Secrecy and the End of America

Patrick Allitt writes about Garry Will's new book Bomb Power:

During World War II, Gen. Leslie Groves supervised hundreds of exceptional people in a vast operation to create a conflict-ending weapon. Secretly, this concentration of nuclear scientists and technologists built the first atom bomb. Secretly, they tested it in the New Mexico desert. Secretly, President Truman, who had only just found out about the project, authorized the use of two such bombs against Japan. Secretly, the Army Air Force carried out the mission and destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Secrecy in wartime was one thing, but should it persist in peacetime? Almost at once, the Truman administration decided that it should, and a mania for classification set in. As the Cold War began, Truman and his successors created new secret organizations to advise them and to gather information covertly. They worked out ways to bypass congressional oversight. The National Security Council, the CIA, the expanded nuclear-weapons program—all were shrouded in secrecy. Political status accrued to anyone with authority to read classified documents. Those denied clearance became outsiders and lost credibility.

Garry Wills has opposed concentrated executive power and secrecy ever since the late 1960s, when he witnessed their abuse by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. In Bomb Power,
he describes the rise of executive secrecy over the last 70 years, tracing its origins back to the Manhattan Project. He shows how the constant assertion of threats to national security has distorted the balance of powers specified in the Constitution.

To read Bomb Power is to feel a rising sense of indignation. Wills, a skilful rhetorician, knows how to guide the reader’s emotions toward his conclusion: the United States has been turned into what the Founding Fathers would have called a tyranny. Concentrated arbitrary power wielded from an all-powerful center and undermining citizens’ rights, often in secret, beyond accountability, makes nonsense of the idea of government by the people, for the people. What makes the indictment particularly effective is Wills’s evenhandedness. He’s not condemning Republican presidents and letting Democrats off the hook; neither is he condemning the Democrats and offering us the GOP as a consoling alternative. He calls down a plague on both houses and scolds a wide array of intellectual and political apologists for the accumulation of secret executive power.