Racist hate groups periodically rear their ugly heads in the United States, only to duck back into their dank holes to hide before making their next appearances. The most active of these organizations during the past half century are the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. 88, subtitled An Undercover News Reporter’s Exposé of American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, by investigative reporter Andy Oakley, chronicles the activities of these repugnant political sects during the 1980s, when Klansmen, Nazis, and others on the racist fringe begin cooperating nationally for the first time. Oakley, a former NorthwesternUniversity journalism instructor and lecturer, describes his four-plus years of experiences investigating these organizations in Chicago, Michigan, WashingtonD.C., and a number of other locations. The result is a book that is sometimes humorous, sometimes frightening, and almost always Kafkaesque.
Oakley is a 20-something graduate student in 1981 when he makes his first visit to a Nazi headquarters for a school project. The two brown-shirted, black-booted thugs who are on duty that evening are so thrilled to have him for company that they send him home with all of the pro-Hitler propaganda he can carry. With encouragement from a friend who is a well-connected newspaper reporter with the ChicagoSun-Times, Oakley establishes contact with the FBI and begins attending meetings of competing Nazi organizations. When the Hitlerians begin cooperating with the Ku Klux Klan, Oakley also goes undercover as a Klansman. From 1981 to 1986, he monitors the activities of a couple dozen hate groups, some with cumbersome names like The Order of the Fiery Cross – Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist White People’s Party. He attends annual celebrations on April 20 to honor Adolf Hitler’s birthday, complete with 5-by-5-foot layer cakes in the shapes of swastikas. He joins hundreds of racists in attending ceremonial cross-burning ceremonies in Midwestern farmers’ fields. He wears a Nazi uniform for pro-Nazi demonstrations in public areas – including in front of the White House. He foils Klan attempts to mail threatening fliers to residents of a largely Jewish village. A photojournalist poses as his girlfriend in order to gain admittance to a Klan-Nazi “White Unity Rally” so that she can photograph secret racist rituals. Oakley nervously sits on a plush couch and, with a tape recorder hidden in his pocket, secretly records coffee-sipping racists’ plans to blow up a bridge using dynamite that they claim to have stolen from a military base.
Oakley’s original intent was to write a series of stories exposing hate groups for The Daily Herald in Chicago. That series forced the resignation of a violence-mongering Ku Klux Klan leader from his sensitive job controlling the reactor of a nuclear power plant 20 miles north of Chicago. Oakley ended up with so many notes, however, that he claims he had no choice but to write a 180-page book about his experiences. The newspaper series, which was written two years before the release of the book, earned Oakley several awards, most notably the coveted Peter Lisagor Award for Distinguished Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. Oakley’s chronicle is full of great, frightening detail, and even contains a compendium listing information about more than 200 far-right extremist organizations that were active in the United States in the 1980s. 88is a must-read for those interested in the history of racism and for readers who enjoy real-life undercover James Bond stories.