“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].”