I was reminded also of these telling words of Edward Livingston:
“No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers. But many have been brought to ruin, and reduced to slavery, by suffering gradual imposition and abuses which were imperceptible only because the means of publicity had not been secured.”
One could only wonder when President Eisenhower would awaken to the abuses of secrecy being perpetrated in his name, right under his own nose.
CHAPTER XI
Keeping the Professor in the Dark
The Justice Department, Commerce Department, Agriculture Department, Defense Department, and State Department had all used the arbitrary secrecy of “executive privilege” without causing a public uproar. Not only had they succeeded in avoiding major press criticism, but they had secured statements from President Eisenhower to give a noble and patriotic coloring to their deceptions.
With such encouragement at the top it was inevitable that the policy of secrecy would spread. In August 1957, the newly created House Legislative Oversight Subcommittee hired Bernard Schwartz, the young law professor from New York (see Chapter VIII), as counsel for an investigation of the various regulatory agencies. The committee, headed by Representative Morgan Moulder, Missouri Democrat, had been established “to go into the administration of the laws [creating the regulatory agencies] and see whether or not the laws ... were being carried out or whether they were being repealed or revamped by those who administer them.”
The young professor had barely started his work in September 1957, when he began bumping into secrecy trouble. In all, there were six of the so-called “independent regulatory agencies” in the scope of the House Legislative Oversight Subcommittee. The “big six” to be probed were the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the Federal Power Commission (FPC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The Congress had created these regulatory agencies to perform a wide range of functions including control of radio and television licenses, control of gas and electric power lines, control of commercial land transportation by train, truck, or bus, the investment market, and air transportation. Rights worth billions of dollars were involved in the decisions of these agencies, and it had been the stated intention of Congress to remove these decisions from the direct pressure of politics. To do this, the regulatory agencies were headed by bipartisan commissions or boards, the members of which were nominated by the President, subject to approval by the Senate and limited to a fixed term of office.
In theory, at least, these boards or commissions were specialized courts in their fields. They had rule-making and administrative functions, but they also rendered judicial decisions on the basis of public records and public hearings. Once appointed, these members of the regulatory agencies were to be insulated from the pressure politics of the White House and the Congress. Prior to Dr. Schwartz’s arrival in Washington, there had been widespread reports, and some evidence, that members of some of the regulatory commissions were engaging in conversations with political personnel at the White House and elsewhere on cases under study. To Dr. Schwartz, an outstanding authority in the field of administrative law, it was elementary that such conversations were improper while a case was being decided.
“It is as bad as having one of the parties in a law suit sneak into the chambers of the judge to try to influence his decision in the middle of a trial,” Dr. Schwartz told me.