REVELATIONS OF the Bush administration's banking surveillance program--the Swift program--are important in at least one respect. They are meant to amplify one of the media's favorite subjects: President Bush's secrecy. Because the Swift operation has been conducted covertly and relies on broad administrative powers--"a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records," according to the New York Times--it comes ready-made as an illustration of this recurring theme. It's "part of an alarming pattern," as the Times says.
Thanks to the media, Bush's manifest secrecy is now the worst-kept secret in Washington. In the June 22 issue of the New York Review of Books, for example, Elizabeth Drew wrote, "Through secrecy and contemptuous treatment of Congress, the Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history."
Theodore Draper paints the picture as follows:
The deliberate decision to exclude Congress for many months from all knowledge, the degrading ex-communication of the secretary of state, the implied edict that disagreement cannot be tolerated and is punishable by exclusion from decision making, the morbid secrecy of the entire enterprise--these are political monstrosities in a democracy such as ours. They are of a piece with those other monstrosities that have recently been advanced--absolute loyalty to the President, repudiation of traditional conservatism in favor of adventurist neoconservatism, the conception of Congress as enemy, and the absolution given to lawlessness on the part of presidential agents, even military officers.
Obviously, Draper is referring to the unprecedented practices of the Bush administration. Or is he? The above passage sounds like a pretty good description of Bush and company--only it was written in 1987.
To believe that the Bush administration's secrecy is unprecedented is to ignore the precedents of past presidents, who have faced their fair share of similar charges. The only thing unprecedented today is the number of times the word "unprecedented" is being used.
In 1987, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times wrote, "The Reagan Administration has pushed the claims of executive secrecy and power to new extremes." Reagan, according to Lewis, embodied the Nixonian "view that Presidents should and can act unilaterally at home and abroad, avoiding the bother of Congressional approval and public discussion."
Of President George H.W. Bush, Peter Stothard of The Times (London) wrote, "He is the President who is proud to be secretive."
Even Jimmy Carter, the man who promised to "strip away all the secrecy that surrounds government," got a bum rap. In August 1979, the ACLU mailed a letter to its members that declared, "The Carter administration's secrecy mania . . . has proved to be even greater than the Nixon administration's in the Pentagon Papers case."
The charge of Nixonism returns every time there is a president--or precedent--the press does not like. Thus, it is little wonder that the people who worry most over secrets are the people from whom the secrets are kept.
Windsor Mann is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.
