Secrecy The American Experience By Senator Daniel P. Moynihan Essays

Secrecy: The American Experience? By Senator Daniel P. Moynihan According to a survey performed for the Defense Department in 1996, it was found that the majority of U.S. citizens believe that the government withholds too much information by classifying it as a secret. In this book, ?Secrecy: The American Experience?, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan reinforces that view. This is a distinctive book with numerous weaknesses, some errors, and one great strength. The weakness is that the book shows controversial arguments rather than a policy analysis. Moynihan has a particular view he wants to advance, and he is not interested in considering alternate explanations or exploring evidence that is contradictory with his view. Moynihan marks the start of modern secrecy with the Espionage Act. Most of the distinctive features of twentieth-century secrecy are rooted in the program to build the atomic bomb, including vast secret budgets and cover stories. I particularly enjoyed the book in that it told the truth of past events. I did not like that the book was written from only Moynihan's point of view and did not discuss other opinions. I enjoyed the book because it is nonfiction and reveals the truth of secrecy in America. Most importantly I found it interesting that this book was written by Senator Moynihan rather than by an ordinary person who would make many assumptions in order to write a book about secrecy. This US senator from New York analyzes the roots of America's obsession with government secrecy and pleads for it's dismantling. This book is not primarily an insider's account of the Government in action. It is, more ambitiously, a historical assessment of the ?culture of secrecy,? particularly in the area of foreign policy. Moynihan cites the CIA's failure to forecast the end of the Soviet Union as yet another deviation caused by secrecy. In his view, the CIA simply failed at its most important task. It is possible that all of those who argue to the contrary are mistaken, but Moynihan does not explain why or even acknowledge that there is a debate. In any case, the relevance of this controversy to government secrecy is weak; since CIA estimates of the Soviet Union economy are among the least secretive items it produced. Secrecy is heavily weighted toward the past. More than half the book is devoted to the period before 1950. Here too there are problems. Moynihan believes he has proved that President Harry Truman was never told about the secret army program known as Venona, which successfully decrypted Soviet communications and provided documentary evidence of Soviet espionage against the United States. There is circumstantial evidence that Truman was not informed about Venona, but Moynihan has not proved the negative. In 1996, the number of new secrets dropped to the lowest in recent decades. Never before has so much information about national security been so easily available to so many. How and why this came to pass is a story that has never been fully told, and it is not mentioned at all in this book. Daniel Patrick Moynihan draws two conclusions from his study of the way America keeps its secrets. If the federal government had revealed all it knew about Soviet espionage activities in the United States during and after World War II, there might have been no McCarthy era. If the U.S. intelligence community had needed its own analysis of the Soviet economy in the aftermath of World War II, there might have been no Cold War. These are the conclusions Moynihan makes. Moynihan proves that the American people and government have been the worst sufferers of this secrecy culture. For example: the xenophobic hysteria which led to the 1917 espionage act and the Dulles-Hoover cold war gyrations. Moynihan believes that the US assessments on the Soviet Union went so widely of the mark, in spite of capacity to access the best intelligence since the secret sources could not be tested and substantiated before acceptance as policy inputs. Excessive secrecy also affected the psyche of the American nation in the McCarthy and Vietnam Era. He feels that much of the witch hunting of the innocent could have been avoided had the intelligence available with the security services been revealed to