Washington cover-up

by Clark R. Mollenhoff

Investigations by Congress have demonstrated the failure of the military departments to police themselves effectively from the inside. In every recent year, the Congress and the GAO have pinpointed the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars on inefficient, incompetent, or corrupt handling of Defense contract arrangements.

Examination of testimony on the foreign-aid programs in Laos and Peru shows that the State Department is little better than the Defense Department in rooting out mismanagement and corruption. There are dozens of other areas within the bureaucracy where the record is just as bad.

It is doubtful that we will ever eliminate corruption in the federal government, but it must be kept under closer control or it can spread with devastating impact. Nothing speeds the growth of corruption more than policies that foster arbitrary secrecy. Secrecy allows little scandals to become major scandals, costly to the taxpayers, devastating to our foreign-aid program, to our position of defense readiness, and to our national morale.

“Secrecy,” as the House Government Operations Committee has put it, “is the handmaiden of bureaucracy, especially military bureaucracy. It has so pervasive an effect that all government becomes invested with the urge to restrict—even those routine agencies which should be wide open to the public.”

In these pages, I have not attempted to examine every agency of government. I have examined enough, however, to show how severe the infection of secrecy has become, what dire symptoms it produces, and how seriously it threatens the health of our democracy.

It can be wiped out. As treatment for a permanent cure, I suggest the following steps:

1 All officials except the President should be obligated to explain all their actions to Congress and the General Accounting Office, unless specific laws are passed for withholding information. This does not mean that the public or Congress should have access to all papers when a decision is pending, but at a later date Congress should have access to all records and testimony concerning events leading up to the executive decisions.

A good example from recent history that shows the value of a properly conducted hearing was the Senate investigation of President Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur in 1951.

The special Senate committee—selected with a reasonably even division of political forces from the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees—did not seek testimony from President Truman. However, it did require the testimony of General Omar Bradley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bradley testified on all events leading up to the firing, including his meeting with President Truman. Bradley was not asked to recount verbatim his discussion with President Truman, but he testified he met with President Truman, that the MacArthur actions were discussed, and the decision was made by President Truman to fire General MacArthur.

The special Senate committee met behind closed doors but released a daily transcript of testimony that had been examined to eliminate any matter that might violate national military security standards.