starred in the iconic TV show “The F.B.I.” in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Like many people who grew up watching the series, I only vaguely recall individual episodes of “The F.B.I.,” which was based on real-life cases and mostly dramatized the good guys nabbing the bad guys, whether they were pornographers, forgers or escaped convicts. The program, which Hoover supported, was far more interested in stories about mob bosses and kidnappers than the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist organization the bureau was infiltrating at the time, to little avail. I certainly don’t remember any episode where they wiretapped and bugged Martin Luther King Jr to gather salacious material that would disrupt his movement, destroy his reputation and neutralize his power.
That real-life case is deconstructed with precision and graceful storytelling prowess in the documentary “MLK/FBI,” which begins streaming this weekend. In the film, director Sam Pollard examines Hoover’s megalomaniacal quest to defame and defang King, whom he perceived as an existential threat to the capitalist, conservative and – most of all – White social order the FBI was dedicated to preserving. Brilliantly knitting archival images and presentday commentary from firsthand witnesses to history, Pollard weaves a deeply troubling portrait of King being hounded and harassed by the FBI, while the murders of his fellow activists went strangely unsolved.
Pollard also shrewdly demonstrates how Hoover burnished the reputation of his agency through movies and television, which occasionally valorized the FBI’s role in bringing groups like the Klan to justice, even as white supremacist ideology continued to spread. In 1975, FBI Deputy Associate Director James Adams testified before the Senate that the bureau had three times as many “ghetto informants” as confidential sources within the Klan – as good an index as any of the agency’s priorities.
But by 1988, with the release of the outrageously revisionist “Mississippi Burning,” based on the murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, Americans had been conditioned to believe that FBI agents were the heroes of the civil rights story, despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary. As Julian Bond said at the time, “These guys were tapping our telephones, not looking into the murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner.” Thanks to Hoover’s PR efforts and cooperative producers, the image of antiBlack racism in America was that of white-sheeted hooligans somewhere down South, not the business-suited guy next door. (Recent films have begun to offer more nuanced views, including Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and Shaka King’s upcoming “Judas and the Black Messiah,” about the death of Black Panther party leader Fred Hampton.)
Despite the fact that white supremacy was clearly a growing domestic terrorist threat over the past few years, law enforcement has been slow to recognize the urgency – a reluctance whose cost became clear on Jan 6. Speaking to NPR reporter Dina Temple-Raston on Thursday, former counterterrorism official R.P. Eddy referred to “the invisible obvious,” a combination of bias and moral arrogance that results in self-protective blindness. “It was very hard for these decisionmakers and these analysts to realize that people who look just like them could want to commit this kind of unconstitutional violence and could literally try to and want to kill them,” Eddy said.