The persistent, hard-hitting inquiries of Committee Counsel William P. Rogers made the Truman administration so frantic in 1948 and 1949 that a staff lawyer in the Justice Department was asked to prepare a memorandum on the precedents set by earlier Presidents who had withheld information from Congress. However, that memorandum was regarded as too insubstantial to use. The Truman administration relied instead on ducking and dodging to avoid embarrassment. It sensed correctly that the press and the public would have been outraged if it had tried to pull down a total secrecy curtain in the midst of investigations of the five percenters, the influence peddlers, and the loyalty cases.
What Truman would not do, however, the highly popular President Eisenhower did do. Ironically, his May 17 letter caused hardly a ripple of criticism. On the contrary, most editorial pages praised President Eisenhower for expressing some fine new theory on the U. S. Constitution or wrote off the letter as an historically unimportant, one-shot claim of secrecy.
I called one editor friend the day after such an approving editorial appeared, and commented that the Eisenhower doctrine of “executive privilege” could bar Congress from practically any executive papers containing “opinions, advice or recommendations.”
“This will set the ‘Freedom of Information’ cause back fifty years, if it is not criticized and stopped now,” I said.
My editor friend said he thought that there might have been some loyalty file discussed at the January 21 meeting, and that this would be a justification for refusing testimony.
I told him that no one had claimed that loyalty files were discussed, and that if this had been the reason for the secrecy then it should have been stated. Also, I pointed out that while discussion of a loyalty file might give some justifications for limiting testimony, the limitation should only cover that subject and not the whole meeting.
The editor agreed with me that the broad language of the Eisenhower letter constituted a dangerous precedent. But he didn’t believe that any administration would ever try to invoke the total arbitrary “executive privilege.”
Just how wrong events would prove him to be was not then easy to predict. Indeed, the whole story of the Army-McCarthy hearings had by this time taken second news billing to the United States Supreme Court ruling on school segregation. The unanimous segregation decision came out on May 17, 1954—the same date as the Eisenhower letter to Wilson. That segregation decision now dominated discussions of constitutional law. And the few persons who did stop to think about the inherent threat in the broad use of secrecy could hardly get emotional about it—as long as the only victims appeared to be Senator McCarthy and his little knot of followers.
CHAPTER V
Another Blow at Senator Joe
When the Eisenhower administration took office in January 1953, I had had high hopes that arbitrary government secrecy would be ended. As a candidate, the President had talked much of his interest in open government and had pledged to make all but national security information available to the public. So had the Vice President, Richard M. Nixon.