By the 1960s, Pauley came to support
Ronald Reagan, and was by far the Board of Regents' harshest critic of UC Berkeley student protesters. In 1965, Pauley was serving as a regent at the University of California, when
anti-Vietnam war campus protests began to grow. At Pauley's request, CIA Director
John McCone met with FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover on January 28 and Hoover agreed to leak to Pauley information about
UC System President
Clark Kerr. (See
memo regarding McCone's request to meet with Hoover. McCone graduated from
UC Berkeley in 1922, the year before Pauley.) At that meeting, McCone told Hoover that Pauley was very upset about the "situation at Berkeley", and was "anxious to get a line on any persons who are communists or have communist associations, either on the faculty or in the student body." As soon as McCone left his office, Hoover phoned Los Angeles FBI chief
Wesley Grapp, and ordered him to give Pauley anonymous memos on regents, faculty members, and students who were "causing trouble at Berkeley". Hoover admonished Grapp, "It must be impressed upon Mr. Pauley that this data is being furnished in strict confidence." Five days later (February 2) Grapp met with Pauley for two hours at his office in the Pauley Petroleum Building in Los Angeles. Grapp provided him information from FBI files on other regents, faculty, and students who were considered "ultra-liberal". The CIA and FBI worked in conjunction with
Ronald Reagan, who sought to mount a "psychological warfare campaign" against the budding
Free Speech Movement and anti-war sit-ins, including using tax-evasion and "any other available" charges in which the FBI agreed to assist. "This has been done in the past, and has worked quite successfully", Hoover noted. (This information was not made public until 2002, after a fifteen-year legal battle with the FBI that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, as a result of a
FOIA request for an in-depth
San Francisco Chronicle investigation. The FBI had claimed it needed to maintain secrecy to "protect law enforcement operations". The
National Security Act of 1947 bars the CIA from engaging in domestic intelligence activities.) Pauley began the February 2, 1965, meeting with Grapp by saying he was upset about the
Free Speech Movement and recalled that "obnoxious question ... concerning the FBI being a secret police" (referring to a 1959 entry exam question.) He told Grapp he had "no use for [UC President] Kerr" and had accused Kerr of being a "communist or a communist follower". Pauley explained that the 24-member Board of Regents was divided and that his faction wanted "strong positive action taken immediately to clean up the mess." The problem, he said, was that so far he'd been unable to muster the votes to fire Kerr. He blamed the impasse on three "ultra-liberal" regents who staunchly backed Kerr. Governor
Pat Brown (
D) had named to the board:
William Coblentz (Brown's former special counsel);
William M. Roth (member of the
ACLU executive committee); and
Elinor Raas Heller (member of the
Democratic National Committee). Pauley told Grapp that in the 1950s the FBI secretly gave the university reports on professors it was considering hiring. He said he wanted to restore the procedure—which the FBI had code-named the
Responsibilities Program—and offered to pay someone to check FBI files. After Pauley promised not to reveal that the FBI was his source, Grapp gave him a report on UC Berkeley immunology professor
Leon Wofsy that summarized news stories from 1945 to 1956, noting that Wofsy had been a self-avowed Communist Party official who tried to get young people involved with the party. The report failed to note that since 1957 the FBI had found no evidence that Wofsy had been involved with the party. On February 4, 1965, Grapp told Hoover that Pauley could be used as a source on internal University affairs, and could harass and remove suspected communists on the faculty and the Board of Regents. Hoover approved, and one week later Pauley was given confidential information on Coblentz, Roth and Heller. Pauley, Grapp reported to Hoover, was "most appreciative" of the information on his opponents. As Pauley saw it, according to Grapp's report, UC would remain in turmoil "as long as the current officials were in power at the university." Grapp continued to slip Pauley anonymous memos about students and faculty—at least two dozen more—that he could use in persuading the regents to fire Kerr. But in October, a frustrated Pauley told Grapp he was still "two votes short to fire Clark Kerr". Kerr would remain in charge of the university, it seemed, as long as Brown remained governor. When
Ronald Reagan was elected California's governor in 1966, after campaigning against "campus malcontents and filthy speech advocates" at Berkeley, one of his first moves was to fire Kerr. Reagan's Legal Affairs Secretary, Herbert Ellingwood, met with FBI agent
Cartha "Deke" DeLoach at FBI Headquarters, and noted that Reagan was "dedicated to the destruction of disruptive elements on college campuses." ==Philanthropy==