PRESS: Nixon's Revenge
Powers, Thomas
PRESS General Maxwell Taylor is an intelligent, articulate, well-educated man. He once quoted Polybius before a congressional committee. General Taylor is also an experienced man, a veteran of many...
...As they drift off to sleep at night they must dream of the history they could write if only they were free to act...
...Spocks blocking draft boards, no more oceans of demonstrators in Lafayette Park...
...that Westmoreland will get his 200,000 troops, because the public won't find out he's asked for them until the decision has been made...
...They can't read the future any more than you or I; they don't know who's going to be President in 1977j or in any other year...
...Treat as sabotage any act which might, or might be intended to, "interfere with or obstruct the ability of the U.S...
...One or two cells ought to do the trick...
...More in sor-row than in anger, then, S.I would: Broaden the government's right to tap phones with-out a court order when "an emergency situation exists with respect to conspiratorial activities threatening the national security...
...Brazil is just such a place...
...This clearly in-cludes Martin Luther King, Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark...
...Section 1122, an anti-leaking law, pro-hibits disclosure of "national defense information," to anyone not "authorized" to receive it...
...and so should the Senate...
...I like and admire reporters but all the same I do not think the govern-ment would have to fill the jails to make S.1 work as intended...
...Somewhere in every soldier, I think, is the dream that he will find his enemy out in the open, massed and vulnerable, just as boxers dream of the punches they might throw if only an opponent would drop his guard, and just as writers dream of the work they could do if only . . . If only the children would go out and play, or if the phone would stop ringing, or if they had an extra day for rewriting, or if they didn't have to worry about money...
...No doubt this is what explains Britain's stunning success hi Ire-land, South Africa's happy relations with her northern neighbors, Russia's crops of wheat General Tayler ought to go back over this question of social discipline one more time...
...S.I would, in fact, do this, but along the way it was rewritten by Attorney Generals Mitchell and Kleindienst and by Senate conservatives like John McClellan...
...The final clause is charitable in the traditional American way, putting the best construction on things, granting an op-ponent die integrity of perfect sincerity, by suggesting he is stupid rather than malevolent...
...But why am I telling you this...
...In writing about questions which deal with funda-mental freedoms it is always tempting to exaggerate, to imply that if such and such happens the light of free-dom will gutter out, and the long night of slavery begin...
...The idea was to cull all criminal offenses from the SO titles (i.e., volumes) of the U.S...
...They don't care...
...Section 1103...
...S.l's answer is no...
...Section 1121 would subject to charges of espionage anyone who, "knowing that national defense informa-tion could be used to the prejudice of the safety or in-terest of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign power, communicates such information to a for-eign power...
...His concern with American policy in Vietnam lasted longer than that of any other American military man, beginning with Korea and not officially ending until Lyndon Johnson left office in 1969...
...If inconvenient facts in certain categories should appear in print, S.I would allow the government to use all the tools of legal in-quiry-grand juries, compulsory testimony, the threat of prosecution-to pin down the source of information...
...If such a law had been in effect since 1965, what would we have known about the CIA's secret army in Laos, American involvement in the overthrow of Diem, the secret bombing of Cambodia, drug addiction in the U.S...
...This remark has a nice ring to it...
...An Official Secrets Act-and S.I has the substance if not the name-would give the govern-ment nearly total control over the dissemination and 'even the publication of information about what it is up to...
...that "our" allies in Angola will get whatever the President chooses to give them...
...The echoes of Vietnam are so audible within the bill that it almost seems intended for a rematch...
...Classi-fied" documents-of which there are literally millions, on every subject from the sexual habits of Idi Amin, to the names of U.S...
...Their intent ought to be clear: it is to prevent officials at any level of government from talking freely to reporters, and to prevent reporters from printing what they might learn anyway...
...Has there ever been a President who did not feel that his opponents were willful or self-seeking, that a chief executive needed freedom to act, that the exigencies of the age did justify--nay, demand...
...He confronted them directly, and reluctantly drew a painful conclusion: Unless we can learn to exercise some degree of self-discipline, to accept and enforce some reasonable standard of responsible civic conduct, and to remove the many self-created obstacles to the use of our power, We will be unable to meet the hard competition waiting for us in the decade of the 1970s...
...Section 1114 prohibits the "communication" of "false statements" about the military affairs of the United States, its allies, or even its enemies...
...Well, bad as S.1 is, it's not that bad...
...Politicians are no less subject to the cussedness of thing-self-seeking opponents, willful bureaucrats, side issues which devour then* time and energy, associates who miss the point, the fickleness of the public, the clamor of the press...
...Section 1302...
...The list could be extended indefinitely, and the answer in each instance'is: not much...
...Could" is an infinitely elastic word...
...A reporter who obtains them can print them or not, as he chooses...
...These are all bad enough, but even worse are die sections which deal with information...
...I haven't asked him but I expect General Taylor thinks the bill to revise, reform and codify Title 18 of the United States Code, known as Senate One, is just what the doctor ordered...
...General Taylor is also an experienced man, a veteran of many wars and a valued advisor to at least two Presidents...
...that there will be no more embarrassing leaks about the CIA sparking awkward investigations...
...In discussions of this sort it is customary to quote Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who wrote, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding...
...S.I would have eased the way of the rest This was not its original purpose...
...I suppose, like Taylor, they blame Vietnam on our own "weakness," rather than credit the enemy's strength, and conclude that acquiescence here would fcswe meant victory there...
...I assume the S.1 people don't want any more Vietnams, but if they should get one any-way they want to be damned sure there will be no more gloomy David Halberstams out in the field with the Army, no more Daniel EUsbergs Xeroxing late into the night, no more Dr...
...Army, the cost of the C-5A, the overthrow of Allende, Westmoreland's request for another 206,000 men, or Watergate...
...In a recent edi-torial TV Guide wondered if the Church committee hadn't gone too far: "The public should know how our armed government operates, but must we know everything about everything...
...Demonstrations in the Mojave Desert would be permissible...
...They are the rule rather than the exception...
...firms boycotting Israel-are classi-fied by executive order only...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...our purpose is to know ourselves, not to master the manual of arms, or to build a trans-Asian highway with American tollhouses at either end...
...Their purpose is more fundamental, to strengthen the autonomy of Presidents, and as such they probably would have been eagerly (if quietly and discreetly) welcomed by every Presi-dent since...
...Give the government the power to ban (with the threat of prosecution) almost any demonstration on the grounds that it physically "interfered" with federal gov-ernment functions...
...It is hard to know whose name to put here...
...An official who reveals them can be reprimanded or fired, but not prosecuted...
...Democracy can be (and, especially during the lamentable Vietnam years, has been) taken too far...
...The repressive sections of the bill-and they are very repressive-are not just grudge laws intended to get even with Nixon's enemies...
...Blaming it all on Nixon, however, misses the point...
...If the repressive sections of the bill have a guiding political philosophy it is that civil liberties are fine, so long as they don't prevent a Presi-dent from doing what he wants to do...
...Code and to collect them in one place...
...There can-not have been many...
...The bill began as the report of a special commission appointed by John-son back in 1966 to bring order to the chaos which was then (and for that matter still is) federal criminal law...
...It would ensure that the next time the bombing will go on, because no one will know about it...
...Prohibit political activity which "could facilitate" the forcible overthrow of the government...
...It won't freeze all political activity in this country, and it won't even stop men of conscience from protesting wars they feel wrong...
...But too often, sadly, civil liberties hinder the strong action which the times demand, hamstringing the chief executive...
...Perhaps Coolidge was such a man, or Harding, or Chester A. Arthur...
...Like General Taylor, they want a disciplined democracy in which Presidents will be able to ignore or jail dis-sidents at home, and do as they like with opponents abroad...
...Their purpose is not a narrow one, aimed at immediate self-benefit...
...That, I think, is the illusion...
...The world, after all, is filled with strong central gov-ernments and docile journals...
...Had I but world enough and time, and your indulgence, I might explain why this isn't so...
...Taken together, these sections amount to an Official Secrets Act, something first proposed (and defeated) in this country in 1917...
...The purpose of S.I is to give Presidents at least a measure of just this sort of freedom...
...So are South Africa, Russia, and, so far as the protection of official secrets is concerned, Great Britain...
...But in any event it doesn't really matter...
...It will then allow the government to put the leakers in jail, right next to the reporter to whom he talked, and perhaps his publisher as well...
...Our differences are not over the right way to achieve a common goal, but over the goal itself...
...What it will do is this: for the first time it will give the government broad and effective control over what the public knows...
...or an associate nation to prepare for or engage in war or defense activities...
...Democracy assumes that the value of life is intrinsic rather than extrinsic...
...The trouble with this traditional attitude is that the proponents of S.I are not well-meaning...
...You know what democracy is, and presumably the pro-penents of S.I do, too, or they could not know so well where it lies, and how to attack it It seems to me that an illusion lures them on, the illusion of unobstructed strength...
...Section 1123 requires anyone with such unauthorized information to return it forthwith to the government...
...Section 3104...
...Section 1111...
...a willingness to ignore democratic niceties in order to achieve a greater good...
...The jostification of demociacy is not that it always works better (although I think it does, in accordance with the settled principle that two heads are better than one), bet that it » better...
...S.I sponsors have given Up trying to make the world safe for democracy, and are trying to make democracy safe for the President...
...Naturally our failure in Vietnam was painful to him but he did not try to avoid its hard lessons in his autobiography, Swords and Ploughshares...
...Clark, remember, went to Hanoi...
...They go far beyond present espionage laws, which define spying as the passage of secret defense information (tactical plans, technical details of weapons systems, diplomatic codes and the like) to a hostile foreign power...
...S.1 assumes that political ignorance means political docility, and that assumption is probably correct But is General Taylor right in thinking that such discipline would free the President to march from one foreign policy triumph to another...
...Whoever he is, they want him to be strong, to be free to do as he likes without hindrance by underlings or journalists with contrary ideas...
...S.I has already been widely attacked as "Nixon's revenge" because its most objectionable sections were largely written by his Justice Department, and because it would offer civil servants charged with misconduct (breaking into the office of EHsberg's psychiatrist, for example) a Nuremberg or "just following orders" de-fense...
...Insidious" is a strong, evocative word, and "encroachment" is another...
Vol. 103 • February 1976 • No. 4
