A secrecy obsession can ruin the powerful Bush's bashing of N.Y. Times mirrors Nixon's
Martin F. Nolan
Sunday, July 9, 2006 now part of stylesheet -->



On June 1, 1972, White House Counsel Charles Colson wrote a memo to President Richard Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, saying, "I hate the (New York) Times as much as anyone else and would like to be in the first wave of Army shock troops going in during the second term to tear down the printing presses."

Colson and Haldeman hated the Times because the newspaper had more credibility than Nixon did. "The press is the enemy," Nixon said many times, according to his speechwriter, William Safire.

Americans need not feel sorry for the press today, no more than they did during a similar beat-the-press episode more than three decades ago. History seldom repeats itself, but obsession with secrecy can be fatal.

The Pentagon Papers saga, like the Times coverage of the role of banks in anti-terrorism, revealed no important secrets. In both cases, the stories could have been seen as pro-administration. When the powerful rage against the press, it's not about secrets, but about secrecy for its own sake, secrecy as a source of power. Dick Cheney worked in the Nixon White House with the secrecy-obsessed Henry Kissinger. The future vice president watched and learned.

In the spring of 1971, Nixon faced a long, unpopular, unexplainable war. "Vietnamization," withdrawing U.S. troops, was moving slowly. By the end of the year, 2,357 more Americans would die in Vietnam. On March 29, Army lieutenant William Calley was convicted of killing 20 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.

Nixon enjoyed a break from routine at the White House wedding of his daughter Tricia. On June 13, 1971, when he read his New York Times, he found Tricia's nuptials eclipsed by a report on a 47-volume study on U.S. decisions in Vietnam. Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and classified top secret, it documented mistakes made by presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

In the White House, the immediate reaction was mild. Haldeman called the story "gobbledygook," although he fretted that "the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this." Colson saw it as "a compendium of memos" indicting Democrats.

Their attitude changed when Kissinger returned from a trip, seething about secrecy and knowing which button to push if Nixon did not act. He told his boss, "It shows you're a weakling, Mr. President."

The Justice Department moved to stop newspapers from publishing the papers. It was an unprecedented injunction, which the Supreme Court overruled June 30 by a 6-3 vote. Of almost 20 newspapers involved in the coverage, the government sued four: the Times, the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Boston Globe, where I was Washington bureau chief.
It's an odd feeling to see one's name as a defendant when the United States of America is the plaintiff. The Globe's lawyers told us we might go to jail, even though we all knew that "top secret" was a stale habit in D.C., where bureaucrats classify yesterday's weather report. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, who to this day calls them "the McNamara Papers," later said that 95 percent of them were not secret at all. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, who argued the government's case, admitted that "no harm was done by the publication of the Pentagon Papers."

The harm to Nixon was self-inflicted. Frustrated by the Supreme Court, he started a White House investigative unit called "the plumbers." This action led to more grasping for power, then to Watergate and to what White House aide Egil Krogh, the plumbers' handler, called "the downfall of the administration." Krogh went to jail, as did Colson, Haldeman and others.
For years, I wondered about the connection about being a litigant in the Pentagon Papers and my landing on Nixon's enemies list. Was the path predetermined by paranoia? My answer came in 1977 when Nixon, on the comeback trail again, explained to the British broadcaster, David Frost, the legal philosophy of his administration's criminal actions: "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal." Nixon also referred to the presidency in that interview as "the sovereign."

This attitude lives on today. In the July 3 New Yorker magazine, Jane Mayer, in "The Hidden Power," profiles David Addington, Cheney's lawyer, who sounds like a cocksure sovereign. "I'm the decider," said President Bush, defending Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bush has never used his veto power, preferring marginal notes that describe his dislike for new laws. Congress is mute and meek, except on life-or-death issues like gay marriage and flag-burning.
War in Iraq? What war in Iraq? Congress has not held a minute of investigative hearings into this war. In the 1960s, Sen. J. W. Fulbright and his Foreign Relations Committee investigated Vietnam, to the dismay of his fellow Democrat, LBJ. In the 1940s, then-Sen. Harry Truman investigated President Franklin Roosevelt's conduct of World War II.

The only questioners left are ink-stained wretches, in print, radio, television or on the Internet. They're not heroes and there's no "right to know," a noble concept, but not in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson said it best in 1786: "Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."