FBI Tracking of Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo Foreshadowed Future Abuses

When neo-fascist “Proud Boys” rallied in Portland, Oregon, on August 17 and were confronted by an array of leftist protesters, Donald Trump weighed in with the tweet, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an “ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.” The tweet came little more than a month after Sen. Ted Cruz called for a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation to be opened into antifa, which would greenlight the full extent of the FBI and other federal agencies’ investigatory powers. Such repressive calls against antifa — along with the FBI attention to so-called Black Identity Extremists, and others — is setting down a dire path. The recently released FBI file of Suze Rotolo, a cultural figure from an earlier period, offers insights and underscores the danger of this surveillance overreach.

The FBI and “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”

In 1963, Bob Dylan released his breakthrough album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, an artistic broadside against the Cold War status quo, with Dylan parodying World War III (“Talkin’ World War III Blues”), railing against inequality and Jim Crow (“Blowin’ in the Wind”; “Oxford Town”), and offering a haunting vision of a world in which the Cuban Missile Crisis transpired differently (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”). These were songs challenging the standing social order and, in many ways, served as an opening bell of the Black freedom, antiwar and other radical upsurges of the decade that followed.

The album itself was tucked inside a jacket bearing the iconic image of Dylan and his then-girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, walking in the February chill on Greenwich Village’s Jones Street. Much has been written about Dylan, Freewheelin’ and his relationship with Rotolo, who passed away in 2011. Rotolo herself documented that relationship, along with her larger life as a political activist and artist, in her 2009 memoir. Unknown and missing from all the various accounts, however, was the fact that Rotolo — and to a degree, Dylan—was under scrutiny by the FBI at the moment that photo was taken, and for the entire span of her relationship with Dylan. Rotolo’s FBI file is exemplary of the repressive role of the Bureau during the 1960s, and underscores the ongoing looming presence of the FBI and other entities that would seek to stifle dissent.