REFLECTIONS

...But with a membership made up of the chief executive officers of such corporations as General Electric, Bristol-Myers, Ford, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, the CED reeked of the mustiest and most conventional Republican respectability...

...These sober members of the American business establishment had produced what now seems a radical document...

...News was a ringing endorsement of the business group's position...

...It strikes at the heart of the issue—the lack of civilian control and the manner in which military bureaucracy has taken over in Washington...

...What made these businessmen so different from today's crop, and from the shameless politicians and toadying journalists who delight in celebrating and wielding American military might...

...The trustees believed this freedom-of-information officer would "tend to counteract the present trend toward undue secrecy," and "constantly press for the release of information...

...And further on, in urging the President to devote a section of his State-of-the-Union message to security and freedom: "There is constant need for more intensive public discussion of the problems of security and freedom...

...The Congressional investigators, in their "conclusions," never mentioned the explicit responsibilities or rights of American citizens to govern themselves...

...It would never have occurred to them to ask permission of their companies' executive committees or public-relations experts to speak their minds...

...The CED statement—about 7,000 words of good plain English—was more eloquent than the pronouncements published by today's American Civil Liberties Union and nothing at all like the predictable rhetoric of today's Business Roundtable...

...From Lawrence I expected something violently anticom-munist, on the order of a sermon about the joys of capitalism or a diatribe against State Department pinkos...

...And eighteen years before John Kenneth Galbraith exposed the myth of free-market America in The New Industrial State, the CED cautioned: "The more that government purchases dominate the market, the more businessmen become, in effect, hired administrators of government contracts...

...In parts it has the tone of a civics lesson...

...a few lines were unpleasantly tuned to the jingoistic spirit of the times...

...More than twenty-five years later, the Carter Administration tried to suppress an article in The Progressive that dealt with the process of making an H-bomb...

...News and World Report...

...This was the straightforward language of another era, a way of writing no longer recognized in the upper echelons of American business or, for that matter, the upper echelons of the American press...

...Just when my search was beginning to appear fruitless, I came across an item headed "Civilian Control or Militarism...

...We have succumbed to what Eisenhower, in his farewell address, called "the military-industrial complex...

...Marion Folsom, the treasurer of Kodak, and Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont...

...It struck me as odd that U.S...

...The policy statement was, by and large, refreshingly free of Cold War paranoia...

...Thus, appointing a special NSC member with responsibility for alerting Americans to security policy designed to shut them out of decision-making seemed perfectly appropriate, since "the security program tends to be unbalanced...

...Where are they when we need them most...

...Unless there is a comprehensive framework for discussion, the public will be confused...

...While acknowledging the need to be considerably more alert in the newly nu-clearized postwar world, the CED emphatically stated that Cold War fear had thrown the scales far out of balance in favor of security and some unsavory attendant emotions, such as paranoia...

...A government official is rarely commended for disclosure...

...REFLECTIONS John R. MacArthur A Passionate Warning That Went Unheeded Alittle more than a year ago, when Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was delivering his astonishingly self-righteous justification of the Iran-contra scandal before Congress and the American people, I went in search of the cause of his blind and zealous faith—the 1947 National Security Act which brought into being the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency...

...Security bought at the cost of destroying our system of individual liberties and our free economy would be self-defeating...

...It left me wondering how, after just forty years, the strong language of liberty so clearly and naturally employed by the CED trustees could be so absent from the work of politicians who should have been their rightful heirs...

...Paul Hoffman, the former head of Studebaker autos...

...What happened to government of the people, by the people, and for the people...

...Some CED trustees brought them to the attention of President-elect Eisenhower just before his first inauguration but, according to a surviving CED staff member, Robert Lenhart, they never received serious consideration...

...Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s for supporting the creation of Social Security...

...Security measures, uncurbed by the requirements of freedom, can undermine our free institutions...

...Senator William Benton, a founder of the Benton and Bowles advertising agency...

...The prestige and friendship we enjoy in many parts of the world arise not merely because of our power but because we have offered the world a unique brand of ideals—the determination to base our political organization on the capacity of individuals for self-government...

...2) by the control of business activity through government contracts, and 3) by the likelihood of recurrent proposals to impose direct control over economic activity in the name of security...

...In such a garrison-police state, the soldier and political policeman rise to power while the institutions of civilian society and of freedom shrink...

...You could almost hear Joe McCarthy's footsteps approaching stage right when the trustees gratuitously stated the need for vigorous monitoring of "subversive activities" and the creation of a large military establishment...

...The free market is thus narrowed...

...It rarely ventured into noneconomic areas to make policy recommendations...

...Public apathy and the pressure for security can lead us along a dangerous road—a road that ends in what has aptly been called a garrison-police state...

...But what particularly impressed me about the CED statement was its vivid contrast with the tepid rhetoric and sinister conclusions of the Iran-contra committee report...

...It was led by future U.S...

...Instead, I found the astounding text of a policy statement issued by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), an elite businessmen's group involved in economic research and legislative lobbying...

...At the time of the photo opportunity, President Truman, Secretary of State George Marshall, and their colleagues were said to be brooding over the Berlin crisis...

...I suppose they got left behind in 1949 with those civic-minded, establishment businessmen, with their old-fashioned faith in a free citizenry: "In the last analysis, the economic strength and the freedom of this country rest on the moral and spiritual vigor of its people...

...All three would have Cabinet rank and be appointed by the President with the approval of the Senate...

...The Times provided no more information than a headline and caption which, with equal grimness, stated: "These men hold the ultimate responsibility for United States security...

...The CED trustees took it for granted that "individual liberties must rest primarily on an alert public opinion...

...It emphasizes the loss of freedoms—the censorship, the suppression, the interference with individual liberties...

...It was entitled "National Security and Our Individual Freedom," and it precisely anticipated the conditions that were to foster McCarthyism, the Army's illegal domestic spying in the 1960s, President Nixon's secret war in Cambodia, and, finally, the spectacle of a militarized National Security Council led by North, Colonel Robert McFarlane, and Rear Admiral John Poindexter...

...In essence, it warned that the creation of a national-security state, with its inescapable bureaucracy and permanent military staff, would inevitably rob the nation of individual freedoms and erode civilian control of the military and of foreign policy...

...Robert Lenhart, the former member of the 1949 CED staff, notes that some of the trustees—Hoffman and Flanders in partic-' ular—were self-made successes who enjoyed the confidence that comes naturally with accomplishment...

...A need exists for greater consensus between the legislative and executive branches on the sharing and protection of information...

...By poring over commentary published at the time, I hoped to get a glimpse of the conventional wisdom that prevailed four decades ago and gave us all those exciting new concepts in security policy that have done the country and the world so much harm ever since...

...But the CED trustees most certainly represented the "industrial" side of the complex, and forty years ago these big businessmen viewed the national-security state as a threat to the free market, not a pathway to easy profit...

...militarism would be a topic of concern to the highly conservative news-weekly then edited by David Lawrence— especially since the Cold War was verging on hot at the time and Senator Joseph McCarthy was poised to begin his hunt for un-American heretics...

...Consider just four of the document's most pointed sentences: "This trend [of militarization and secrecy in government], particularly if coupled with hysteria or with complacency and ignorance, may produce policies which, in the name of security, endanger essential liberties...

...Lenhart also points out that these were people who had lived through the Great Depression and World War II...

...In addition, he says, their exposure to military bureaucracy and wartime controls had made them permanently suspicious of people in uniform...

...Admittedly, there is something almost naive about the CED's policy statement...

...According to the caption writer, "these men" had been "charged with the delicate task of weaving into one fabric the heretofore separate threads of the nation's foreign, domestic, and military policies...

...it tends to overemphasize the military at the expense of non-military measures...

...Where, indeed, are the people themselves...

...Even so, Senator Daniel Inouye and Representative Lee Hamilton would have done well to read it before writing their useless "conclusions" to the Iran-contra report...

...Faced with the most persuasive evidence to date that covert action is fundamentally at odds with American democracy (besides being remarkably unsuccessful), they chose simply to endorse secret military operations as "a necessary component to our nation's foreign policy...

...has a responsibility to ensure that sensitive information from the Executive Branch remains secure when it is shared with the Congress...

...The second freedom officer was to be made "responsible for reviewing the effect of security measures on individual liberties and advising the President thereon...

...Where is the CIA's obligation and the President's and the military's to obey the will of the people...

...The CED was hardly a radical organization...

...What happened to all these fine words and recommendations...

...John R. MacArthur is the Publisher oj Harper's Magazine...

...With the encouragement of both major political parties, the country has by and large absorbed—or been absorbed by—the national security state...

...It was a remarkably prescient analysis, encompassing nearly every postwar Administration's obsession with communism, from the "Who Lost China...

...The trustees must have been aiming directly at Representative Richard Nixon, President Truman, and Secretary of State Acheson when they wrote: "An atmosphere of suspicion favors the growth of political police...

...One of the two special NSC freedom officers would be responsible for creating "a more effective flow to the public of information relating to national security," a sort of ombudsman for declassification and freedom of information...

...The staff and advisory board, drawn from mainstream academia, even included Herbert Stein, the future chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers...

...In the context of the entire statement, however, such sentiments seem little more than window dressing, possibly contrived to placate the more anticommunist CED members...

...David Lawrence's introduction to the statement in U.S...

...Necessary investigations into loyalty can deteriorate into witch hunts which threaten the whole structure of individual freedom...

...The resulting resistance to disclosure can be overcome only if there is positive pressure to release information...

...For example, an August 1948 issue of The New York Times Magazine contained a photo spread of the grim-faced NSC members seated around their White House conference table...

...It proposed, among other things, the appointment to the NSC of three full-time civilians without other governmental responsibilities, two of whom "should be given special responsibility with respect to public information and individual liberties...

...Carried far enough, the expansion in government purchasing can destroy a free economy...

...The CED," he wrote, "particularly stresses the tendency to build up a military dictatorship...

...Most certainly not in Congress or on the Business Roundtable, where the members are desperately in need of a civics lesson, or among the press, where the scriveners have lost the instinct for free speech...

...It's inconceivable that the current version of the CED, or an equivalent organization like the Business Roundtable, would tolerate, much less publish, such a controversial paper today...

...Worse still, the Iran-Contra Committees expressed their conspiratorial wish to make Congress an accomplice to Executive Branch secrecy when they declared, "The Congress...

...With keen insight, the CED points at the root of the trouble— the tendency to let one bureaucrat control everything...

...Benton was a Democrat, Flanders a progressive Republican...

...from a December 1949 issue of U.S...

...Agencies with power to investigate sometimes degenerate into organs of oppression and intimidation.' the indoctrination of officers both military and nonmilitary...

...In contrast with this frightening nonsense, here is what the CED had to say in 1949: "At present, there is one-sided emphasis upon the importance of secrecy in 'An atmosphere of suspicion favors the growth of political police...

...So what of the statement itself...

...What enabled them to challenge the dangerous premises of the national security state so vigorously and presciently...

...As government purchases rise, the power to use uneconomic means to control production is increased...

...and loyalty-oath hysteria of the Truman era to President Reagan's compulsive concern about Nicaragua...

...Public opinion is not as effective as it should be so long as it depends largely on random exposure to news and comment...

...The available material was surprisingly thin, or so it seemed at first...

...They wrote: "A security program of the present size threatens our free economy in three major ways: 1) by the burden of taxes on economic incentives...

...Lawrence's fears were dramatically borne out just three months later when the Atomic Energy Commission burned 3,000 copies of a Scientific American issue that carried an already censored article by the physicist Hans Bethe—an article that criticized Truman's decision to proceed with development of the hydrogen bomb...

...It turned out to be a passionate warning that construction of an elaborate national-security apparatus would gravely threaten American liberty...

...Folsom, who would later serve as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Eisenhower Administration, had earned the displeasure of the U.S...

...Instead, they begged for a piece of the national-security action and made grateful reference to the country's good fortune in having "a military that is sensitive to the constraints built into the Constitution and to the necessity of respecting the Congress's responsibilities...

...By 1949, very little could scare them, not even a communist...

...The CED trustees didn't see much room for Oliver North, John Poindexter, or Robert McFarlane in their vision of America...

...Of course, the CED's policy statement wasn't perfect...

...Moreover, the CED was almost exclusively concerned with protecting and enhancing a capitalist American economy...

...Paradoxically, while rejecting the "more drastic step" of setting up a Civilian Commission on Security Policy and Freedom, the CED put its hope in an expanded National Security Council...

...Agencies with power to investigate sometimes degenerate into organs of oppression and intimidation...

...Almost forty years later, the Iran-contra committees spoke with the timid voice of a junior partner for whom liberty is merely on loan until the Government decides to repossess it...

...The businessmen of the CED spoke as free citizens of a republic...

...About the worst thing a right-wing anti-communist could have said about it in those days was that its board of trustees was bipartisan...