From Snopes.com

Origins:   It's difficult for those who weren't around to experience the 1960s first-hand to fully understand the controversy that swirled around "radical" parties such as the Black Panthers. Certainly to many Americans they represented the very worst of that era's political movements: a group of hate-filled militants who felt their disaffection with the existing social and political systems justified anything required to achieve their aim of "revolution by any means necessary" (such as smuggling guns into a Marin County courtroom in an attempt to free Panther George Jackson, resulting in a shoot-out that killed a judge, two inmates, and Jackson's brother). To others, however, they were the only political group that truly represented a downtrodden and marginalized group of people who had been enslaved, discriminated against, and denied civil rights protections for hundreds of years; that sought to improve the condition of the poor by operating schools, opening medical clinics, and providing free breakfasts for ghetto children; and that had the courage to stand up to the brutality visited upon them by law enforcement acting in the service of a government and a society that sought to "keep them in their place."

In May of 1969, Black Panther founder and national chairman Bobby Seale (who had already been indicted for his alleged participation in demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968) made a trip from Oakland to New Haven, Connecticut, to speak at Yale University. The Black Panthers were by then nationally known, a focus of media attention, and under the active surveillance of the FBI. (J. Edgar Hoover had publicly declared several months earlier that he considered the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.") Rumors of police informants and government spies having infiltrated the party were rampant, and a man named Alex Rackley, a member of the Panthers' New York chapter, fell under suspicion. Rackley was taken to the home of Warren Kimbro (a "community organizer and aspiring Panther") where he was held captive for 24 hours, beaten, and scalded with boiling water in an effort to force him to confess. Rackley was then taken to a marsh in Middlefield by Kimbro, George Sams (Panther field marshall and, according to some, himself a police informant), and Lonnie McLucas (a Panther member from Bridgeport), where Sams ordered Kimbro and McLucas to kill the suspected informant. (Who did the actual killing has always been disputed; McLucas reportedly fired the first shot, but Kimbro admittedly delivered the bullet to the head that killed Rackley.) Rackley's body was discovered the next day by fishermen, and fourteen Black Panthers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy.

That several Black Panthers directly took part in the torture and murder of Alex Rackey is beyond dispute, and to those of us who believe that torture and murder are always wrong, no matter what the cause, their actions were morally reprehensible. But this piece isn't really about outrage over what the Black Panthers did thirty years ago; it's a political tract whose purpose is to discredit the Clintons by associating them with the Black Panthers. Of the hundreds of people who played part in the Black Panthers' New Haven trial three decades ago, the only ones named here are Hillary Clinton (currently our First Lady and a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York), and Bill Lann Lee (acting head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, whose appointment by President Clinton remains controversial because of Lee's support for affirmative action programs).

So, exactly what connection do Ms. Clinton and Mr. Lee have to the Black Panthers? The piece quoted above claims:

We'll begin with the last part, and it's simply ludicrous. Yale University was not "shut down" during the trial. Classes were made optional when 12,000 Panther supporters swarmed the campus in protest, and the president of Yale University himself, Kingman Brewster Jr., announced: "I personally want to say that I'm appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S." To lay the entire responsibility for this massive, widespread protest on the shoulders of two Yale students is just silly, all the more so because nobody has offered evidence that either one of them led, or even participated in, any student demonstrations or protests in support of the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, even if they didn't actually lead or take part in any demonstrations they're still guilty by association, we're told, because they "defended" the Black Panthers.

One of the elements often employed in political screeds such as this one is the ambiguity of the word "defend." It can be used in the sense of providing legal aid to a person accused of a crime, or in the sense of supplying moral justification for a person's actions. Sometimes these two concepts go hand in hand; but often they don't. We often find it necessary, in order to preserve and protect our rights, to defend (in a legal sense) those whose actions we consider morally wrong, and to defend (in a moral sense) those who actions we find legally wrong. We sometimes let criminals go free because constitutional safeguards were violated in the process of bringing them to justice. That doesn't mean we condone their crimes; it means we're willing to "defend" their rights in order to preserve a higher moral principle (i.e., the rights that protect all of us).

What has been overlooked (or deliberately ignored) in the piece quoted here is that even though fourteen Black Panthers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in connection with the murder of Alex Rackley, only two of them were put on trial (the others plead to lesser charges, or the charges against them were dropped): Bobby Seale and Erika Huggins. Why only these two? Seale wasn't present at either the torture or murder of Alex Rackley; he maintained that he knew nothing about any plans to kill Rackley and wasn't even aware that Rackley was suspected of being a police informant. (Panther George Sams did claim he had told Seale about suspicions Rackley was an informant, however.) Erika Huggins wasn't present when Rackley was killed, either. She was accused of having taken part in the "interrogation" of Rackley, boiling the water used to scald him and kicking him while he was tied to a chair. Certainly her actions were both criminally wrong and morally reprehensible, but several other Panthers took a far more active hand in the torture and murder of Rackley (such as those who actually poured the boiling water onto him, beat him, and shot him in the head). Why were only these two people put on trial while the other Panthers were allowed to plead out or weren't even prosecuted at all?

Many people genuinely believed, at the time, that the government was deliberately prosecuting for murder people whom it knew full well were not guilty of murder in order to discredit a group it perceived as a threat, and that perhaps the government had deliberately sacrificed Rackley by planting him in the Panthers' midst and then leaking his cover in order to provoke a showdown. (The fact that neither of the accused was ever convicted is taken by some as proof of the correctness of this theory; others dismiss it as irrelevant and maintain that the case was far too politically controversial to allow for a fair verdict.) If Bobby Seale, the head of the Black Panther party, could be convicted and sent to prison for murder, the Black Panthers would lose a great deal of public support and credibility and be disarmed as a threat to the government. This, it was widely held, was the government's real motivation for prosecuting only Seale and Huggins while other Panthers who were more directly involved in Rackley's murder went free or were allowed to plead to lesser charges (in exchange for turning state's evidence against Seale and Huggins).

The key point here is not whether this notion was ultimately right or wrong. The key point is that many people believed it to be true at the time, and they therefore "supported" the Black Panthers during the subsequent trial (in a legal sense) -- not necessarily because they condoned the (alleged) actions of the two people on trial (or the Black Panthers in general), but because they felt it was morally wrong for the government to prosecute murder charges against only two people, neither of whom was directly involved in the murder of Alex Rackley, all for political purposes. So, one cannot simply tar everyone who "defended" the Panthers with the same brush of moral outrage; many found the Panthers and their actions odious but still "defended" them because they honestly believed the government's attempts to prosecute only a select two of questionable guilt (while letting confessed torturers and murderers off with a comparative slap on the wrist) to be the far greater injustice.

So, what exactly did Mr. Lee and Ms. Clinton do to "defend" the Panthers in a legal sense? In Mr. Lee's case, he did absolutely nothing. He wasn't a lawyer, or even a law student; he was simply another Yale undergraduate who had nothing to do with the Black Panthers' trial. Ms. Clinton wasn't a lawyer then, either; she was a Yale law student. The sum total of her involvement in the trial was that she assisted the American Civil Liberties Union in monitoring the trial for civil rights violations. That a law student's tangential participation in one of the most controversial, politically and racially charged trials of her time (one that took place right on her doorstep) to help ensure it remained free of civil rights abuses is now offered as "proof" of her moral reprehensibility demonstrates that McCarthyism is alive and well -- some of us apparently believe in rights but don't believe everyone has the right to have rights.

Of course, neither Mr. Lee nor Ms. Clinton had anything to do with "defending" the other twelve Panthers, who never even stood trial because the government declined to prosecute them or allowed them to turn state's evidence. The flimsy "evidence" typically mustered as "proof" of their "support" for the Black Panthers is that Hillary Clinton was co-editor of the Yale Review when it printed a derogatory cartoon depicting police as decapitated pigs, even though no one has demonstrated that she approved (or even knew) of it, and that in order to join a student group, Bill Lee once "acquiesced when pressed to write a statement expressing solidarity with the Panthers who were on trial." (If Mr. Lee was such a wholehearted supporter of the Panthers, one has to wonder why he had to be "pressed" into making such a statement.)

In a woefully bad piece of "journalism," Insight magazine writer John Elvin tried his best, despite his lack of any real evidence, to huff and puff and assert as true the claim that Hillary Rodham was leading campus protests in support of the Black Panthers. His conclusion was a model of disingenuousness:

Sure, the answer is "no," because the wrong question has been asked. That Hillary Rodman could fairly have been described as a "student leader" is something no one would dispute. The question being asked here is "Was Hillary Clinton leading campus protests in support of the Black Panthers?" -- a question Elvin dishonestly avoids answering because he can't demonstrate the answer to be "yes." The "foregoing facts" he refers to can be summarized thusly:

• The person who started this rumor says it's true.

• Hillary Rodham associated with people I don't like.

• A bunch of books I don't name say she was a campus activist.

The first two items have no probative value, and the third is carefully worded to conceal the fact that the writer is really stating nothing more than an obvious point no one would dispute, while trying hard to create the misleading impression the point that he can't prove (i.e., that Hillary Rodham actually led campus protests in support of the Black Panthers) is true:

Yes, Hillary Rodham was a "campus leader" and played an "activist role" in her university days. So what? The same could be said of thousands of other people who protested the Vietnam War, or campaigned to get 18-year-olds the vote, or supported equal rights for women. None of that demonstrates anything about Hillary Rodham's alleged support of the Black Panthers. Elvin himself admits that she was "a moderate voice," and it's significant that he doesn't quote from, synopsize, or even identify by title any of the "reviewed biographies" he alludes to, because none of them supports the impression he's trying to create. Not a single one of these biographies quotes anyone who actually saw Hillary Rodham taking part in campus protests for the Panthers, but nearly all of them quote people who knew her back then as saying that radical protest politics simply weren't her style, and that she preferred getting two sides together for reconciliation rather than confrontation. For example, in The Seduction of Hillary Rodham Clinton by David Brock, we find:

Stripped of all the invective and blatant political ranting, the case here against Mr. Lee and Ms. Clinton comes down to nothing more than "We don't like their politics" and "They were there," so they must be as morally guilty as the Panthers themselves. As a junior senator from Wisconsin once demonstrated, if you can't defeat your political opponents at the ballot box, and you can't point to anything specific they've done wrong, simply declare them guilty for once having been associated (no matter how tenuous the association) with a group now reviled. "Vilification by association" tactics that worked for McCarthyites in the 1950s apparently still have their adherents today.

Scream, America, when you've had enough. e-mail puts it, "shut down Yale University with demonstrations") is disingenuous.

On behalf of the ACLU, Rodham did, however, help organize a group of law students to monitor the trial for civil rights violations. Each day, one or more of these monitors (including Rodham) was present in the courtroom, quietly writing down what they saw.

But why were students up in arms about the trial in the first place? The protesters didn't all condone the Panther's killing of a man; many of them were angered because they felt the government was misusing the judicial system for political purposes. Some of the common sentiments expressed at the time were:

• The government had no right to put the Black Panthers on trial, as the group had been formed to protect Blacks against the abuses of power and the denial of civil rights directed at them by that very same government.

• The government was attempting to use the judicial system to discredit the entire Black Panther party (rather than punish criminals) by putting its leader on trial for murder (even though his involvement in Rackley's killing was questionable) while allowing the real murderer(s) to plead to lesser charges.

• The system was too threatened by what the Black Panthers represented to allow for any possibility of a fair trial (an opinion shared by Yale's president).

One confusing point should be cleared up right here: Neither Rodham nor Lee were part of the legal team put together to defend any of the Black Panthers. When this e-mailed missive speaks of them "defending" Rackley's assailants, it's not in an in-the-courts sense but rather as college students drawing attention to what they saw as an injustice. Rodham was a first-year law student at the time all this happened, and her only connection to the Panther case was that Bill Lann Lee wasn't even a law student at the time; he was in his junior year as a Yale undergraduate. (When he did go to law school after graduating the following year, it was at Columbia University, not Yale.)

The bare facts of who did what mean very little unless the background of the case is also filled in.

The Black Panthers were always controversial.

In May of 1969, Black Panther founder and national chairman Bobby Seale (who had already been indicted for his alleged participation in demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968) made a trip from Oakland to New Haven, Connecticut, to speak at Yale University. The Black Panthers were by then nationally known, a focus of media attention, and under the active surveillance of the FBI. (J. Edgar Hoover had publicly declared several months earlier that he considered the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.") Rumors of police informants and government spies having infiltrated the party were rampant, and a man named Alex Rackley, a member of the Panthers' New York chapter, fell under suspicion. Rackley was taken to the home of Warren Kimbro (a "community organizer and aspiring Panther") where he was held captive for 24 hours, beaten, and scalded with boiling water in an effort to force him to confess. Rackley was then taken to a marsh in Middlefield by Kimbro, George Sams (Panther field marshall and, according to some, himself a police informant), and Lonnie McLucas (a Panther member from Bridgeport), where Sams ordered Kimbro and McLucas to kill the suspected informant. (Who did the actual killing has always been disputed; McLucas reportedly fired the first shot, but Kimbro delivered the bullet to the head that killed Rackley.) Rackley's body was discovered the next day by fishermen, and 14 Black Panthers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy.

Erika Huggins later served on the board of education in Alameda County, California; operated a Black Panther school in Oakland, and was the director of the Oakland chapter of the AIDS Project. After four years in prison, Warren Kimbro earned a master's degree in education at Harvard University; became an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State College; and served as directory of Project Move, a program to help convicts released from prison make the transition to the outside world.

The purpose of this analysis of times long past isn't to declare the Panthers or their defenders "right" or "wrong," but to analyze the purpose of the piece quoted above (which is quite similar to an article by John McCaslin that appeared in The Washington Times on 12 June 1998). Clearly what's hitting e-mailboxes is intended to provoke moral outrage at Hillary Clinton, both directly through mis-stating her involvement with Rackley's killers and indirectly by slamming her husband for his choice of Bill Lann Lee as a Justice Department appointment.

• "Rackley was a fellow Panther suspected of disloyalty."

  Waving off the motive for the murder as "disloyalty" is a deliberate understatement. Whatever his real status, Rackley wasn't suspected of not toeing the Panther line 100% or disagreeing with a matter of policy -- he was suspected of being an active, paid informant planted amongst the Panthers by the police or the FBI to report on the Panthers' activities. Using the much milder word "disloyalty" is a manipulative effort to make the actions of the Panthers seem even less justifiable, thereby increasing the guilt-by-association factor of those we're now told were instrumental in defending them.

• "Well, in 1977, that's only eight years later, only one of the killers was still in jail."

  In a sense, the phrases "only one of the killers" and "still in jail" are distortions. Multiple people didn't shoot Alex Rackley in the head: Warren Kimbro did, and the reason he's not still in prison is that the government allowed him to plead to a lesser charge (second degree murder) in exchange for turning state's evidence against other Panthers, then sentenced him to life in prison but released him after four years. The only other Panther named in this piece, Ericka Huggins, isn't "still" in prison because she was never there in the first place, as she was never convicted.

• "These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial."

  No "two people" brought about this course of events; nonetheless, the only names mentioned here are those of Hillary Clinton and Bill Lann Lee (whom President Clinton appointed to the Justice Department thirty years later) because this piece isn't about the Black Panthers: it's a political screed against the Clintons.

• "[Bill Lee] is the head of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Lee is serving in that capacity, illegally, by the way, but that's another story -- another part of the Clinton saga of ignoring the rule of law."

  Bill Lann Lee was appointed acting head of the Justice Department's civil rights division by President Clinton when it appeared that the Senate would not confirm Lee's permanent appointment to that position (largely because of Lee's support for affirmative action programs), then allowed him to remain as acting head for two years before re-nominating him for the post. Questions were raised over the legality of Clinton's allowing an acting official to remain in his post for more than 120 days, and his renominating someone who would likely have been rejected had the Senate been allowed to vote on his original appointment.

  The key point is, however, that even if Clinton's actions in appointing and retaining Bill Lann Lee in a Justice Department post were blatantly illegal, what does that have to do with the Black Panthers and Lee's actions in allegedly having defended them thirty years earlier? The answer is, nothing -- it's a smoke screen for a proxy attack on Hillary Clinton, this time through a retroactive "guilt by association" issue involving her husband.

  Those who dislike President Clinton have been expressing their contempt for years by attacking his wife; now that his wife is running for public office, the pattern is reversed.

• "The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at that time. She is now known as The Smartest Woman in the World. She is none other than the unofficial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from the State of New York -- our lovely First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton."

  Here is the heart of the matter: Don't support Hillary Clinton, because she's a terrible person (and so is her husband). Call it the WWF approach to political awareness -- this one's good, that one's bad, and isn't it lovely to live in a world where complicated voting decisions can be easily simplified down to a matter of caricatures so that nobody has to bother with that pesky business of figuring out what the issues are and who stands where on them.

As election year progresses, look to see other Internet smears of political candidates turn up in your morning mail. Widely-disseminated e-mail is a way of quickly passing along wild exaggerations about the opposition, or even outright lies. Since most don't have access to the necessary research tools to properly examine the claims being made in these screeds, the vast majority of those on the distribution list are left with nothing other than the original piece of rabble-rousing to form an opinion from. Because in the absence of anything else to go on, we're conditioned to believe where there's smoke there's fire, even patently ridiculous claims about any candidate will leave a little bathtub ring of "Yes, but I heard. . ." doubts in otherwise clear-thinking minds. Such is the destructive nature of innuendo, after all. And it's hopelessly naive to assume this method of swaying public opinion won't be employed by those fanatic in what they see as the rightness of their cause.

Some of the Black Panthers involved in the death of Alex Rackley did go on to acquire educations, lead regular lives, hold jobs, and try to contribute something to the world. If we're outraged that they're not all still in prison, then our outrage is best directed at the legal system that failed to convict them, allowed them to plead to lesser charges, and released them from prison early. If we're appalled that "killers" could end up on school boards or college faculties, then our outrage is best directed at the people who elected or appointed them to those positions. -->

Update:   Versions of the e-mailed denunciation headed "Paul Harvey's 'The rest of the story'" began circulating on the Internet in June 2000. This header plus a comment at the end of the text ("And now, as Paul Harvey says, you know the rest of the story") caused some to believe Paul Harvey had read this piece (or a shorter version of it) on air. Paul Harvey's people confirm he has never broadcast the Panthers and Hillary Clinton story.

Hillary has a history of supporting those who would like to see this nation destroyed. She has given aid and comfort to the enemy. That is all I need.