The Cult of Secrecy: America’s Classification Crisis →

-FOREIGN AFFAIRS

“It turns out that, from the very beginning, what’s secret has been whatever serves the interests of the president and all those around him who are invested in executive power,” he writes. In any bureaucracy, the ability to render something secret becomes an irresistible trump card—a way to evade oversight, tout parochial priorities, and obscure shortcomings. “After conjuring the power of secrecy, and setting it loose, presidents found that it had a power all its own,” Connelly continues. “Thousands more people, many career civil servants, began creating their own secrets, and jealously protecting them, making it harder to identify and protect what mattered to the president personally. At the same time, they could leak whatever they liked, undermining the president’s ability to manage the news cycle.” Connelly is particularly scathing about the role of military leaders, such as Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay, who “employed leaks and spin no less than secrecy to protect their perquisites and push their agendas,” lobbying to expand military spending and outright defying civilian authority. In 1978, he notes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stopped preserving notes from their meetings, “as if America’s most senior military leadership were running a numbers racket, committing nothing to paper.”