Trump Breaks Washington’s Secrecy Addiction

“Secrecy,” wrote the late great senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “is for losers.”

In his first week in office, Donald Trump ignited a public debate over the merits of government secrecy when he signed an executive order stating that he, the president, has determined that the veil of secrecy surrounding documents relating to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., “is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.”

The order has ignited a partisan debate over declassification, not least thanks to the response from JFK’s obviously troubled grandson, who condemned Trump’s move as an exercise in partisan politics.

There are other issues at stake besides the question of ‘whodunit?’ Washington’s addiction to secrecy beginning in the early years of the Cold War has, as Moynihan wisely pointed out, bred suspicion of the government by its citizens.

In his 1998 treatise, Secrecy: The American Experience, Moynihan made the case that the Cold War-era mania for secrecy had outlived its usefulness—indeed, was becoming counterproductive, eroding people’s trust in government while acting as a brake against actual thought within the intelligence community. Consider this 1987 memorandum from CIA deputy director Robert Gates who, on the eve of the Washington Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, warned that Gorbachev’s reform were simply a ruse, an attempt to win “breathing space” for the USSR. 

“It is,” wrote Gates, then considered to be among the agency’s top Russia experts, “hard to detect fundamental changes, currently or in prospect, in the way the Soviets govern at home or in their principal objectives abroad.”

In an interview on PBS’s late and much lamented Charlie Rose Show, Moynihan, then approaching his penultimate year in the Senate, noted that “obviously a government has to have secrets—but how many and for how long?” Too much secrecy, Moynihan believed, chipped away at “the foundations of trust” on which democracies depend. Moynihan cited the secrecy surrounding the assassination of JFK as an example of where the American people felt that “the United States government has not told the truth.” And, he noted ruefully, “that was before the movie [Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK].”

Moynihan added that in this “vast system of secrecy we create about 6 million secrets a year, which has no basis in law, excepting for atomic energy…there is no law. There [are] just executive orders and whoever has a stamp.” If this seems like an exaggeration, it’s not. The opaque rules governing classification have, according to Brookings Institution legal expert Matthew Kahn, “been defined primarily by a series of about 20 successive executive orders” beginning in 1940 under Franklin D. Roosevelt. These are laws of the administrative rather than statutory variety—in other words, executive branch directives made in the absence of congressional input and oversight. Not surprisingly, given the inherent lack of accountability in such a system, the number of secrets the government creates has grown exponentially: from Moynihan’s estimate of 6 million a year in 1998 to roughly 50 million today.

Moynihan, who in 1991 and 1995 authored bills that sought to dismantle the CIA, was no fan of alternative theories of the JFK assassination, and indeed, he complained that government secrecy undermined the credibility of the official narrative. During the same interview with Rose, he exclaimed, “Do we want Americans to think the CIA killed Kennedy? Of course not!”

At a press conference on February 6th, author Gerald Posner—whose book Case Closed (1993) lays out the case that Lee Harvey Oswald really was the lone gunman—sounded a lot like Moynihan from a quarter century ago when he said that, regarding the Kennedy documents, the government “has been its own worst enemy. It has redacted material and argued for the continued classification of files or withholding them from public release long after they should have been made public, raising the reasonable specter among many people that they must be hiding the truth of what really happened.”

Whatever one’s position on the assassination, the fact that these documents—in part or in whole—are still being kept from the prying eyes of the public is becoming harder to justify.

One such document, a memo titled “CIA Reorganization,” was written at the request of President Kennedy by his close aide, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger. Most of the memo has been public for years—and makes for fascinating reading. 

Schlesinger, a veteran of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, argued that the direction the agency had taken under its longtime director, Allen Dulles, could be “traced to the autonomy with which the agency has been permitted to operate.”

Schlesinger recommended the president reorganize intelligence gathering and operations along lines similar to how the British government operates, where MI-6 reports to the Foreign Office. “The State Department,” Schlesinger wrote, “would be granted general clearance authority over all clandestine activity” while a deputy undersecretary of state for intelligence would oversee a new Joint Intelligence Board made up of representatives from the intelligence community and the White House.

Dulles’ reaction to such a plan would not have been difficult to discern. And after Kennedy received Schlesinger’s memo, the search for Dulles’ replacement began in earnest. 

A full page and a half of a section of the Schlesinger memo subtitled “covert political operations” remains completely redacted. 

Journalist Jefferson Morley, who is skeptical of the official assassination narrative, notes that “in the National Archives JFK collection, the memo is redacted as of the last public release in December 2022.”

Moynihan concluded Secrecy with a plea of sorts:

“Openness is now a singular and singularly American advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in the mode of an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of cold war era regulations. It is time to begin building the support for the era of openness, which is already upon us.”

Perhaps Trump’s executive order mandating the release of the Kennedy and King files will be a step in that direction.

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