One of Vance’s recommendations after Regular Army troops had been sent to quell the extreme violence in Detroit in 1967 was to create a joint service command unit to oversee the mission of controlling civil disturbances when the Army was called to deploy troops by a Governor and the President. Thus, was born the Department of Defense’s Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations. DCDPO had an Army Lieutenant General in command, with an Air Force Major General as his Deputy.
Immediately prior to my arriving at CIAD, the then-classified Department of the Army Civil Disturbance Plan (Code Name: Garden Plot) was published on September 10, 1968. In a strange coincidence that arose later, Garden Plot’s author and the first head of DCDPO I worked for was Gen. George R. Mather. After my brother Dick’s divorce, Mather’s son later became my niece and nephew’s stepfather. The good General went on to retire from the Army at the same time I did. However, while I left as a Sergeant, he wrapped up his distinguished Army career with four stars after leaving DCDPO to serve as head of the Army’s Southern Command.
When I began my work at CIAD in November 1968, I was given the task of reviewing domestic intelligence relating to the likelihood of DCDPO being asked to again deploy troops to American cities. With this background in mind, I was assigned to provide intelligence needed by DCDPO for both planning and operational purposes. My reading diet for this task included classified government documents which were primarily and voluminously produced by the FBI, and to a lesser extent the Army. I found open-source, non-classified material was usually of more utility than the classified sources in making judgements about whether and when Regular Army troops needed to be alerted for possible deployment.
By the mid-1970s I was back in civilian life, and the country had become considerably calmer. I imagine DCDPO withered away with the changing times, and a half-century would have to pass before the country again saw the widespread civil unrest of the early 2020s.
