Memos Prove FBI Campaigned Against Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is currently promoting his album Rough and Rowdy Ways, featuring the epic “Murder Most Foul” — a deconstruction of the John F. Kennedy assassination and the broader 1960s era.

The pushback on Dylan happened amid the Cold War contention between the now long-gone USSR and the US. I Photo: Xavier Badosa Flickr

While the song reconstructs the world of the ‘60s, it also, with its allusions to sinister forces at play, is very much a song of the moment.

The irony in all this is that documents buried in the archives detail how Dylan himself was a target of a secret government program during that period, as reported by Aaron J. Leonard for Truthout.

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

On December 13 of that year, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC) — an advocacy group for constitutional rights, with considerable Communist Party influence — held its annual Bill of Rights Dinner.

The event aimed to honor people it considered at the forefront of the fight for civil liberties. One of those up for an award was Bob Dylan.

In accepting the honor, Dylan said, “I have to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where — what he thought he was doing, but I have to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone — I don’t think it could go that far. But I have to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me — not to go that far and shoot.”

This statement became the basis for the FBI to monitor Dylan and his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, whose father was a labor organizer, and link them to the Communist Party of the USA, the ECLC, and unleash tirades against the folksinger through FBI agents who also worked as syndicated and magazine writers.

The pushback on Dylan happened amid the Cold War contention between the now long-gone USSR and the US.

“Putting aside for the moment the fascistic politics percolating across the US, one need look no further than the current calls and actions to suppress those standing with the people of Gaza to see how fraught the current landscape is,” Leonard wrote.

If the Bob Dylan of today is writing songs about a dark turn of events in the US — or as Dylan writes in “Murder Most Foul,” the place where faith, hope, and charity die — he is only expanding on a narrative that has been in play for a considerable amount of time.

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