Washington cover-up

by Clark R. Mollenhoff

Senator Henry M. Jackson, the Washington Democrat, was no McCarthy supporter, but he too was nettled by the instructions given Adams by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert B. Anderson. Jackson held that if the Defense Department had any right to refuse to testify on high-level conversations, then it had waived that right when Adams told of the January 21 meeting and the participants.

“I think that maybe this testimony may be embarrassing to the Administration, and I do not think that because it is embarrassing to the Administration and favorable to Senator McCarthy, that it ought to be deleted,” Senator Jackson declared.

“I think this committee should find out now,” Jackson continued, “whether it [the Administration policy] covers just this conversation or whether it covers all conversations that went on between the various officials within the Executive Branch of Government ... [if] we are going to be foreclosed here immediately from asking any further questions relating to conversations between officials within the Executive Branch. Heretofore, those conversations have been coming in when they have been favorable. Now that they are unfavorable [to the Administration], are they to be excluded?”

The unfairness of allowing favorable testimony by a witness, and then arbitrarily cutting off unfavorable testimony was apparent to many observers, even through the steam of feeling that surrounded the Army-McCarthy hearings. To justify such arbitrary secrecy, the Defense Department needed all the prestige it could summon.

The answer to the problem, it was decided, would be a letter from President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson. It had to be a letter of high tone in which the popular President Eisenhower could convince the public that some great principle was at stake. It had to be general enough to avoid saying just why John Adams couldn’t testify, but specific enough to give the impression that the security of the nation and the foundations of the Constitution were in danger if John Adams were forced to talk. The letter drafted between Friday, May 14, and Monday, May 17, carried the full impact of the prestige of a highly popular President, but it obscured temporarily a sweeping assumption of executive power to arbitrarily withhold information (see Appendix A).

On Monday morning, May 17, John Adams filed the Eisenhower letter with the Army-McCarthy committee and a broad new doctrine of “executive privilege” was born. The glowing phrases about a “proper separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches of the Government,” misled the public and a good many newspaper editorial writers and columnists, even though it did not fool all the members of the Army-McCarthy committee.

President Eisenhower’s May 17, 1954, letter stated:

“Because it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the Executive Branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters, and because it is not in the public interest that any of their conversations or communications, or any documents or reproductions, concerning such advice be disclosed, you will instruct employees of your Department that in all of their appearances before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations regarding the inquiry now before it they are not to testify to any such conversations or communications or to produce any such documents or reproductions. This principle must be maintained regardless of who would benefit by such disclosure.

“I direct this action so as to maintain the proper separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches of the Government in accordance with my responsibilities under the Constitution. This separation is vital to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power by any branch of Government.”

The Eisenhower letter also stated that “throughout our history the President has withheld information whenever he found that what was sought was confidential or its disclosure would be incompatible with the public interest or jeopardize the safety of the Nation.” The letter gave the impression that from George Washington down, a number of Presidents had taken action analogous to the silencing of John Adams.