By March of 1959, Campbell had full proof that he could not rely on the summary reports submitted to him by the Navy. He declared that the Navy had submitted two reports on one subject that were “incorrect representations” of the government’s action. “The second version of the report, while containing twice as many pages, is also incomplete and inadequate because of the use of self-exercised censorship.”
Campbell said that the secrecy was not only illegal and bad government but that it was mighty expensive. He explained that the secrecy deprived the GAO auditors of information already accumulated at the taxpayers’ expense. This meant that the GAO was forced to go out and duplicate work already done if it was to make any effort to fulfill its responsibility.
Comptroller General Campbell put no price tag on the extra cost for a GAO audit of the Navy. However, the GAO did estimate that lack of access to the Air Force Inspector General reports made that audit cost at least $125,000 more than necessary. Though the cost of the audit could have been avoided with the proper co-operation of the Air Force, the audit ultimately disclosed millions of dollars in bungling and waste in the Air Force missile program—all covered up in the name of “executive privilege.”
The Richmond Times-Dispatch commented:
“The amazing thing about this situation is that President Eisenhower backs the armed services in withholding vital information from the GAO. He has been told by his legal advisers that ‘executive privilege’ has some validity, where it is in essence nothing but the determination of bureaucrats to keep the GAO from seeing their books.
“This bogus doctrine forced the GAO to spend an extra $125,000 in making its inquiry into Air Force mismanagement.... Just how much longer is the public going to put up with this sort of thing?”
I knew that Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, was fed up with this expensive and undemocratic secrecy. So was J. Russell Wiggins, executive editor of the Washington Post and Times Herald; James Pope, executive editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal; Herbert Brucker, editor of the Hartford Courant; V. M. (Red) Newton, managing editor of the Tampa Tribune; and Harold Cross, the special counsel for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
The Chicago Daily News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal were among the other top papers firmly opposed to the secrecy cover-up. But despite several excellent editorials, the problem just wasn’t flamboyant enough to catch the attention of the public or even most reporters. Too many news stories and editorials in other papers merely repeated the self-serving justifications of the Eisenhower administration without determining whether the assertions were true.
CHAPTER XIV
Hiding the Laos Mess
By the summer of 1959, Representative Porter Hardy was fed up with arbitrary executive secrecy. The lanky Virginia Democrat was getting a double dose of “executive privilege” and had nearly reached the end of his patience. He was a member of the Armed Services subcommittee headed by Chairman Edward Hebert, and therefore had firsthand knowledge of how the Defense Department was hampering investigations of military waste.