Our Secret Government; V.M. Newton, Jr.

OUR SECRET GOVERNMENT They [an administrative bureaucracy of of ficials:! jurists:! clerks:! and bookkeepers] con stitute a supreme and sovereign self-recruiting body:! immune from political intervention:! re sponsible to no one outside their own hier archy:! a rock against which all political storms beat ineffectively and in vain; a com pletely closed mandarin system:! even in the social choice it exercises in reproducing it self· . HERBERT LUETHY., France Against Herself BACK IN 1951, I wired the Comptroller of the United States, the man who pays all federal salaries, to give me the exact number of the major federal bureaus. He wired back that he could not do this, that to the best of his knowledge, there were approximately 1,875, not including the new ones created that year. I would haz ard the guess that there are more than 2,000 major fed eral bureaus today. Then, in addition, there are approximately 5,000 adFrom an address by V. M. Newton, Jr., editor, The Tampa Trib une., before the Arizona Newspaper Association at Tucson, Janu ary 14, 1961.

262 OUR SECRET GOVERNMENT 263 visory federal bureaus, all of which wield tremendous power in the lives of the average American citizen. It is interesting to report, in this connection, that Rep. Dante Fascell, of Florida, introduced and got passed in the House of Representatives in 1957 a bill that would force these 5,000 federal advisory bureaus to re veal the identities of their membership to Congress and to keep minutes of their secret meetings. But the Senate refused even to consider the bill, and many of us to this very day do not even know the identities of our secret governors and much less of the political privilege that goes into their edicts. This mushrooming American bureaucracy has draped a stifling curtain of secrecy over virtually all of the execu tive branch of federal government, wherein the facts of our governrrient are denied to the people, Congress, the press, and even the General Accounting Office, which is our auditing restraint upon government spending. If you doubt this, let me point out that no records of the federal expenditure of the billions of your tax funds are open to the inspection of the American citizen. Let me point out further that no audited reports of the ex penditure of your federal tax funds are available to the citizen.

As just one small example of the great secrecy en shrouding the expenditure of your tax funds at Wash ington, our federal government never has accounted to the taxpaying citizens for one penny of the 75 billions of dollars it has spent on foreign aid since the close of World War II.

264 V. M. NEWTON, JR. All of the information of the spending of the citizens' tax dollars comes to you in the form of press handou ts from the 50,000 federal press agents in Washington. Many of these federal handouts are little more than propaganda, designed to prolong the political lives of our bureaucratic ·bosses and to tyrannize the public, against which Thomas Jefferson· warned the world 175 years ago. How It Began The American bureaucracy and the American secret government jointly got their start in the thirties when the Roosevelt Administration moved government into all phases of the citizen's private life in coping with the great depression. They became entrenched at Wash ington in the forties when the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations put more and more power into central government in coping with World War II and with the Korean War in the early fifties. During the dire days of the depression and the excit ing days of the war years, the press, short of manpower, materials, and time, was gravely preoccupied with those tragic affairs. At the same time, it became accustomed to accepting in good faith the proclamations, reports, and propaganda issued by federal press agents.

So, ignored by· the press and left .largely on his own in federal office, the fledgling American bureaucrat devel oped the new American philosophy that our government belongs to him as his private domain; that he feels he OUR SECRET GOVERNMENT 265 has the privilege to give out or withhold information of government as he sees fit; and that he sincerely thinks that the American people should be satisfied with the decisions of government after he has made them. After the Korean "Var, when the press finally turned its attention back to the domestic affairs of our nation, it found itself confronted with a tight secret government in Washington. Under the Truman Administration, by White House executive order, every federal bureaucrat had the right of censoring information of government under the stamp of sacred security, regardless of whether or not the information actually affected our national security.

Let me give you just two of the hundreds of examples of ridiculous security foisted upon us at. that time. First, the Department of Labor refused to give out details of the Armed Services' purchase of peanut but ter on the grounds that the clever enemy could deduce from these purchases the approximate number of men in our armed services. Yet you could walk down .the street a few blocks in Washington to the Department of Defense and obtain mimeographed sheets giving the ex act number of men in our Army, Navy, and Air Force. Second, the Pentagon affixed. the censorship stamp "for military use only" on military weather data. Yet the Soviet Ambassador could telephone the Department of Defense, ask for Extension 79355, and a recording would give the latest 24-hour weather forecast from the nearby Bolling Air Force Base. This automatic recording con cluded with the following words: "This information is 266 V. M. NEWfON, JR.

for military use only and dissemination to the public is not authorized." The press so protested this blanket security censorship th,at Mr. Eisenhower eased our security regulations upon his arrival at the White House in 1953. But not even the new Eisenhower directive limiting security censor ship stopped the bureaucrats. They simply pulled out an old dust-covered federal statute pertaining solely to the safekeeping of governmental records as their excuse for censorship, and then blandly went right on doing the American people's business in secrecy as they chose, with little restraint from anyone. By this time Congress became aroused over the prob lem simply because the American bureaucrat, in his new-found arrogance, denied essential information of government to our federal lawmakers. I have in my files dozens of concrete cases of refus~l to give legitimate in formation of government to Congress in the middle fifties.

So Congress created the Hennings Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in the Senate and the Moss Sub committee on Government Information in the House to investigate the matter of free flow of information of fed eral government to the American people. During public hearings in 1956 and 1957, the heads of no less than 19 major federal bureaus testified before these two commit tees that they had used the old federal record custody statute to withhold legitimate information from the American people, Congress, and the press. Early in 1958, Congress, supported by the press, OUR SECRET GOVERNMENT 267 amended this old record custody statute with a sentence stipulating that it cannot be used to withhold informa tion of federal government from the American people. This should have curbed needless censorship and assured the American people of information on the expenditure of their tax funds.

rrExecutive Privilege" But by this time, the American bureaucrat really was flexing his muscles. After Congress and the press de stroyed such excuses for secret government as national security and the old record custody statute, Attorney General William P. Rogers appeared before Senator Hennings' Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in April 1958, with his "doctrine of executive privilege." The Attorney General argued that this doctrine, based on the separation of powers in our federal government, gave all the legal right needed to withhold information of government from the American people, Congress, and the press. Actually, this ridiculous "doctrine of executive priv ilege" is nothing more than the bureaucrats' fanciful theory of doing as they please in the domain of the peo ple's business. In subsequent testimony before the Hen nings Committee, I pointed out that there was not a single judicial decision upholding it, and I called for a return to the original American "doctrine of the peo ple's privilege."

In the months that followed, the late Senator Hen268 v. M. NEWTON, JR. nings and other eminent lawyers wrote articles in our bar journals pointing out that the "doctrine of execu tive privilege" had no standing whatsoever in the law. But, nevertheless, the doctrine is still with us in Wash ington, used most effectively in the following cases dur ing the last two years: 1. The Navy withheld information of its Military Sea Trans portation Service from the General Accounting Office. 2. The Air Force withheld information of its billion-dollar a-year missile program from the General Accounting Office. 3. The International Cooperation Administration withheld information of our foreign aid program from Congress, even though there were strong indications of waste and dishonesty in such countries as Laos. 4. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration withheld information on U. S. space programs from Congress.

5. The Space Administration declined to give information to Congress on a 102 million dollar rocket contract with North American Aviation, and its administrator, Dr. T. Keith Glen nan, gave the "doctrine of executive privilege" as his excuse. All of this secrecy in our space program will explain to you the great public confusion today over whether or not we are in a position to match missiles with Soviet Russia. It was the secrecy in our foreign aid program that brought the issue squarely before Congress. In 1959, Rep. Porter Hardy, Jr., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, discovered from outside sources evidence of waste and corruption in our foreign aid in Laos. He asked for the facts and figures on the foreign aid program in that country and also in Formosa, Bra zil, India, Guatemala, Pakistan, and Bolivia. The InterOUR SECRET GOVERNMENT 269 national Cooperation Administration refused to give the information. Whereupon, Representative Hardy pro posed, and the House subsequently adopted, an amend ment to the foreign aid appropriations bill that would bar funds to those who refused to give Congress informa tion. But the Senate declined to accept the amendment and, in its place, adopted an emasculated provision that placed all the power in the White House.

All of this was repeated in 1960. Representative Hardy again was refused information on the foreign aid program in Laos and Vietnam; again the House adopted his amendment to withhold funds in the event of secrecy; and again the Senate ducked the issue. On December 2, 1960, the General Accounting Office shut off foreign aid funds in Latin American countries after officials refused to give information to Representa tive Hardy's Committee. On December 23, President Eisenhower intervened, upheld the secrecy in our foreign aid program, and ordered the fund to be handed over. Congress Yields Thus, the White House has tossed at the feet of Con gress the glove of challenge, not only in the matter of freedom of information, but also in the very important matter of who is to rule America in the future, the ap pointed bureaucrats or the people's elected representa tives in Congress. I am not optimistic at all over the im mediate outlook. And there is ample evidence to sup port my pessimism.

270 v. M. NEWTON, JR. First, in recent years, Congress has yielded more and more of its power to the bureaucracy. As an example, the Democrats have had an overwhelming majority of Congress for the last two years. Each January, they talked long and lustily over how they were going to put our Re publican President in his place. Yet every time the Democrat majority balked over the administration's program, which was conceived in the secrecy of the bureaucracy, the Republican President either went on the national television network-or warned that he would do so-and that was that. The Democratic Congress, with no such entree to the Ameri can living room, quickly folded its tent, rubber-stamped his program, and, in some cases, left the American peo ple uninformed and utterly confused over the major issues of government in the deluge of governmental propaganda. There is no indication whatsoever that this bureaucratic dictatorship will be changed during the Kennedy Administration.

Second, there have been many revelations in recent years of Congress' utilization of such political privileges as unlimited and unchecked expense funds on both for eign and domestic junkets, which are easily available behind the locked doors of governmental secrecy. And none can tell exactly what political privileges are being utilized today behind the locked doors of the 1,200 an nual secret sessions of the congressional committees; but there have been many rumbles of this, particularly in the syndicated news columns. Third, it took the Moss and Hennings Committees, OUR SECRET GOVERNMENT 271 composed of hard-working, sincere public servants deeply interested in the American people's inherent right to know about government, five years to get through Con gress one lone freedom of information bill. And this was quickly buried under the ridiculous "doctrine of execu tive privilege." Fourth, the American Bar Association, now greatly worried over the menace of governmental secrecy to jus tice, and the Hennings Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights each introduced bills in the U. S. Senate in 1960 that would have opened all records of the federal ex penditure of the people's tax funds to the inspection of the American citizen. But neither bill ever reached the floor of the Senate and, therefore, automatically died.

In conclusion, as an editor of the free American press who has spent ten active years in the great fight for free dom of information, I point a finger at Congress with the warning that the very future of American freedom is in their hands today. And I call upon each and every newsman in our land, as well as on the American peo ple, to keep constant pressure on the individual con gressman to remind him that American government is the servant-not the ruler-of the American people; that man's freedom always has been extinguished by secret government; and that only-an informed public opinion can preserve the processes of free government.