The essay question

It was optional question number 7 on UC's 1959 English aptitude test for high school applicants - and Hoover was livid:

"What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?"

Hoover took any attack on the FBI personally. As soon as he learned about the essay question, he ordered Assistant FBI Director Cartha "Deke" DeLoach to start a covert public relations campaign to embarrass the university and pressure it to retract the question.

"We really should stir up as many protests re (sic) this as possible," Hoover ordered.

DeLoach, a high official in the American Legion, enlisted his fellow legionnaires to fire a barrage of irate letters at the university.

At the FBI's urging, the head of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and a "Bureauminded" member of the Los Angeles Archdiocese each publicly condemned the question.

In San Francisco, Auerbach met with Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown and made him aware of Hoover's "extreme displeasure regarding the aptitude test question."

Auerbach also called on "a few friendly sources" in the media, including the publishers of the San Francisco Examiner (then owned by the Hearst Corp.) and the San Francisco Chronicle (then owned by the DeYoung family and now owned by Hearst).

And Hoover personally complained to Brown, who was ex-officio president of the regents, and four other regents, calling the question a "gross error."

The campaign worked. Brown promptly chastised UC officials. On Feb. 19, 1960, the regents retracted the question, expressing their "regret" and affirming their "highest respect" for the FBI.

In an interview with The Chronicle, DeLoach said the FBI was merely trying to "set the record straight."

At the time, Hoover couldn't resist gloating. In a "Dear Dick" letter to Vice President Richard Nixon, the director described the "storm of protest" that arose in response to the "viciously misleading question."

And he was just getting started.

The wrong man

Hoover next ordered his agents to identify the author of the question, and they soon focused on UCLA English professor Everett Jones, combing their files for any derogatory information on him.

A few weeks later, UCLA chancellor Vern Knudsen received an anonymous letter attacking the loyalty of Jones and his wife. Copies also went to three Los Angeles newspapers.

The FBI's files don't say who wrote the letter. In an interview, DeLoach said he had no recollection of the episode.

The letter claimed that in the mid-1940s the joneses were "fanatical adherents to communism." It said the couple were present at parties attended by communists in the 1950s. Everett Jones, it said, had "in- . herited" leftist sympathies from his father, a former Unitarian minister.

The letter added that "it is indeed impossible to believe that UCLA or any other educational institution would knowingly place a person with Everett Jones' record in a position where he can so effectively poison the minds of American Youth."

Knudsen prepared a statement saying he normally ignored anonymous allegations, but he had questioned Jones about the letter. Jones denied ever being in the Communist Party and noted he had signed the university's loyalty oath.

In any event, the chancellor added, Jones had "no part" in preparing the essay question.

The FBI, it seems, had the wrong man.

The Security Index

Hoover now set his sights on the entire university.

He ordered his agents to search the bureau's files for any derogatery information about UC's 6,000 faculty members and top administrators around the state.

On March 2, 1960, he received a 60-page report on UC's "political complexion." DeLoach, who prepared the report, told Ihe Chronicle that the FBI was just sizing up the university that had come out with the controversial essay question.

The report said 72 faculty members, students and employees were listed in the bureau's "Security Index," a secret list of people whom the FBI considered potentially dangerous to national security during a crisis and would detain indefinitely without judicial warrant.

Bay Area detainees, a former FBI agent told The Chronicle, were to be held on Angel Island.

Hoover had started keeping the nationwide index in 1940, according to a 1976 study by the U.S. Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

He ignored an attorney general's 1943 order to destroy the list because it was "impractical, unwise and dangerous," said the committee, which was headed by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho.

At its height in 1954, the Security Index contained the names of 26,174 people. The index listed not only alleged communists, but suspected communists and individuals who had "shown sympathy" to communist objectives. It included people involved in labor unions, civil rights groups, the film industry and schools.

Congress was not told about the detention plan, according to the Church committee, which also found the plan failed to meet 1950 statutory requirements that there was "reasonable ground to believe" prospective detainees would engage in espionage or sabotage.

The FBI's report on UC also alleged that faculty members had engaged in a panoply of other misconduct:

• 141 professors had committed miscellaneous misdeeds such as "writing a play that glorified the Chinese Communist Army";
• 54 professors or'their family members subscribed or contributed to publications the bureau deemed subversive;
• 40 faculty members had protested the state's loyalty oath;
• 27 had close relatives who were former members or contributors to the Communist Party;
• 22 professors had been involved in "illicit love affairs, homosexuality, sexual perversion, excessive drinking or other instances of conduct reflecting mental instability."

But the FBI found nothing in its files about UC Berkeley English professor James Lynch who, the bureau finally learned, had written the offensive essay question.

Kerr had been in Argentina at a conference on education during the essay-question imbroglio.

On March 28, 1960, he wrote Hoover to express his regret about the question and to ask the director to raise any future concerns about the university "directly with me as president."

But Hoover snubbed Kerr's overture. "if we have any further difficulties," Hoover told his aides, "we will deal with the regents as we recently did."

The protest at City Hall

On May 13, 1960, hundreds of demonstrators - many of them UC Berkeley students - gathered at San Francisco's City Hall to protest hearings being conducted there by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.

When the demonstrators were barred from the hearing room, a loud scuffle broke out. The police turned on high-pressure fire hoses and blasted the crowd down the marble steps.

Officers arrested 64 people, including 31 Berkeley students, but instead .of discouraging the protest, the confrontation became a call to arms. The next day 5,000 people protested the HUAC hearings at City Hall.

The incident marked not only HUAC's decline but the noisy arrival of a new generation of students, the first stirrings of a youth movement that, even then, seemed centered in Berkeley.

It took the FBI by surprise.

"Yesterday...we had a demonstration of Communist strength in San Francisco, the likes of which have not been seen since the infamous 1934 strike," Auerbach told Hoover. His memo compared the City Hall protest to the violent strike that was led by San Francisco labor leader Harry Bridges and shut down the West Coast maritime industry.

"What is particularly significant, and undoubtedly of special interest to you, is the fact that much of the manpower for this riotous situation was provided by students of the University of California at Berkeley.

"Since Clark Kerr has become President, the situation on all campuses has deteriorated to the point where the so-called academic freedom has become academic license.

"The attack on the FBI in the English 'A' examination was merely one example of the deterioration of the morality and patriotism at this great university, which soon will have fifty thousand students in its halls."

In june 1960, a San Francisco judge dismissed all charges of disturbing the peace against 63 of the City Hall arrestees.

Several months later, in a widely publicized report entitled "Communist Target -- Youth: Communist Infiltration and Agitation Tactics," the FBI director blamed the melee on the students, claiming they had been duped by communists.

Hoover charged that UC Berkeley student Robert Meisenbach "provided the spark that touched off the flame of violence." He alleged that Meisenbach leaped over a barricade, grabbed a policeman's billy club and used it to beat the officer.

But in May 1961 a jury acquitted Meisenbach.

Hoover's "Communist Target Youth" may have been discredited. But it already had caught the eye of a politically ambitious actor named Ronald Reagan.

'The FBI Story'

On Aug. 26, 1960, Reagan had the Hollywood operator place a call to FBI headquarters in Washington and asked to speak with Hoover. Told the director was out, he was connected to DeLoach, the assistant director.

Reagan introduced himself as the host of "General Electric Theater," a popular Sunday night television drama. He said he wanted to produce a special program based on the "Communist Target Youth" report. Hoover could appear at the end of the program to warn viewers about the communist threat, he added, which would be "a great public service."

Over the years, Reagan and the FBI had engaged each other through a series of contacts that catalyzed his political metamorphosis.

He had come to Hollywood in 1937 and three years later played George Gipp in his most acclaimed film, "Knute Rockne - All American." He was a Democrat who gave his name and time to groups promoting liberal policies at home and abroad.

But as the Cold War began, the FBI suspected that some of those groups included Communist Party members trying to promote the Soviet cause. As Reagan recalled in his memoir, "An American Life," FBI agents approached him in 1946 and shared their insights about the communist effort to take over Hollywood.

Reagan's book suggests that this and other discussions with FBI agents inspired him to fight communism, which led him to run for president of the Screen Actors Guild and "indirectly... set me on the road that would lead me to poiitics."

In 1985, the FBI released some documents about Reagan. A spokesman for Reagan said at the time that the president played only a "very minor" involvement with the bureau. The spokesman claimed that the FBI was merely contacting people who had testified before HUAC.

Those documents described an April 10, 1947, meeting between FBI agents, Reagan, then SAG president, and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman at the Reagans' Hollywood home, where they identified colleagues "who they suspected were carrying on Communist Party work."

Newly released FBI records obtained by The Chronicle reveal that the actors named by Reagan and Wyman that day included Larry Parks ('The Jolson Story"), Howard Da Silva ('"The Lost Weekend") and Alexander Knox ("Wilson"). Each was later called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and blacklisted from working in Hollywood.

And over the years, the new documents show, Reagan's contacts with the bureau were far more extensive than he acknowledged or has been reported.

In May 1947, Reagan gave the FBI the name of another actor involved in liberal causes (the actor's name is deleted in the FBI documents).

That October, Reagan went to Washington, D.C., to testify as a friendly witness at a HUAC hearing on communism in the movie business. At a dinner attended by Hoover, Reagan remarked that Quentin Reynolds, a prominent journalist who had criticized the HUAC hearing, was "said to be a communist."

Reagan continued to periodically phone the E'BI to report people he suspected were communists, based, apparently, on his brief encounters with them.

One was a young starlet who at a 1959 Hollywood soiree disagreed with blacklisting actors who had refused to testify against their colleagues. (The FBI deleted her name in the records.)

Another was an unnamed Los Angeles college student who questioned Reagan after he gave a 1960 speech on behalf of Democrats for Nixon. The student, Reagan told the FBI, asked questions "right down the commie line."

DeLoach told The Chronicle that Reagan was not an informant, saying, "He never was a close contact of ours. He was never a source of information. There was no unique relationship."

In an interview, Edwin Meese III said Reagan and the FBI had "back and forth" contact during this period. "He felt that the contacts with the bureau were very helpful to him during that period."

Wyman did not respond to a request for comment through her Hollywood representative, Jan Stern.

Reagan also saw the dramatic potential in fighting communism, new documents show.

In 1958, he sought to play the part of Special Agent George Crandall in a movie to be called '"The FBI Story." So eager was he to play the valiant agent killed in the line of duty that he offered to take half of his normal $75,000 fee.

But the Los Angeles FBI chief checked the bureau's files and found that Reagan had been "associated with certain Communist front organizations" in the mid1940s, before he "suddenly saw the light."

The FBI was wary of giving the bureau's imprimatur to the ex-liberal. "Sounds as though Reagan would consider this another stamp to block out the past," the agent wrote. "If it reaches an issue I am just going to say 'No.' "

The role of Crandall in the 1959 film went to Larry Pennell.

By the end of the decade, Peagan's film career had stalled - he claimed Hollywood liberals were punishing him because of his anti-communist work - and he was hired by General Electric, hosting its weekly television show and making speeches to GE employees.

At first his talks focused on fighting communism in Hollywood, but they increasingly embraced broader conservative concerns like "encroaching government controls." Liberalism, he said at one point, was a disguise for "socialist revolution."

And he was inspired when he read Hoover's "Communist Target -- Youth" report on the protests against HUAC at San Francisco City Hall.

In September 1960, after he broached the idea for a television special with DeLoach, the bureau again checked its files on Reagan.

"He has been contacted on several occasions by agents of our Los Angeles Office and in every instance has been cooperative and helpful," the resulting memo said.

"He in turn has visited our Los Angeles office, and our relations with him have been cordial."

But on Sept. 8, 1960, Reilgan again phoned Hoover only to be told the director was unavailable. Reagan declined to speak with anyone else.

The next day, he made one last pitch to do the show, but DeLoach said the answer was still no.

The FBI wasn't ready to take the stage with him - not yet.