This was the same William P. Rogers who was appointed Deputy Attorney General in the first term of the Eisenhower administration, and who later became the Attorney General and the leading spokesman for the ultimate in “executive privilege.”
In his early days in the Justice Department, I saw Bill Rogers on a number of occasions and pointed out the inconsistency of his positions. I asked him how he could be such a caustic critic of secrecy in the Truman administration, and then suddenly switch to being a leading advocate of such total arbitrary secrecy as used by the Eisenhower administration in its stretched claim of “executive privilege.”
“When you can show me that some crime or wrongdoing is being covered up, come up and see me,” Rogers said.
I tried to reason with him, explaining that there were no laws and no judicial decisions to support so absurd a claim to an arbitrary right to withhold information. Rogers became jocular and said I was taking the whole business too seriously. He said that if there were serious cases he would examine them. He laughed off my suggestion that the cases then available were serious and some day in the future could be used as precedent to bury Democratic scandals from Republicans.
Rogers said that newspaper editorials had been in favor of the May 17, 1954, letter when it was issued, and that there was little support on my side. I stuck to my argument that he was contradicting his own position of six or seven years earlier. But it was no use to try to argue with him. I left him to do his explaining later to the Moss subcommittee and other congressional committees.
On May 8, 1956, the Moss subcommittee on Government Information heard testimony from Bernard Schwartz, professor of law and director of the Institute of Comparative Law at New York University; Hugh Fulton, former chief counsel for the Truman committee; and Harold L. Cross, special counsel for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Fulton, after an exhaustive statement on the problem of arbitrary withholding by the executive agencies, concluded that the efforts to impair the investigative power of Congress “hampers the legislative powers and imperils democracy as we know it.”
Harold Cross, who had been practicing law since 1912, had also served for twenty-five years as a professor of newspaper law in the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. I had known him for some years through work on projects for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
In his testimony, Cross struck at the legal basis of the memorandum of Attorney General Herbert Brownell that had accompanied the May 17, 1954, letter.
“Some of the findings of the memorandum ... are accurate,” Cross said. [But] “the underlined part of the statement is merely an assertion by the Attorney General. It is at direct variance with pertinent court rulings.