In answer to questions I said I did not object to specific legislation to cover areas of government where secrecy was essential. I emphasized that “if the record of the government must be confidential, it is not too much to ask the executive department to give a reason. Democrats and Republicans in Congress have an equal interest in obtaining ... the whole story, all of the information behind the decisions of the executive agency.”
The next week, the Moss subcommittee on Government Information began calling the long roll of witnesses from the Post Office Department, the Agriculture Department, the Treasury Department, and the Civil Service Commission. The first task was to try to establish from reports and testimony just what the information practices of each of these departments were.
A few months of work revealed to Chairman Moss and his staff a tendency toward “a flexible policy” in many departments. A department might refuse to produce information on one ground, and then jump to another reason when the first became untenable. I knew that some press officials were poorly schooled as to what should and should not be made available, and that they made up the rules as they went along. If the Moss subcommittee had done no more than establish a written record on the laws and regulations being used for information policies its effort would have been worthwhile. Fortunately it did a lot more.
By the end of the first week of hearings the subcommittee staff (Staff Director Samuel J. Archibald, Chief Counsel Wallace J. Parks, and Special Counsel Jacob Scher) had already gathered a large collection of rules and regulations on information. Also, they had inserted in the record a copy of a Joint Resolution, No. 342, passed by the House of Representatives on May 13, 1948—a not-so-gentle reminder.
The Republican Eightieth Congress of 1948 had been so irritated at the Truman administration for its refusal to make records available to Congress that it passed a resolution directing “all executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government created by Congress” to furnish “such information, books, records and memoranda” as was demanded by a majority vote in any properly authorized committee of Congress.
At the time of that dispute in 1948, such leading Democrats as John W. McCormack, of Massachusetts, and William L. Dawson, of Illinois, defended the Truman administration for refusing to make available a Commerce Department investigative report on Dr. Edward U. Condon, director of the National Bureau of Standards.
President Truman had issued an executive order in which he stated that “efficient and just administration of the employee loyalty program ... requires that reports, records, and files relative to the program be preserved in strict confidence.”
Even though this was a specific executive order, and limited to investigative reports and personnel files, the Republicans were outraged at being denied access to all information on cases under investigation by Congress.
However, in 1955, when the tables had turned, the Republicans used the same basic arguments the Democrats used in 1948. The Republicans, moreover, were having to defend a far more widespread withholding of records.
During this dispute, I examined the 1948 records of the Senate on an investigation of a loyalty case involving William Remington, another Commerce Department official. William P. Rogers had been chief counsel for the committee investigating the Remington case, and had been in charge of preparing the Senate subcommittee report that castigated the Truman administration for arbitrary and unjustified secrecy in withholding personnel investigation files. In those reports, Rogers had likened withholding information from Congress to keeping the seeing-eye dog from a blind man.