None of Your Business: Government Secrecy in America
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Description
Bacon said, “All governments are obscure and invisible.” His dictum reflects a long tradition of government secrecy, here and abroad. It stands to reason that a person disposing of weighty and controversial issues gets through the day more easily when his decisions are shrouded from view, particularly from the eyes of those most affected by them. This is true whether the decision-maker is a corporate executive or union leader, and academic administrator or government official. But government officials conduct public business. Secrecy and deviousness, often unjustified in other contexts, are intolerable when national interests of high importance are involved. Although the Constitution does not expressly guarantee American citizens a right to know what their government is doing, the Supreme Court on several occasions has recognized the “right to know” as a general proposition. For example, it has stated that “the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas” and that, as far as radio and tv are concerned, “it is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.” But government secrecy and public access to information are not primarily legal questions. They are rather political issues of basic importance to democratic government. They were recognized from the beginning of the nation. Henry Steele Commager, the noted historian, has written: “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.” Anthony Lewis points out in his Introduction that Vietnam and Watergate are the twin events—he rightly calls them earthquakes—which have focused unprecedented attention on the misuse of executive power and on the secrecy which facilitated these abuses. We have since endured a third earthquake—the disclosure of the illegal financial dealing of Vice President Spiro Agnew, leading to his resignation. And a fourth earthquake may be coming—impeachment of the President. The Vietnam misadventure alone was sufficient to impel the Committee for Public Justice and the Arthur Garfield Hayes Civil Liberties Program to convene a conference of historians, lawyers, journalists, scientists and public officials to discuss the dangers and limits of government secrecy. Watergate broke while the conference was being planned, and the Agnew conviction and resignation came afterward. Neither the organizers of the conference nor the editors of this volume believe that all government business must take place in a fish bowl. There are situations in which secrecy is permissible, even desirable. Thus, government should be able to protect certain military and diplomatic information of potential value to enemies; to safeguard the process of decision-making by protecting confidences in order to encourage frank discussion; and to assure that private information about people is not widely disseminated. The precise boundaries of these and perhaps other exceptions to the general requirement of open government are an important subject of this book. Not all the participants agree on what these boundaries should be. But we should candidly state that the perception of public policy shared by man of the contributors to this volume leads them to favor open government and to define the exceptions narrowly. They are likely to agree, in other word, with the premise of the House Committee on Government Operations, which approved the Freedom of Information Act in 1966: “A democratic society requires an informed, intelligent electorate, and the intelligence of the electorate varies as the quantity and quality of its information varies. A danger signal to our democratic society in the United States is the fact that such a truism needs repeating. . . .”
Publication Date
1974
Recommended Citation
Gillers, Stephen and Dorsen, Norman, "None of Your Business: Government Secrecy in America" (1974). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 975.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/975
