The Honorable
John F. Kennedy
The President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President:
In your letter of February 8, 1962 to Secretary McNamara you directed him to refuse certain information to a Senate Subcommittee. The concluding paragraph of your letter stated:
“The principle which is at stake here cannot be automatically applied to every request for information. Each case must be judged on its merits.”
A similar letter from President Eisenhower on May 17, 1954 also refused information to a Senate Subcommittee, setting forth the same arguments covered in your letter. President Eisenhower did not, however, state that future questions of availability of information to the Congress would have to be answered as they came up.
I know you are aware of the result of President Eisenhower’s letter. Time after time Executive Branch employees far down the administrative line from the President fell back on his letter of May 17, 1954 as authority to withhold information from the Congress and the public.
Some of the cases are well known—the Dixon-Yates matter and the investigation of East-West trade controls, for instance—but many of the refusals based on President Eisenhower’s letter of May 17, 1954 received no public notice. A report of the House Committee on Government Operations covering the five years from June, 1955 through June, 1960 lists 44 cases of Executive Branch officials refusing information on the basis of the principles set forth in the May 17, 1954 letter.
I am confident that you share my belief that your letter of February 8, 1962 to Secretary McNamara should not be seized upon by Executive Branch employees—many of them holding the same policymaking positions of responsibility they did under the Eisenhower Administration—as a new claim of authority to withhold information from the Congress and the public. A Subcommittee staff study indicates that during the year between the time you took office and February 8, 1962 the claim of an “executive privilege” to withhold government information was not used successfully once, compared to the dozens of times in previous years administrative employees held up “executive privilege” as a shield against public and Congressional access to information.
Although your letter of February 8, 1962 stated clearly that the principle involved could not be applied automatically to restrict information, this warning received little public notice. Clarification of this point would, I believe, serve to prevent the rash of restrictions on government information which followed the May 17, 1954 letter from President Eisenhower.
Sincerely,
/s/ John E. Moss
Chairman
THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington