http://www.dallasmorningnews.com/national/1016nat1spock.htm
10/16/99
By Doug J. Swanson / The Dallas Morning News
To millions of parents, he was the trusted baby doctor who dispensed advice on topics ranging from breast-feeding to dealing with tantrums to toilet training. But to the FBI, Benjamin Spock was a subversive and a "rabble-rouser" whose speeches against the Vietnam War made him the target of intensive bureau surveillance.
Newly opened FBI files obtained by The Dallas Morning News show that the government shadowed the world-famous author of Baby and Child Care for years. Agents watched his movements, cataloged his associates and notified the CIA when he left the country on vacation.
When he came to Dallas in 1971 for a speech at Southern Methodist University, bureau informants were on hand to listen and to record the name and license-plate number of a student who went so far as to give the doctor a ride.
Dr. Spock died last year at the age of 94. Last month, the FBI released more than 1,700 pages of his files to The News after a Freedom of Information Act request.
Spanning eight years, the files are Cold War specimens. They provide a window on the government's campaign against left-wing protesters of the era, a time of deep suspicion and acrimony on both sides of the Vietnam issue.
Though the FBI said it was pursuing violent radicals, the mere act of voicing anti-war sentiments could make someone a target of the bureau.
Dr. Spock neither condoned violence nor advocated the overthrow of the government. He was investigated, the files say, because he was "a symbol with regard to the New Left movement."
The FBI finally stopped watching him only after a bureau official protested in a memo: "The basis for investigation appears to be - pick someone you dislike and start investigating."
Dr. Spock rose to international renown with his 1946 book on raising children. Eventually selling more than 40 million copies, Baby and Child Care became the most popular book of its kind.
Through its pages Dr. Spock often was the primary medical source consulted by parents anxious over late-night fevers, mysterious rashes or teething-induced crying jags. Resonating through the book is the assurance that mothers and fathers should trust their own common sense.
Some critics found him overly permissive in his approach to child-rearing, but Dr. Spock enjoyed an outpouring of acclaim. In 1990, Life magazine listed him among "The 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century." Newsweek, in 1994, called him "arguably, the most influential American alive today."
"More than any president, pope, or populist," wrote his biographer, Thomas Maier, "Spock brought about a remarkable revolution since 1946, enacting a fundamental change in how parents bring up their children."
But Dr. Spock also had political concerns, which brought him to the attention of the FBI.
The bureau had done a routine background check of the pediatrician in 1964, before his appointment by President Lyndon Johnson to the National Advisory Council for the war on poverty.
In 1965 an informant told the Cleveland FBI office that Dr. Spock was planning a "peace delegation" to North Vietnam. Investigating agents could find no evidence of such a trip. And a memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover noted that Dr. Spock was "not known to be a member of, or sympathetic to, the Communist Party."
Nevertheless, his anti-war activities - mainly marches and speeches - apparently caught the bureau's attention.
He spoke frequently on his opposition to the draft and urged draftees to resist conscription. In January 1968, he was indicted for conspiracy to violate Selective Service laws. Evidence against him included some gathered by an FBI wiretap of his office, the files show.
A federal court convicted Dr. Spock and others. But the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston overturned Dr. Spock's conviction and entered a judgment of acquittal.
His acquittal did not stop the FBI surveillance, the files demonstrate. Dr. Spock had been placed on the bureau's "agitator index," with information on his activities furnished to the White House "on a continuing basis."
The action apparently sprang from a 1967 bureau directive that ordered agents to increase undercover work against those in the anti-war movement. "Their activities are no longer in the realm of legitimate dissent," the directive said, "but are now directed toward violence, resistance and direct confrontation."
However, many who did not engage in violence also became targets, as shown by FBI files, which are generally eligible for release to the public after a subject's death. John Lennon of the Beatles was investigated by the FBI. So was farm-worker leader Cesar Chavez.
"A lot of people who didn't pose a threat to national security were watched," said Dr. Mitchell Hall, a Central Michigan University historian who's writing a book on the American anti-war movement. "They represented threats to the outlook and the agendas of the people who held political power."
FBI spokesman David Miller said such tactics are "of a bygone age" when "different concerns drove the government." Investigative guidelines were tightened beginning in the late 1970s, he said.
"The continuing investigation after his [Dr. Spock's] acquittal would not have occurred under today's guidelines," Mr. Miller said.
In 1995, Dr. Spock requested the release of his own file from the FBI, said biographer Maier, "but to the best of my knowledge, he died without seeing it."
The file shows that the FBI was intent on tracking his movements and affiliations. He was a member of groups urging nuclear disarmament and the abolishment of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Such associations, bureau files noted, made him "potentially dangerous" or "inimical to [the] U.S."
The bureau tracked his travels domestically and abroad. When he went to Australia in 1971, FBI chief Hoover sent a copy of his itinerary to the CIA, noting that Dr. Spock was "deeply involved in anti-administration activities."
Though the surveillance was undercover, it wasn't always crafty.
During speeches, "there was always a visible FBI man in the middle of the audience, in his slouch hat and his camel's hair coat," the pediatrician said in his 1998 biography, Dr. Spock: An American Life. "They had no idea what democracy meant. They really thought it was their business to be suspicious of anybody who didn't agree politically with Hoover."
A 1971 visit to Texas was typical. It generated a six-page report that was distributed to various FBI offices.
Dr. Spock had come to make speeches at the University of Texas at Arlington and SMU. A "confidential source" reported to the bureau in minute detail on the contents of the public talks, which concerned war, pollution and nuclear disarmament.
Then, the source reported, Dr. Spock had lunch and left campus, escorted by UTA government student Michael DeFrank, who was driving his 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass, license number FNW 303.
Mr. DeFrank, who still lives in Arlington, said he had no idea the FBI was watching as he drove Dr. Spock from UTA to SMU for another speech.
"That was my total task, conveying this terrible radical from one speaking engagement to another," he said.
As they made the trip, the talk ranged from matters of science to the smell of baking bread from the Mrs Baird's plant, Mr. DeFrank recalled. "That's how seditious our conversation was."
Mr. DeFrank, now 52, was hardly a student revolutionary, although he said he did write for an alternative campus newspaper.
"My writing was focused on being quiet in the library, that kind of thing. It was far from being radical."
Eventually, Mr. DeFrank became an associate vice president for academic affairs at UTA, which he left in 1989. He now works for a company that gives culinary tours of Europe. The disclosures of the Spock files brought back memories, not all of them good. "One forgets about the very suspicious attitude of those days," he said.
Ultimately, the FBI was able to pin only a couple of accusations on the baby doctor: He didn't agree with many of the government's actions, and he belonged to groups that also had Communist or socialist sympathizers as members.
By 1972 the bureau was having second thoughts about watching him.
One FBI official wrote in a memo: "There are more dangerous characters around needing our attention."
Another bureau official who looked at the Spock case warned that there were "difficult legal questions as to the FBI's authority to conduct such investigations."
Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray apparently agreed. In October 1972, he wrote to a subordinate, "Unless you can persuade me on the basis of the results of this current investigation, or for other reasons, why Dr. Spock should continue to be investigated, this investigation should be closed."