The 1950's is a semi-mythical golden age for US conservatives. It was a time when a woman's place was in the home and the Negroes' place was in the back of the bus (or at a separate lunch counter).
It was also the era when Americans were ruthlessly exploited and controlled through fear of The Threat. It was the time of Duck and Cover, and it gave birth to McCarthyism.
J Edgar Hoover thrived in this environment. The first Director of the FBI represents everything that is odious in the American Experience. His quest for unchecked power was legendary and from the 1950s to the 1970s, he cast a baleful shadow over the landscape of American Politics. Using the investigative powers of the FBI, he compiled and maintained secret dossiers on all prominent Americans.
Today we learn that he saw the outbreak of the Korean War as an opportunity to suspend habeas corpus and arrest "the troublemakers".
Hoover had wanted Truman to declare the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage," The New York Times reported Saturday in a story posted on its Web site.
Hoover identify the enemies of the state through an illegal domestic spying program.
The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list Hoover had been compiling for years.
"The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States,"
Finally, he wanted to put these "illegal combatants" beyond the reach of the law. He planned to suspend habeas corpus and establish extra-legal review "tribunals"
Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the writ of habeas corpus.
All apprehended individuals eventually would have had the right to a hearing under Hoover's plan, but hearing boards comprised of one judge and two citizens would not have been bound by the rules of evidence.
Does this remind you of another tin-plated, meglomaniacal, wannabee dictator with delusions of godhood?