A New Game of Jenga: A Query into the Contours of U.S. Anti-Terror Law Enforcement Preparedness 1932-1972

Abstract

On September 20, 2001 in order to reassure to the American public, President George W. Bush proclaimed, “our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda but it does not end here.”1 This declaration became to be known as the Global War on Terror and invited an avalanche of political scholars and historians to uncover a new understanding of the Middle East. But the story of how the United States has responded to terrorism has an untold story, going back further to the edges of the Cold War. The purpose of my thesis is to show how the federal government implemented anti-terrorism policies by combating the infiltration of Russian communist influence prior to the Second World War. It was during the edge of the Cold War in the 1950s that the federal government used the very policies that it adopted to address what it considered domestic terrorism in the 1960s. I argue that presidential desperation to address the communist threat, coupled with the growth of the FBI’s extension into local law enforcement created a curved impromptu approach to terrorism, geared towards domestic threats while removing the focus on threats that originated internationally. My contention is that the collaboration between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expanded the purpose of the FBI to address the Russian communist threat in the 1930s. The next step came with the success of the war’s conclusion in 1945, where President Harry S. Truman initiated the National Security Act of 1947. The policy manufactured approaches to national defense and takes us through a maze of juxtapositions to combating elevating crimes rates. Together with the expansion of federal law enforcement responsibilities and with the threat of communism, socialism and fascism coming into its own borders, the United States would begin to define what we refer now to as “terrorism.” National Defense policies in the late 1940s would have to be redefined and inversely applied in order to uproot this growing problem. There is a litany scholarship that has been dedicated to the military and intelligence response of the dilemma of Cold War internationally, but little has been discussed of how the United States sought to protect itself once it had already arrived inside of its own borders. If we analyze the federal government’s discourse of policies and discussions that have gone largely awry, we can see that the American public was left exposed and vulnerable through a misguided path of blinding ideologies from its elected polity. My approach is unconventional and establishes a series of patterns that converge into single road of symmetrical evidence. I purposely avoid seismic arguments that involve the Second World War, the Great Depression and US. Diplomacy in the Middle East primarily because they would distract from the greater point at hand. My argument rests on the idea that the ability to combat terrorism in the United States originates in its need to combat domestic terrorism and then rotates precipitously to combat international terrorism. Ultimately, we can see a cyclical pattern of the US government is in a constant flux preventing two types of terrorism under various circumstances. By focusing on the examination of personal letters and documents from J. Edgar Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, official Congressional records, CIA declassified materials and historical polling data so that we can see that many of these greater events created a new unforeseen path to the events leading up to the tragedy of 9-11.