The Abuses of Secrecy

...The author also recounts the now familiar story of how supposedly secret documents are routinely leaked when this serves the political ends of those who inhabit the White House...

...And, in a lengthy discussion of LBJ's preparation of The Vantage Point, he details how former Presidents freely declassify whatever privileged information they think might put them in a favorable light when it comes time to publish their memoirs...

...But he is quick to call LBJ's April 1965 order-committing U.S...

...If some of these anecdotes and milieu sketches sink to the level of political pornography (for instance, the disclosure that H. R. Haldeman always added the middle initial "P...

...ground troops to Vietnam combat and directing that they be introduced gradually to make it appear as though there had been no change in policy ?one of the most shameful official documents of a shameful time in American history...

...Despite the slightly misleading packaging, however, Wise does offer us an enlightening commentary on the larger issues that fall under the rubric of the public's "right to know," along with much lively political gossip gained from his long experience as a Washington correspondent...

...Every exposure of government duplicity adds to the ranks of those who believe in conspiracy theories of politics...

...There is a vigorous attempt to promote order (very large numbers of documents are classified) and an unusual lack of enforcement (leaks proliferate...

...to the name of CBS newsman Daniel Schorr, the "P...

...Very little of the book is about lying...

...Wise's contention that Presidents tend to equate national security with their own particular policies, though hardly original, has been strikingly confirmed by Nixon's statements about Watergate and particularly the activities of the so-called plumbers group...

...by 1970, the figure had dropped to 35 per cent...

...Furthermore, many of the "lies" Wise does reveal are pretty small potatoes, like President Johnson's maintaining in a speech that he had an ancestor who died at the Alamo...

...In its anarchy, the world of classification and leaks-where "top secret" is not the ultimate designation, and especially guarded documents bear code names that are themselves classified-resembles in many ways the larger pattern of American society as a whole...

...The English, it appears, keep fewer things secret, but have more respect for what is secret...

...Daniel Ells-berg, for example, had to be indicted for theft and espionage in the Pentagon Papers case...

...As a result, unwarranted secrecy in the name of national security serves to undermine the political health of the nation...

...standing for "prick"), others provide valuable insights into the interactions between people at high levels of government...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Author, "Behind the Berlin Wall," "Push Comes to Shove" The title of David Wise's new book, The Politics of Lying, invites the easy criticism that it exemplifies exactly the kind of deceptive trick the author deplores when committed by public officials...

...Turning to the consequences of excessive secrecy and government deception, Wise cites polls conducted by the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center: In 1964, fully 62 per cent of a national sample expressed a "high" degree of trust in the Federal government...

...Like a conquering army entering an enemy city, Wise observes, the Nixon Administration came to Washington in 1969 suspicious of the Federal bureaucracy, the media, and everything it perceived as representing the Liberal Establishment...

...Unlike Britain, moreover, the U.S...

...In such an atmosphere, it was scarcely surprising that the Executive developed an obsession with secrecy...

...In reviewing the history of press-government relations from John Kennedy to Richard Nixon, Wise awards Lyndon Johnson higher marks for openness with the media than have other observers...

...it is mostly concerned with relations between the government and the media, and the Executive bureaucracy's mania for classifying information...

...But the title has undoubtedly helped sales, not to mention the timing-given the current Senate investigations into the really big lies of the Watergate cover-up, the secret bombing of Cambodia, etc...

...has no Official Secrets Act to prohibit the dissemination of classified information...

...Compounding a weakness of its predecessors, the Nixon White House proceeded to use the classification system as a political tool rather than as a genuine safeguard of national security...

...Undeniably, there is a legitimate need to classify information whose secrecy is important for national security, but abuse of the system to prevent the detection of misdeeds creates an atmosphere of rumor and innuendo that soon begins to feed on itself...

...Interestingly, Henry Fairlie has recently disputed in the Washington Monthly the notion that our Vietnam involvement came about through stealth and deception, arguing convincingly that the newspapers were informed about and reported on every step of the escalation...