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WACO: Six years later by Alan Wolfe,
BOSTON--After denying for six years that federal agents used pyrotechnic
devices capable of starting the fire that burned down the Branch Davidian
compound near Waco, Texas, in April 1993, the FBI admitted last month that
it deployed flammable tear gas. It is difficult to imagine anything more
damaging to the already fragile trust that Americans have in their
government. There was a time in American politics when the Federal
Bureau of Investigation symbolized incorruptible integrity. Its former
director, J. Edgar Hoover, zealously protected the bureau's reputation in
magazines such as Reader's Digest. He also kept extensive files on
politicians, threatening to expose what he knew about them if they did not
fund the bureau at the levels to which he had grown accustomed.
The popularity of the FBI was enhanced by the unpopularity of Hoover's
targets: criminals and communists. At the height of Hoover's power, the FBI
stood as the great exception in American attitudes toward government.
Liberals, who defended government, disliked the FBI, while conservatives,
who attacked government, praised it.
Now, conservatives attack the FBI and, because they do, the case for
government no longer has bipartisan support. One likely result is that the
rights and liberties secured by government will be threatened.
Americans, an individualistic people, have a tendency to be suspicious
of public authority. They also tend to be more conservative than liberal.
The mutual admiration society between conservatives and the FBI meant that
liberals could rely on conservatives to give support to the idea that
sometimes government is necessary. At the same time, the link between the
FBI and the American right made it difficult for violent right-wing
extremists to operate: How could conservatives support the government and
try to bomb its installations at the same time?
All this changed under Hoover's successors. As the American left went
into abeyance, the only political activists seriously threatening violence
were on the right. To the degree that it monitored and tried to control
their activities, the FBI came to be as distrusted by the right as it once
had been distrusted by the left.
Randy Weaver, a white separatist, was one of the FBI's targets. After Weaver purchased sawed-off shotguns from federal undercover agents and missed a court date, U.S. marshals surrounded his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992. An 11-day siege ensued, in which Weaver's wife and son and a U.S. marshal were killed. Weaver was acquitted of murder and weapons charges, and the Justice Department agreed to pay him and his daughters $3.1 million.Revenge on Weaver's behalf was said to be one of
the motives behind Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of a federal office
building in Oklahoma City.
David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, was no Weaver. He
and his followers constituted a classic religious cult, not a right-wing
paramilitary organization. Nonetheless, the burning of his compound, in
which more than 80 people died, rapidly became new evidence for
conservatives of how evil government can be.FBI and Justice Department officials repeatedly insist that Koresh
started the fire. Right-wing extremists have never believed them. Nor do
they believe the FBI when it now says its tear-gas canisters were used too
early and too far away to be responsible for the fire in the main compound.
So deep is right-wing suspicion of government that it approaches paranoia:
Anything government says in its own defense becomes further cause to
distrust government.
Like just about everyone else in the United States, I have no way of
knowing whether the canisters used by the FBI started the fire or whether
Koresh did. As a one-time new-left radical who eventually obtained his own
FBI file, I have no particular reason to trust the bureau's word. Nor, it
seems, does Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who, on Wednesday, ordered federal
marshals to seize tape recordings from FBI headquarters. Government makes
mistakes; in both the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents, the FBI made plenty of
them. Yet, for all the incompetence--and potential malevolence--of the FBI,
there is reason to fear those who attack government more than government itself.
At stake in the debate over the FBI's role in Waco is a paradox that
lies at the heart of America's attitude toward government. Right-wing
opponents of the bureau speak in the language of freedom and rights. They
imagine themselves the Lone Ranger: self-sufficient, free to roam,
un-corrupted by civilization and its annoying obligations. From their point
of view, government is by nature oppressive. Those who defend it, they
believe, have no love of freedom; they are incipient authoritarians intent
on denying others the right to be left alone.
In reality, this picture is out of focus. It took those pro-government
enthusiasts known as the Founding Fathers long days and nights to create a
government that made individual freedom possible. It then took a Civil War
before those freedoms could be exercised by all citizens. One reason why
African Americans support government more than any other group of Americans
is their recognition that a weak and decentralized government meant that
they would remain in slavery. Only a powerful central government could give
them the freedom they deserved. By the 20th century, nearly all Americans
had come to understand that government was there to fight the wars abroad
and correct the abuses at home that made it possible for them to live with dignity and respect.But romantic myths die hard, none more so than the dream that life was
once simpler and purer than it is now. In attacking government in the name
of these myths, right-wingers are really attacking freedom. The language of
rights they employ involves rights for states or gun owners or ranchers,
not rights for all. To give credence to their paranoia is to undermine what
it has taken 200 years to fashion. Clumsy tactics by the FBI have given
them their best opportunity in decades to try to repeal the freedoms we all enjoy.
Law-enforcement officials had no trouble upholding the sanctity of the
law when civil-rights demonstrators and antiwar protesters were breaking
it. But they seem hamstrung and incompetent when white supremacists,
militia members and anti-abortion fanatics take the law into their own hands.
Some leftists, no doubt recalling the bad old days when the FBI was
their enemy, are cheered by the bureau's current embarrassments, even if
such views make them allies of the extreme right. But most liberals have
come to recognize that the rule of law is as important now as conservative
believed it was then.
The FBI and the Justice Department have a hard enough job upholding
the law in a society that has a soft spot for disorder. They could use some
support from conservatives who once believed that their country could be
strong only if its government were as well.*
- - -Alan Wolfe, Director of the Center for Religion and American Public Life at
Boston College
