“This constitutes a victory for the bureaucrats, a defeat for Congress, and a serious setback in the fight against government secrecy.”
Criticism of the Kennedy administration from some Republicans could be disregarded. But from George Meader it invited serious attention. As the foregoing chapters have shown, he was one of the most outspoken critics of the information policies of the Eisenhower administration.
Meader had joined Representative Hardy, a Democrat, in criticizing the State Department in March when Secretary of State Rusk issued orders barring the Hardy committee from testimony or records on the Peru scandals. But he had also joined Hardy in applauding President Kennedy for overruling his own Secretary of State and making the ICA records on Peru foreign-aid scandals available to the Hardy subcommittee.
On July 28, 1961, the Democratic-controlled House Government Operations Committee issued a report on information policies. It was, of course, highly critical of the Eisenhower administration but not completely approving of the new administration. The committee found the record of the first months of the Kennedy administration “mixed.” However, it saw a “hopeful note” in the fact that President Kennedy had given “positive policy direction from the top.” The report contained a favorable comment on “the Presidential determination—even at the cost of reversing his Secretary of State—to live up to the new administration’s pledge to honor the right to know.”
Democrats took great party pride in the speeches President Kennedy made to assure the public of his concern for freedom of information.
“The essence of free communication must be that our failures as well as our successes will be broadcast around the world,” President Kennedy said at the convention of the National Association of Broadcasters. “And therefore we take double pride in our successes.
“The great inner resource of freedom, the resource which has kept the world’s oldest democracy continuously young and vital, the resource which has always brought us our greatest exploits in time of our greatest need, is the very fact of the open society.
“Thus, if we are once again to preserve our civilization, it will be because of our freedom, and not in spite of it.... For the flow of ideas, the capacity to make informed choices, the ability to criticize, all the assumptions upon which political democracy rests, depends largely upon communication.”
By the time the House Government Operations Committee was ready to file a second report on government information policies, the Democrats were aglow with admiration for President Kennedy. The September 21, 1961, report stated: “For the first time since the subcommittee entered the fight against excessive Government secrecy six years ago, there is a powerful new weapon—the support of a President who is clearly on record in favor of the greatest flow of Government information.”
Representative Meader thought the Democrats were too willing to praise a Democratic administration. In his dissent, he wrote: