Washington cover-up

by Clark R. Mollenhoff

Despite the inequity in this case and others similar to it, a general belief prevailed in Washington that secrecy on government personnel files and loyalty-security files was an unmixed blessing. The fallacy of this contention was impressed on me every time I saw Mrs. A. She was defeated in appearance, and she was deeply hurt.

There is a sharp cruelty in secrecy that results in such injury to an individual, and there is great damage to our government—and to people’s faith in it—when secrecy is used to cover up mismanagement and corruption. I am gravely concerned over any obstructions put in the way of congressional committees’ investigating the abuses of secrecy. Where would we be if Congress had not looked into such nefarious schemes as the Teapot Dome scandals of the Harding administration or the tax “fixes” in the Truman administration?

Have we, a self-governing people, learned anything from these black marks on our history? I am afraid that we have not learned enough yet. I am afraid that the people as a whole, and many persons in the press and Congress, tend to disregard the danger signs and accept the self-serving declarations of virtue from their Presidents or other high officials. A few newspapers, a few diligent investigators for congressional committees, a few senators and a few congressmen have had to take the whole responsibility for breaking through unjustified secrecy and uncovering the truth.

In my twenty years as a newspaper correspondent I have been concerned with this problem of information policies at every level of government—starting in a local police station, city hall, county courthouse, and state capitol. For the past eleven years I have been covering the federal government for the Washington Bureau of Cowles Publications. I have been fortunate to have the freedom to follow any investigations that interested me, as well as the enthusiastic support of several newspapers. My position has afforded me the privilege of a day-to-day acquaintanceship with every major investigation in Washington since 1950.

The problem of the Washington cover-up became a major interest to me in connection with the scandals in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and the Internal Revenue Service beginning in 1950. The investigations of the RFC were of a reasonably short duration. The pattern of “political favoritism” in administering this government loaning agency was ended when W. Stuart Symington, later a United States Senator, was named by President Truman to restore order. Symington instituted the “fishbowl policy” that brought most of the RFC operations out in the open.

The problems with secrecy in the Internal Revenue Service remained a major news story for more than two years. The Internal Revenue law provides that it is unlawful to disclose the information on the tax returns submitted by U.S. taxpayers. It was a secrecy established in a specific statute, and the purpose was to protect the privacy of the finances of individual taxpayers. However, investigations by Senator John J. Williams, the Delaware Republican, and a House subcommittee, headed by Representative Cecil King, the California Democrat, showed that the secrecy was used to shield crooked tax agents and tax collectors from exposure and prosecution.

The Alcohol Tax Unit (ATU), a division of the Internal Revenue Service, had even set up procedures to provide for secret settlements of criminal law violations. Also, ATU provided secret hearings on applications for a federal license to wholesale liquor or beer. A racketeer found it possible to go into a secret hearing, give perjured testimony, and obtain a license with the help of weak or corrupt ATU administrators.

The lesson was clear in each case: secrecy corrupts. It allowed government officials to dispense favors behind closed doors. When decisions were secret, there was no need to provide any consistency in decisions or in penalties. It was impossible for the public or the press to obtain enough information to register an informed objection.

During fights to open records in the Internal Revenue Service, I became acquainted with James S. Pope, executive editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal who was then chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. We worked together in forcing the Internal Revenue Service to open certain “compromise settlements” of tax cases as well as the ATU hearings.

In exploring these and other information problems, I worked closely with the late Harold Cross, former special counsel for the American Society of Newspaper Editors; J. Russell Wiggins, executive editor of the Washington Post and Times Herald; Herbert Brucker, editor of the Hartford Courant; and V. M. (Red) Newton, managing editor of the Tampa Tribune.