THE DARK SIDE
Curry, Richard O.
The Dark Side FREEDOM AT RISK: Secrecy, Censorship, and Repression in the 1980s edited by Richard O. Curry Temple University Press. 423 pp. $29.95. To a degree unprecedented in American...
...Taken together, these dispatches from the freedom front amount to a scathing indictment, and they tend to confirm Curry's assessment that "major structural and technological changes"—including the national-security bureaucracy among the former and sophisticated surveillance electronics among the latter-have produced a qualitative decline in the health of American democracy during the Reagan years...
...Still, as Curry himself acknowledges, there has always been "a darker side of American history"—a side that embraces authoritarianism and repression...
...It would be a mistake to conclude from this collection that Reagan was the author of all the evils that beset us, or that freedom will flourish now that he's gone...
...Curry, a professor of American history at the University of Connecticut, has compiled from a variety of sources (including The Progressive) some two dozen pieces dealing with official assaults on First Amendment rights, due process, freedom to move across U.S...
...To a degree unprecedented in American history, says Richard O. Curry, who edited this collection of essays, the Reagan Administration managed to "institutionalize secrecy, censorship, and repression in ways that will be difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate...
...borders, privacy, and the media...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
