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WASHINGTON COVER-UP
WASHINGTON
COVER-UP
_Clark R. Mollenhoff_
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
1962
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 62-13288
COPYRIGHT © 1962 BY CLARK R. MOLLENHOFF
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I Secrecy Solves No Problems 9
CHAPTER II The First Century 21
CHAPTER III Teapot Dome to the Tax Scandals 30
CHAPTER IV Army-McCarthy—A Claim of Secrecy
Unlimited 41
CHAPTER V Another Blow at Senator Joe 55
CHAPTER VI Secrecy Fix on Dixon and Yates 60
CHAPTER VII Congress Becomes Concerned 79
CHAPTER VIII Secrecy Hides the Security Bunglers 86
CHAPTER IX Secrecy Curtain on Iron Curtain
Deals 95
CHAPTER X Pressing a Point with Ike 106
CHAPTER XI Keeping the Professor in the Dark 114
CHAPTER XII Ike’s Lawyer and the Law 129
CHAPTER XIII Muzzling the Public’s Watchdog 143
CHAPTER XIV Hiding the Laos Mess 153
CHAPTER XV Defiance to the End, Above the Law 169
CHAPTER XVI Kennedy Makes a Wobbly Start 177
CHAPTER XVII A Pending Problem for JFK 190
CHAPTER XVIII A Solution 201
APPENDIX A Letter from President Eisenhower to
the Secretary of Defense 210
APPENDIX B Letters Regarding the Presidential
Letter of May 17, 1954 222
APPENDIX C Correspondence on the Right of Access
to Information by the General
Accounting Office 224
APPENDIX D Letter from President Kennedy to
the Secretary of Defense 236
APPENDIX E Executive Privilege Correspondence
between President Kennedy and
Congressman John E. Moss 237
WASHINGTON COVER-UP
CHAPTER I
Secrecy Solves No Problems
No single factor is more important to the strength of our democracy
than the free flow of accurate information about the government’s
operations. The citizen in a democracy must know what his government
is doing, or he will lack the soundest basis for judging the
candidates and the platforms of our political parties.
Our elected officials are given only a temporary grant of power,
and only a temporary custody of government property and government
records. Neither the President nor those he appoints have any royal
prerogative; they have only a limited right to steer our government
within the framework of the Constitution and the laws.
It is well to remember that every withholding of government business
from the public is an encroachment upon the democratic principle that
government officials are accountable to the people. It follows that
citizens should regard all governmental secrecy with some suspicion
as an encroachment on their right to know.
The American citizen should reject all arbitrary claims to secrecy
by the bureaucracy as sharply as he would reject any claims to a
right of the executive branch to by-pass Congress in levying taxes.
A wise citizen should be as outraged at arbitrary secrecy as he
would be at arbitrary imprisonment. Logically he should insist on
the same safeguards against arbitrary secrecy that he would against
unjustified arrest or taxation. The public’s “right to know” is that
basic.
Unfortunately, there is a general tendency to regard government
secrecy as only a problem for the newspapers. And even within the
newspaper profession there is a tendency to ignore government secrecy
until it interferes with a story the individual reporter or editor
wants to develop.
I am not interested in pleading for any special right of access to
government information for newspapers or reporters. As vital as their
function is, newspapers, magazines, television and radio for the most
part merely provide an orderly process for disseminating information
about government to the people who do not have the time, money,
or technical facility to acquire the information for themselves.
Transmitting information gathered at a government press conference or
through a government press release does not necessarily answer the
people’s right to know.
The public has a right to expect that its government’s press releases
will be factually accurate, and for the most part they are. We
also have a right to expect our highest officials to be factually
accurate, but we must recognize realistically that it is only normal
for them to color facts with opinions and conclusions that are most
favorable to the political party in power.
This manipulation, shading, twisting, or omission of facts—often
referred to as “managing the news”—will be limited only by the
political fear of being exposed for having made erroneous or
intentionally misleading statements to the public. As reprehensible
as the practice can be, it is nevertheless a political fact of life
and those who lament its existence would do better to bolster the
one sure safeguard against it: the people’s right to know—through
the press and through their elected representatives in Congress.
News management, I repeat, can be controlled only by insisting on
the public’s right to go behind the statements distributed by the
government agencies or by high government officials.
Those who manipulate the news or try to cover their tracks with
arbitrary secrecy are not likely to be pursuing totalitarian goals.
Usually the only motivation is short-term political gain. Often it
is rationalized on grounds that a few factual errors and overdrawn
conclusions are not important when viewed in the total context of
the achievements of the party in power. There is also the standard
rationalization that a few distortions only serve to balance the
distortions of the other political party.
No administration enjoys admitting errors or mismanagement of
government. Because the criticism is usually initiated by the
political opposition, it is often harsh and overdrawn. An instinctive
defensiveness springs up within the defending political party, and
the battle rages.
In the classic political controversy, the initial criticism has been
followed by a demand for a full investigation. The press has already
done some investigative work and has printed stories dealing with
all available aspects of the controversy. However, when the probing
by the press or by private citizens has not been conclusive, the
Congress, throughout the history of the United States, has launched
investigations to dig out the facts not otherwise available to the
press or the public. And almost as often as the Congress has dug in,
the executive branch has refused or been reluctant to co-operate.
A truly thorough investigation of the executive branch can be
conducted only in the Congress. It is unreasonable to believe that
an Attorney General, appointed by the President, will aggressively
delve into an investigation of matters that might embarrass his own
administration. For this reason, the right of the public and the
press to government information is for the most part contingent upon
the power of Congress to obtain documents and testimony from the
executive branch.
If the committees of Congress, acting within the scope of their
authority, cannot obtain access to all the facts on government
activity, then the facts can be arbitrarily hidden for the
duration of the administration’s power. Who would argue that
any administration should be allowed to bury its crimes, its
mismanagement, and its errors until a public, barred from full facts
on these matters, decides to vote that party from power? Such a
philosophy would put a premium on the Washington cover-up.
Properly authorized committees must have the power to compel
government officials to testify and produce government records. If
this power is lacking, the Congress, the press, and the public are
dependent upon the information or half-information that the executive
branch chooses to release. It should be obvious to even a novice
in politics that politicians are not likely to voluntarily produce
testimony or records that may harm their own aspirations.
Most congressional requests for information have been filled without
trouble. The executive branch has resisted, however, whenever it
seemed likely that congressional hearings would expose some political
favorite or embarrass the administration. Invariably it has been
claimed that the Congress was invading the executive branch and that
some constitutional issue was involved.
In this book I will show how the executive branch, beginning with
George Washington’s administration, has handled requests from
Congress for delivery of information. And I will show how the
tendency to withhold information has grown, particularly since World
War II.
It is not my intention to argue that all government information
should be made public immediately, for I am fully aware of the
need for security on military matters as well as the need for some
restrictions on release of information from personnel files and
investigative files.
In practice, we must allow our elected officials the right to
withhold some kinds of information from the public. War plans and
other papers involving military security are the more obvious
examples. But any withholding should be done under specific grants of
authority from Congress or under specific grants in the Constitution,
and the authority should be carefully limited. The broad right of
arbitrary withholding of information is not something that any
officials should be permitted to arrogate to themselves.
There is ample justification for laws that set out areas of military
information to be withheld from the general public. There always
has been. It would be especially foolhardy in these days of serious
international tension to insist on a full public disclosure of our
military posture. However, this does not mean that all persons
outside the military establishment should be barred from access
to military information. There should be no question about proper
committees of Congress having access to nearly all information on
military spending, for this is the only way the Congress can obtain
sufficient information for passing laws and appropriating money.
Also, the auditors of the General Accounting Office (GAO) must have
access to all but the most highly classified Defense secrets, or
they will be unable to carry out their duties of determining whether
expenditures are being made in an efficient and lawful manner.
There might also be justification for withholding information from
the public when it involves diplomatic negotiations with a foreign
nation. However, barring the public should not bar the GAO or
properly authorized committees of Congress except under the most
unusual and most clearly delineated circumstances.
There are other areas of government in which secrecy is justified.
These include the raw investigative files of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), and some parts of the government personnel
files. There are clear reasons for barring the public from the FBI
investigative files, for these files contain much unevaluated rumor
and many unauthenticated documents. Also, as FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover has pointed out, much mischief could be done by the underworld
and subversive elements if they had access to FBI files.
But while we are using a limited secrecy to guard our chief
federal investigative agency, we must realize that law enforcement
agencies can go wrong if there is not some regular scrutiny from
the outside. This was demonstrated in the twenties, just prior to
the time when J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of cleaning up the
federal investigative agency. We have been fortunate to have a J.
Edgar Hoover heading the FBI, but we cannot assume that the office
will always be filled by one whose major ambition is creating and
maintaining a skilled career investigative agency.
Under unusual circumstances, arrangements have been made for
examination of an entire FBI file by the chairmen of the Judiciary
committees of the House and Senate. On occasion, the ranking minority
member of these committees has taken part. Since this procedure
provides for examination by a Democrat and a Republican, it has the
strength of being bipartisan. It has the disadvantage of depending
on the character and personality of the majority and minority
representatives for true bipartisanship. The procedure is a touchy
one that the press, the public, and the Congress must scrutinize
periodically. Certainly the FBI must have a right to keep its files
secret from the public, but it should never be forgotten that some
limited bipartisan congressional group must have authority to examine
these files if we are to remain secure from possible abuse of power.
President Truman wrapped government personnel files in secrecy on the
theory that making them available to a Republican-dominated committee
of Congress could result in the use of rumor and hearsay to “smear”
government officials. Certainly it is laudable to try to protect
government employees from baseless charges. But this “protection”
for the government employees has its drawbacks. Such secrecy has been
used to prevent government employees from gaining access to their own
medical records which were material to a defense in an ouster action.
It also shields government personnel administrators from criticism
and thereby encourages arbitrary actions.
I learned once of a case in which the secrecy surrounding personnel
files made it impossible for a woman to find out why she had been
discharged by the government. I will refer to the woman as Mrs. A,
for there is no necessity of stirring up more problems for her now if
she has been able to find a job after being out of work for several
years.
Mrs. A was a woman of about fifty with more than twenty years of
service with the Civil Service Commission as a shorthand reporter.
She had had some problems with an employee in the same section
and some disagreement with a supervisor. She was asked to go to
the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for a physical
examination.
Mrs. A took the physical examination and shortly afterwards was
forced to resign. She was given no reason except that something
in the physical examination made her unqualified to continue as a
government employee. Mrs. A went to a private physician and had a
thorough examination to try to find out why she was unqualified to
hold her job with the government. The doctor could find no reason for
her discharge.
At this point Mrs. A hired a lawyer. Neither the doctor nor the
lawyer could obtain access to the records of the physical examination
given to Mrs. A at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
The lawyer hired by Mrs. A found himself tilting with a ghost. He
could not find out why his client was discharged, and yet he was
faced with trying to establish proof that whatever was alleged was
not true.
I could not believe the story Mrs. A told when she first came to my
office, but I said I would examine it and see what I could do. It
checked out in every detail. I was informed at the Health, Education
and Welfare Department that the physical records of all government
employees were confidential. There were no exceptions. I pointed
out that this confidential status was set up for the purpose of
protecting the government employees against public intrusion, but
that it certainly couldn’t be meant to keep a government employee
or her private doctor from examining her records. Officials at
the Department of Health, Education and Welfare disagreed. I made
repeated calls to see if I could get the policy changed, but to no
avail.
Mrs. A was a little more distressed each time she came by the
office, for I was unable to interest anyone in her case. She was not
important. She was not the center of a big political drama.
Was it a wrongful discharge? I could not answer the question when it
was raised by lawyers for committees of Congress. It was possible
the file would have shown justifiable grounds for the discharge. I
could only argue that it was wrong to bar this woman, her lawyer,
and her doctor from examination of a file giving the results of her
government health examination.
Despite the inequity in this case and others similar to it, a general
belief prevailed in Washington that secrecy on government personnel
files and loyalty-security files was an unmixed blessing. The fallacy
of this contention was impressed on me every time I saw Mrs. A. She
was defeated in appearance, and she was deeply hurt.
There is a sharp cruelty in secrecy that results in such injury to
an individual, and there is great damage to our government—and to
people’s faith in it—when secrecy is used to cover up mismanagement
and corruption. I am gravely concerned over any obstructions put
in the way of congressional committees’ investigating the abuses
of secrecy. Where would we be if Congress had not looked into
such nefarious schemes as the Teapot Dome scandals of the Harding
administration or the tax “fixes” in the Truman administration?
Have we, a self-governing people, learned anything from these black
marks on our history? I am afraid that we have not learned enough
yet. I am afraid that the people as a whole, and many persons in the
press and Congress, tend to disregard the danger signs and accept the
self-serving declarations of virtue from their Presidents or other
high officials. A few newspapers, a few diligent investigators for
congressional committees, a few senators and a few congressmen have
had to take the whole responsibility for breaking through unjustified
secrecy and uncovering the truth.
In my twenty years as a newspaper correspondent I have been
concerned with this problem of information policies at every level
of government—starting in a local police station, city hall, county
courthouse, and state capitol. For the past eleven years I have
been covering the federal government for the Washington Bureau of
Cowles Publications. I have been fortunate to have the freedom
to follow any investigations that interested me, as well as the
enthusiastic support of several newspapers. My position has afforded
me the privilege of a day-to-day acquaintanceship with every major
investigation in Washington since 1950.
The problem of the Washington cover-up became a major interest to
me in connection with the scandals in the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation (RFC) and the Internal Revenue Service beginning in
1950. The investigations of the RFC were of a reasonably short
duration. The pattern of “political favoritism” in administering this
government loaning agency was ended when W. Stuart Symington, later
a United States Senator, was named by President Truman to restore
order. Symington instituted the “fishbowl policy” that brought most
of the RFC operations out in the open.
The problems with secrecy in the Internal Revenue Service remained
a major news story for more than two years. The Internal Revenue law
provides that it is unlawful to disclose the information on the tax
returns submitted by U.S. taxpayers. It was a secrecy established in
a specific statute, and the purpose was to protect the privacy of the
finances of individual taxpayers. However, investigations by Senator
John J. Williams, the Delaware Republican, and a House subcommittee,
headed by Representative Cecil King, the California Democrat, showed
that the secrecy was used to shield crooked tax agents and tax
collectors from exposure and prosecution.
The Alcohol Tax Unit (ATU), a division of the Internal Revenue
Service, had even set up procedures to provide for secret settlements
of criminal law violations. Also, ATU provided secret hearings on
applications for a federal license to wholesale liquor or beer.
A racketeer found it possible to go into a secret hearing, give
perjured testimony, and obtain a license with the help of weak or
corrupt ATU administrators.
The lesson was clear in each case: secrecy corrupts. It allowed
government officials to dispense favors behind closed doors. When
decisions were secret, there was no need to provide any consistency
in decisions or in penalties. It was impossible for the public or the
press to obtain enough information to register an informed objection.
During fights to open records in the Internal Revenue Service,
I became acquainted with James S. Pope, executive editor of the
Louisville _Courier-Journal_ who was then chairman of the Freedom of
Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
We worked together in forcing the Internal Revenue Service to open
certain “compromise settlements” of tax cases as well as the ATU
hearings.
In exploring these and other information problems, I worked closely
with the late Harold Cross, former special counsel for the American
Society of Newspaper Editors; J. Russell Wiggins, executive editor of
the Washington _Post and Times Herald_; Herbert Brucker, editor of
the Hartford _Courant_; and V. M. (Red) Newton, managing editor of
the Tampa _Tribune_.
We shared a deep suspicion of government secrecy and also resented
what it did in corrupting our system of government. I was privileged
to serve as a member of the national Freedom of Information Committee
of Sigma Delta Chi (the journalism fraternity) and handle the
Washington phase of the reports for Red Newton for a period of more
than five years. For a longer period I have worked with the American
Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee. I
have testified before committees of the House and Senate.
My testimony before the Moss subcommittee in November 1955 was the
first testimony on the scope of the problem of “executive privilege”
advanced by the Eisenhower administration. I have kept in touch
continuously with Representative John Moss, the California Democrat,
and the members of his staff from the time their subcommittee was
established. I am particularly indebted to Staff Administrator Sam
Archibald, Staff Consultant Paul Southwick, and staff lawyers John
Mitchell and the late Jacob Scher.
Others who were particularly helpful and co-operative over these
years were the late Senator Thomas Hennings (Dem., Mo.); Charles
Slayman, counsel for the Hennings Judiciary Subcommittee; Senator
John McClellan (Dem., Ark.), and Robert F. Kennedy, who was his
chief counsel; Herbert Maletz, chief counsel for a House Judiciary
Subcommittee; Representative Porter Hardy (Dem., Va.); John Reddan,
chief counsel for the Hardy Government Operations Subcommittee;
Representative F. Edward Hebert (Dem., La.); James Naughton, chief
counsel for the Fountain Government Operations Subcommittee; and John
Courtney, chief counsel for the Hebert Armed Services Subcommittee;
Arthur John Keefe, counsel for the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly
Subcommittee; and Representative George Meader (Rep., Mich.).
The knowledge of the secrecy problem gained by most of these
lawmakers and lawyers has been understandably confined to their
experiences with one or two committees, whereas I have had the
opportunity to become aware of the day-to-day activities of nearly
all the committees. For that reason, and because of my alarm at the
public apathy over government secrecy, I have decided to set the
whole story down in one place. Most of the story is taken from the
official records of congressional committees—the sworn testimony, the
correspondence with government agencies, and the official reports
of Senate and House investigators. As much as possible, I have put
it together in chronological, narrative form so that the reader may
discover, as I did, how the abuse of government secrecy has spread
and just how vast and serious the scope of it has become. At the end
of the book I will make some recommendations that I hope may serve as
a guide to eliminating this serious threat to our democratic form of
government.