h-diplo roundtable, vol. xviih-diplo roundtable reviews, vol. xvii, no. 4 (2015) introduction by...

Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Introduction by Loch K. Johnson

Katherine A. Scott. Reining in the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-7006-1897-2 (hardback, $39.95). URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVII-4

Contents

Introduction by Loch K. Johnson, University of Georgia ................................................................... 2

Review by Michael Bowen, John Carroll University ...........................................................................12

Review by Lori Clune, California State University, Fresno ...............................................................15

Review by Thomas W. Devine, California State University, Northridge ......................................19

Review by Kathryn Olmsted, University of California, Davis...........................................................22

Author’s Response by Katherine Scott, Associate Historian, U.S. Senate Historical Office...26

© 2015 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

2015

H-Diplo H-Diplo Roundtable Review Volume XVII, No. 4 (2015) 19 October 2015

http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVII-4

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H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVII, No. 4 (2015)

Introduction by Loch K. Johnson, University of Georgia

Reining in the Dark Side of the State

his year, 2015, is the fortieth anniversary of the Church Committee investigation into charges of domestic spying leveled by the New York Times against the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975, so I have decided to introduce this roundtable review by providing a backdrop related to one of the key

events during the eras explored by Dr. Katherine A. Scott, namely, the nation’s first major inquiry into its secret intelligence agencies.1

On January 27, 1975, the U.S. Senate voted 82-to-4 in favor of establishing a special committee to conduct an inquiry into the U.S. ‘Intelligence Community.’ The Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana) chose a fellow westerner and senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Church (D-Idaho), to lead the investigation. The House of Representatives established a counterpart panel, but it experienced internal strife and not until July did it settle on a permanent leader, Otis Pike (D-New York). Senator Church and Representative Pike met in mid-summer to discuss how they could avoid unnecessary redundancy between their two investigations. Church proposed that his panel concentrate on alleged abuses of power, and Pike agree to examine how well the intelligence agencies performed their core mission of intelligence collection and analysis.

Congress created these committees in response to an outpouring of public concern over a series of articles in the Times that appeared during the fall and winter of 1974. Written by the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, the articles accused the CIA of ‘massive’ spying against anti-Vietnam war activists. Moreover, Hersh disclosed details of covert actions overseas, including against the democratically elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile. Intelligence sources quoted in the Times further claimed that ‘the Agency’ (as the CIA is known by insiders) had collected dossiers on over ten thousand American citizens, even though the language of the National Security Act of 1947 expressly barred the CIA from engaging in espionage within the United States. Arriving on the heels of the Watergate scandal, this news of intelligence skullduggery brought pressure on government officials for an official inquiry into the allegations. In addition to the two congressional investigative panels, President Gerald R. Ford initiated a separate probe: the Rockefeller Commission, chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller.

The lifespan of both the Rockefeller Commission and the Pike Committee proved shorter than that of the Church Committee. The Commission narrowed its focus to alleged wrongdoings related to CIA domestic spying and issued its report by the summer of 1975. The Pike Committee labored on into the autumn months but reeled from internal dissension as well as combative relations with the intelligence agencies. In contrast, the Church Committee subjected the CIA and its companion agencies to a lengthy, sixteen-month investigation. As a result of its broader probe, it exerted a greater influence on intelligence reform.

The Role of Congressional Leadership

1 See Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky, 1985), reissued with a new Preface and Postscript (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2015).

T


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The Church Committee consisted of six Democrats and five Republicans, and its staff numbered more than 150 investigators and researchers. Senator Church led the Democrats and Senator John G. Tower (Texas) led the Republicans. Each senator chose a personal aide (a ‘designee’) and I served in that capacity for Chairman Church. As the investigation unfolded, different senators assumed leadership roles according to their personal interests and opportunities. The Chairman’s foremost interest was foreign policy and he spent most of his time looking into CIA covert actions. Both he and Vice Chairman Tower took a lively interest in the assassination plots. Though miles apart ideologically, they worked closely together to unravel these Cold War operations aimed at eliminating Presidents Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of Congo (among other targets, none of whom died at the hands of the Agency because each of the plots failed).

Senator Walter F. Mondale (D-Minnesota) emerged as the Committee’s leader on domestic intelligence matters. Having served earlier in his career as state attorney general, he had an interest in the FBI and law enforcement. Senator Mondale ended up spending more hours than any other member working with the staff in preparation for hearings on the Bureau’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which involved spying on anti-war dissenters, civil rights advocates, and members of the Ku Klux Klan. On other occasions, additional committee members came forth to provide leadership. Gary W. Hart (D-Colorado), for example, was fascinated by the assassination plots against Castro and their possible relationship to President John F. Kennedy’s own death at the hands of an assassin.

Although ill with a terminal cancer, Philip A. Hart (D-Michigan) became the leadership center during the Committee’s hearing on COINTELPRO. In a weakened voice, he spoke movingly in the Senate Caucus Room of the Russell Building to an audience packed with reporters, government officials, and tourists. “I’ve been told for years by, among others, members of my own family that this is what the Bureau has been doing all this time,” Hart said, in response to a summary of COINTELPRO presented by the Committee’s staff attorneys. “As a result of my superior wisdom in high office, I assured them that they were on pot---it just wasn’t true. They [the FBI] just wouldn’t do it.” Hart paused and cleared his throat as the Caucus Room fell silent. “What you have described is a series of illegal actions intended to deny certain citizens their First Amendment rights---just like my children said.”2 Even hardened staff members felt choked with emotion as they listened to Hart’s poignant remarks. The popular Senator would never appear again at a Committee hearing or work session, but he had provided the most dramatic moment in its investigation.

Beneath its formal hierarchy, the Church Committee---like all congressional inquiries---found itself buffeted internally and externally by disagreements over how to proceed: what topics to investigate, what hearings to hold in public, which witnesses to call, what to say in the final report. The liberals, led by Church and Mondale, wished to see strong new regulations that would make the intelligence agencies more accountable to Congress. The conservatives, led by Senators Tower, Howard H. Baker, Jr. (R-Tennessee), and Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), sided with the Republican White House most of the time in opposing more stringent accountability. The moderates on the Committee---Walter ‘Dee’ Huddleston (D-Kentucky), Robert B. Morgan (D-North Carolina), Richard Schweiker (R-Pennsylvania), and Charles Mathias (R-Maryland)---played an important role in arbitrating disagreements between the liberals and conservatives.

Along with these ideological conflicts came the further complication of personal ambitions, as individuals on the Committee jockeyed for position to help themselves and their party in the approaching presidential

2 Johnson, Season of Inquiry, op.cit., 129.


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elections. Senator Church became a presidential candidate in the spring of 1976 as the work of the Committee wound down. At the staff level, methodological disagreements between social scientists and attorneys about how an investigation should be run produced other tensions, as the social scientists emphasized the importance of interviewing key intelligence personnel and the attorneys focused on the acquisition of documentary evidence.

Separation of Powers

The Ford Administration found the Pike Committee so belligerent that the White House eventually refused to cooperate with the panel’s requests for documents and witnesses. Even with the Church Committee, the administration periodically practiced stonewalling and slow rolling, refusing initially to provide key documents and witnesses and, when relenting, doing so in a manner that seemed to take forever. The executive branch always had an eye on the calendar and knew that time would eventually run out on both congressional investigations. Sometimes the Church Committee’s more honey-laded, diplomatic approach to the executive branch often worked. When it didn’t, however, as with repeated requests for more documents on the assassination plots, covert action, and wiretap activities, the staff escalated the Committee’s demands, followed by formal letters of complaint signed by Senators Church and Tower when necessary. The Committee took some disputes to court in the District of Columbia for arbitration; it also waved subpoenas in the faces of witnesses balking at requests to appear for hearings. The modus operandi of the executive branch was to seek more delays, and then (on most topics) finally to comply.

On one occasion, the Department of Defense responded to a document request by backing up a large truck to the Church Committee’s quarters in the Dirksen Building on Capitol Hill. The truck was filled with documents and the staff expressed elation, only to discover that the papers were as relevant to the panel’s proceedings as might be copies of the Congressional Record from the 1800s. The Committee’s leaders rebuked the Secretary of Defense and documents more to the point arrived a few weeks later---slow rolling at its finest.

Throughout this Year of Intelligence (or ‘The Intelligence Wars,’ as some CIA officers remember it), a running battle ensued inside the executive branch between, on the one hand, the CIA Director (William E. Colby), who decided it would be prudent to cooperate with the Church Committee (although not the obstreperous Pike Committee) or risk the abolition of the Agency, and, on the other hand, the Ford White House, which proposed hunkering down until the congressional storm blew over. The President finally dismissed Colby in December of 1975, near the end of the investigations. Colby was right, however. Had the CIA refused to cooperate with the Church Committee, lawmakers in the Senate would have gone after the Agency with a vengeance, just as the Pike Committee had decided to do regardless of Colby’s efforts at conciliation.

Partisanship

Three Republicans---Tower, Goldwater, and Baker, the most conservative members of the panel---ended up voting against the release of the Church Committee’s final report. Nonetheless, during the course of the investigation even they cooperated with most of the substantive and procedural decisions reached by the Democratic majority, something that would be unthinkable in today’s sharply polarized Congress. When the full Senate chamber voted on whether to create an intelligence oversight committee---the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) in 1976---the final favorable tally was 72- to-22, an overwhelmingly bipartisan victory for the Church Committee and intelligence reformers. Shock among the Senators over


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domestic spying by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA), as well as the FBI’s chilling COINTELPRO activities, had trumped partisanship.

The Legacy of the Church Committee

The Church Committee ranks as one of the most significant congressional inquiries ever conducted. In a recent scholarly study of the top one-hundred investigations carried out by the U.S. government since 1945, political scientist Paul C. Light concluded that “it is impossible to single out one investigation in this book as the best of the best, but I often return to the Church Committee’s 1975 investigation of intelligence abuse as a model of the high-impact investigation.”3

The Committee provided the first serious examination into America’s intelligence agencies and set in motion forces that revolutionized U.S. espionage activities, including the tightening of accountability through the watchfulness of SSCI and its counterpart, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI, established in 1977). Congress also went on to enact legislation initially drafted by the Church Committee, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed in 1978, which required court warrants for national security wiretaps; and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which required advance notice on all important intelligence operations before they were carried out---vital ante facto reporting rather than ex post facto when the horse was already out of the barn. Above all, the Church Committee set a new tone for espionage activities; henceforth, the CIA and its companion agencies would be expected to operate under the rule of law, with proper supervision by members of Congress.

Nevertheless, accountability has from time to time fallen short. The Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s demonstrated that serious intelligence abuses could occur even in this era of stepped-up congressional attention to the nation’s spy services. So did the bypassing by the second Bush administration of the FISA warrant requirements in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and the subsequent resort by the CIA to overzealous counterterrorism operations that included the use of secret prisons abroad, extraordinary renditions (kidnappings), and the torture of suspected terrorists. Further questionable intelligence activities included the expansive ‘metadata’ collection programs of the NSA carried out inside the United States, as revealed by the government contractor Edward J. Snowden in 2013; and attempts by the CIA in 2014 to hack into computers being used by Senate staffers who were investigating the use of torture by the Agency. In response, the Obama administration outlawed the secret prisons, as well as renditions and torture, but permitted the NSA metadata operations to continue. Members of SSCI and HPSCI investigated this ‘dragnet’ procedure adopted by the NSA and vowed to establish new rules to align this signals-intelligence agency with counterterrorism practices that focused more on a small number of suspected terrorists living inside the United States. The CIA ‘investigated’ the tampering with Senate staff computers by appointing a five-person committee of inquiry (comprised of three Agency officers and two outside sympathizers), which concluded that the episode was merely a ‘misunderstanding.’ 4

3 Paul C. Light, Government by Investigation: Congress, Presidents, and the Search for Answers, 1945-2012

(Brookings Institution, 2014), 193.

4 Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan's Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).


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Thus, while the Church Committee ushered in a new era of robust intelligence accountability, this spirit has been violated from time to time. Oversight relies on the steady involvement of SSCI and HPSCI members determined to maintain the rule of law and propriety within the hidden side of government. At times, these lawmakers have been vigilant---usually in the aftermath of an intelligence scandal or failure; sometimes, however, they have been AWOL. This uneven dedication to intelligence accountability underscores the importance of Katherine Scott’s book. As she highlights, it takes a steady drumbeat of activism by outsiders---civil society and the media---to push lawmakers toward the serious practice of oversight, without which America will surely succumb again to the misuse of power by its spy services.

Civil Society and National Security Reform

In this book, Scott seeks to fill in a large gap in our knowledge about the neo-progressive movement in the 1960s and 1970s that attempted to reform America’s national security policy. She draws our attention to America’s interest groups that have pounded away at government institutions in hopes of bringing about reforms that protect privacy and civil liberties. The Church Committee was certainly influenced by the skillful and knowledgeable lobbying of Morton Halperin and his Center for National Security Studies (CNSS, founded by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation), with its unrelenting privacy agenda---and strategic location, right across the street from the Dirksen Senate Building.

While acknowledging the importance of this book for its concentration on the role of civil society in reforming the national security establishment, one can quibble about certain conclusions reached by Scott. She states that the apex of the neo-progressive movement was 1978 with passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but I would suggest that the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 is even more important, given its broader mandate of ante facto reporting to Congress that is required for all the intelligence agencies. Scott notes, further, that the election of Ronald Reagan “marked the end of intelligence reform” (178). More accurately, the Reagan years were a hiatus. The Clinton Administration focused on intelligence reform with its backing of the Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence (1995-1996);5 and, in 2004, Congress passed the far-reaching Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created a new office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI)--a weaker position than it should have been, but nonetheless a step toward improving the organizational integration of the spy services.6 Moreover, in light of the revelations about CIA torture, secret prisons, and extraordinary renditions in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, plus the controversial bulk data collections against American citizens engaged in by the NSA, the national security reform movement has sputtered to life again.

As significant as civil society can be in the pursuit of democratic reforms, its influence must be weighed in comparison to other forces in American politics. In the case of the Church Committee, for example, Halperin and others aided the thinking of members and staff about reform; however, the heavy lifting was done inside the Committee’s walls. Reforms emerged as Committee members debated the issues and as the staff came up with position papers and policy options, most often thought of by the lawmakers and their staff,

5 See Loch K. Johnson, The Threat on the Horizon: An Inside Account of America’s Search for Security After the

Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

6 See Michael Allen, Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013).


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not so by much outside lobbyists (although sometimes these currents intermingled). Without a doubt, Hersh’s reporting on CIA domestic spying, coupled with the horrors revealed in the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, did much more to shape the thinking and the report writing of the Church Committee than groups like CNSS. Lawmakers are not as easily buffeted by outside influences as is sometimes thought; they have a strong Burkean streak, too.

Scott buys into the argument that Frank Church was motivated largely by his presidential ambitions. As someone who was with him virtually every day of the inquiry in 1975-1976, I do not believe that is correct. The Chairman was deeply involved in the investigative topics that most interested him, especially CIA covert actions, the assassination plots, and the NSA’s interception of international communications sent and received by American citizens (Operation SHAMROCK). When it came time to probe into FBI domestic intelligence activities, he allowed Senator Mondale---who was much more experienced in this aspect of intelligence---to lead the effort. Much to the anguish of the individuals promoting his presidential candidacy, Senator Church spent little time worrying about the approaching primaries of 1976; he was too busy with his Committee’s work and other Senate obligations.

These objections aside, Scott has written a fine study on the tensions between the national security apparatus in the United States and those groups and individuals who have tried valiantly to ensure the government doesn’t trample on civil liberties in the process. Four other readers offer their thoughts here about her findings.

Professor Michael Bowen underscores how the public interest movement during the Watergate and Vietnam War eras---Scott’s ‘civil society’ of journalists, pressure groups, lobbyists and think tanks---helped rally a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill in favor of pushing back against the expanding surveillance state. Bowen notes that this coalition of lawmakers partial to civil liberties enacted such important measures as the Freedom of Information Act (1967); the Privacy Act (1974); and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978). On the intelligence side, I would add the Hughes-Ryan Act (1974) that placed restrictions on CIA covert actions; and the Intelligence Oversight Acts of 1980 and 1991 that required reporting to the congressional Intelligence Committees on a wide range of espionage activities---in advance of their implementation. This ante facto reporting mandate represented a major breakthrough in accountability over the previous ex post facto standard. Vital, too, was the creation of permanent standing oversight committees for intelligence on the Hill: the SSCI and HPSCI. Without public interest groups---the ‘neo-progressives,’ as Scott sometimes labels them---helping to draft legislation and bucking up the resolve of lawmakers, these statues may not have passed. That is the key story Scott tells.

Professor Lori Clune emphasizes how the overreaching by the executive branch in the conduct of domestic spying was curbed only because the Congress and public interest groups were willing to work together as a shield against the government’s Orwellian excesses. Clune also captures the lamentable failure of the NSA to learn from its embarrassments during the Church Committee investigation. Pilloried at that time for its domestic spying and improper reading of communications sent abroad by American citizens, or received from overseas, the NSA nonetheless resorted to its old behavior in 2002 by again engaging in warrantless wiretaps, this time in clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. As she puts it, “Everything old is new again!”

Professor Thomas Devine notes how intelligence excesses are often correlated with perceived crises. “As the urban crisis grew more acute, the perceived need for more information grew apace,” he writes. Tapping into


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another important hypothesis, he also observes a correlation between advances in technology and the expanding use of these inventions for surveillance purposes. The Justice Department in the 1960s, he observes, “used the latest in computer technologies to implement a nationwide catalogue of dossiers . . . ” A “craving” for data and factual information began to outweigh the commitment of executive branch officials to civil liberties. What may have been legitimate intelligence gathering, at first, soon turned into an inappropriate use of surveillance power, as the data became a source of information “to pursue political enemies.” Devine points to a crowning irony: the government tells us “. . . that only by enhancing the power of the state to infringe on our privacy can our civil liberties be insured.” This is a tradeoff citizens must resist and participation in the reform groups of civil society has been, and continues to be, an important response.

Professor Kathryn Olmsted, who has written an intriguing book on the Church Committee,7 offers a perspective that warrants a longer introduction. She believes Scott overstates her case that the “right-to-know” movement succeeded in reining in the government’s national security apparatus. Olmsted is skeptical about whether the new laws and oversight committees have made a difference. She quotes Senator Tower to the effect that the Church Committee (in her words) “destroyed the CIA for years.” Or in Tower’s own words, “shattered” CIA moral and “betrayed” intelligence professionals. She also quotes the first President Bush, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) at the time of the Church Committee and no friend of that panel, that the inquiry “unleashed a bunch of untutored little jerks.” (Although Olmsted doesn’t mention this, President Bush was referring to the Committee’s staff; I doubt, however, that his opinion of the Democratic senators on the panel was much higher.) Vice President Dick Cheney joins Professor Olmsted’s list of Church Committee haters. She might also have brought in former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane of Iran-Contra infamy and the late Tom Clancy, the Chicken Little author of Cold War fiction who probably viewed détente as a rare tropical disease. Both often went out of their way to excoriate the 1975 Senate investigation.

It would be good to have seen some remarks from high-profile Church Committee supporters presented here. This list could have included statements from every one of the DCIs since George H.W. Bush (with the exception of William J. Casey of the Reagan years---another architect of the Iran-Contra scandal). She does quote L. Britt Snider, like me one of those “untutored little jerks” on the Church Committee staff in 1975 (misidentified here as a CIA in-house historian, rather than the Agency’s Inspector General he became after his Church Committee service). Snider is a proponent of intelligence accountability, if only (as he puts it) because it is useful to have overseers on the Hill “who understand and are able to defend the Agency’s interest’s.”8 Former DCI, and later Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates has offered a better reason. He writes, “. . . some awfully crazy schemes might well have been approved had everyone present not known and expected hard questions, debate, and criticism from the Hill. And when, on a few occasions, Congress was kept in the dark, and such schemes did proceed, it was nearly always to the lasting regret of the Presidents

7 Kathryn Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

8 Olmstead includes this quotation in her review and offers the following citation: L. Britt Snider, The Agency and the Hill: CIA’s Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2008), 42.


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involved.”9 Prior to the Church Committee, no such questioning, debating, and criticism took place in Congress.

Olmsted also makes the argument that the efforts of the neo-progressives and the Church Committee had the end result of strengthening “anti-statist enemies on the extreme Right,” in part because “Senator Church shied away from implications of his investigation.” On the latter point, she draws upon author Rick Perlstein (a right-winger), without ever explaining in what manner the Committee Chairman supposedly “shied away.” In fact, the Church Committee reforms amount to the difference between night and day when it comes to intelligence accountability: darkness before 1975, followed by a much greater degree of transparency after 1975. She argues further that “certainly since 2001, and arguably since 1981, Congress and civic groups have had little success in continuing to rein in the presidency or the state.” This ignores the impressive congressional investigation of the Iran-Contra affair in 1987; the CIA Inspector General Act of 1989; the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1991; the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004; the Senate torture report of 2014; and ethical and procedural improvements in CIA drone targeting, among other examples of robust intelligence oversight.

Yes, the fear generated by the 9/11 attacks, by the scare tactics of the second Bush Administration that drew the United States into an invasion of Iraq in 2003, and by photographs of the medieval methods adopted by the terrorist organization ISIS have led to a retreat in some quarters of support for intelligence accountability. Unfortunately, fear has often led to an abandonment of democratic principles, as when the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration rounded up Japanese-Americans for internment camps during the Second World War. Even now, though, civic groups and key lawmakers have keep up the struggle to preserve the Church Committee reforms, which remain largely in intact. Moreover, the recent NSA and CIA excesses---bulk data collection against American citizens, secret Agency prisons abroad, renditions, and ‘harsh interrogation techniques’---have led to a growing number of calls for the establishment of a new Church Committee. The civil liberties coalition has had many victories during the past five decades and it is still alive and well in America today.

Professor Olmsted faults Scott’s analysis for failing “to acknowledge how far the neo-progressives fell short of their goals.” Instead, the deficiencies in intelligence accountability can be traced to the second Bush Administration for trying to unravel the national security reforms, through a hyping of fears about global terrorism and a bypassing of key laws [such as the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] that Congress and the neo-progressives had put in place. Olmsted has written that “the secret actions of the government are the real enemies of democracy.”10 That statement carries considerable truth---though, of course, certain secret actions are necessary, such as the clandestine recruitment of agents within ISIS to warn the world about impending terrorist attacks. Civic society, along with the internal accountability provided by the Church Committee, the Iran-Contra Committee, the Aspin-Brown Commission, the Kean Commission on 9/11, and a host of other reform-minded inquiries, have done much to reduce the unwarranted secret actions that concern Olmsted. These champions of democratic principles deserve the credit Scott gives them

9 Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 559.

10 Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democrat, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 2011), 239-240.


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for past victories, as well as our wishes of Godspeed for the future battles they will encounter with overzealous officials of the surveillance state.

Participants:

Katherine Scott is Associate Historian, U.S. Senate Historical Office. She earned a Ph.D. in American History from Temple University. In addition to Reining in the State, she is the author of “A Safety Valve: The Truman Committee’s Oversight during World War II,” in Colton Campbell and David Auerswald, eds., Congress and Civil-Military Relations (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2015), and “Nixon and Dissent,” in Melvin Small, ed., A Companion to Richard M. Nixon (New York: Blackwell Wiley, 2011).

Loch K. Johnson is the Regents Professor of International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He served as assistant to the chairman on the Church Committee, staff director of the Subcommittee on Intelligence on the House Intelligence Committee, and assistant to the chairman of the Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence. His latest books include The Threat of the Horizon: An Inside Account of America’s Search for Security After the Cold War (Oxford, 2011), National Security Intelligence: Secret Operations in Defense of the Democracies (Polity, 2012), and American Foreign Policy and the Challenges of World Leadership: Power, Principle, and the Constitution (Oxford, 2015). In 2012, the consortium of universities in the Southeast Conference selected Professor Johnson as the inaugural recipient of its “Professor of the Year” Award; and, in 2014, the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association presented him with its “Distinguished Scholar” Prize.

Michael Bowen is currently a Visiting Assistant {rofessor of history at John Carroll University. He specializes in political and cultural history. His first book The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2011. He is currently working on a book-length examination of the Watergate Babies, the seventy-five freshman Democrats elected to the House of Representatives in 1974, and their impact on post-1960s liberalism.

Lori Clune is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Fresno and holds a doctorate in history from the University of California, Davis. Lori has written pieces for American Communist History and History News Network, and contributed a chapter to the upcoming Wiley Blackwell A Companion to Ronald Reagan. She is currently working on a manuscript under consideration with Oxford University Press tentatively titled A Contentious Crusade: Executing the Rosenbergs in a Cold War World.

Thomas Devine, Professor of History at CSU Northridge, received his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill in 2000. He is the author of Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism (UNC Press, 2013) which received the 2014 Harry S Truman Book Award. He teaches courses in U.S. foreign policy, economic history, Cold War America, and 20th century youth culture. His current project examines youth culture during the 1950s and is tentatively titled The View from Under the Desk: Growing up in Cold War America.

Kathryn Olmsted is Professor and Chair of the history department at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of three books: Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (North Carolina, 1996); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (North Carolina, 2002); and Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009). Her


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next book, Right Out of California: The Origins of Modern Conservatism, will come out with the New Press next year.


Review by Michael Bowen, John Carroll University

n 1972, Common Cause founder John Gardner published In Common Cause, a manifesto for his fledgling organization. One of the most recognizable leaders in the public interest movement of the early 1970s, Gardner argued that the government of the United States no longer served the interests of the

people. He wrote that “[i]f the nation fails, we all fail. And we share the conviction that as citizens we have every right to raise hell when we see injustice done, or the public interest betrayed, or the public process corrupted.”1 Gardner’s declaration was a call to arms for the citizenry to regain control of the state.

Though scholars have studied the public interest phenomenon generally, they have largely ignored its relationship to political development.2 Katherine Scott’s Reining in the State corrects this disparity. Her book presents a compelling account of the “unheralded heroes” who advocated for government accountability and transparency in matters of national security and domestic surveillance (2). Though at times too narrowly-focused on the specific individuals she is examining, Scott’s fascinating tale reveals how a small group of men took on the Herculean task of restoring legislative and judicial oversight to an executive branch run amok.

The campaign to check the national security state was born out of the infamous credibility gap under President Lyndon B. Johnson and reached maturity during the Nixon administration. Federal officials concerned with urban unrest, Black Power, and the antiwar movement turned the nation’s intelligence apparatus inward. Scott’s early chapters use National Archives and Congressional sources to show how these decisions were made, as well as their repercussions on civil liberties. The FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance of civil rights and antiwar activists is well-known. Scott digs deeper into Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s attempt to use military intelligence to predict future riots and Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s creation of a central data clearinghouse to coordinate a response to them. Though perhaps well-meaning, those who carried out these orders were steeped in a Cold-war dichotomy and frequently equated dissent with subversion. At best, wiretaps and field surveillance skirted the borders of legality. Clear-cut violations of fundamental rights occurred often and were excused as necessary in the name of national security.

As revelations of domestic intelligence gathering trickled out from whistle-blowers and investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh and Daniel Schorr, those on the frontline of the public interest movement capitalized on the resulting outrage. Their activity led to several Supreme Court decisions reaffirming the First and Fourth Amendments and clarifying the separation of powers. On Capitol Hill, they helped rally a bipartisan coalition behind several landmark pieces of legislation, including the Freedom of Information Act of 1967 (FOIA), the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). FOIA and FISA bookend Scott’s work. She is most concerned with their legislative histories and provides a

1 John Gardner, In Common Cause: Citizen Action and how it Works (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1972),

22.

2 The notable exception is the effort to make government more responsive to environmental concerns. See, for example, Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Robert Gottlieb, Fording the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington DC: Island Press, 1993); Richard N. L. Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Chad Montrie, To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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fairly comprehensive take on their passage. She does not spend a great deal of time assessing their implementation or effectiveness, but concludes that, while not perfect by any means, these provisions helped to roll back the worst excesses of the state.

What sets Scott’s work apart is her emphasis on ‘civil society,’ a shorthand term for the journalists, interest groups, lobbyists, and think tanks that contribute to political discourse and public policy formation. While fairly common in political and environmental history, the role of civil society is often overlooked in the literature on the Cold War, especially in regards to intelligence gathering. Scott puts it front and center. Her subjects include Aryeh Neier and his staff at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Morton Halperin of the Center for National Security Studies, and Christopher Pyle, an ex-Army intelligence officer who exposed the Defense Department’s program of domestic surveillance in 1970. These individuals and organizations were outside of the national security state but had a deep desire to reform it. Some, like Pyle and Halperin, had participated in its rise and were converted to avowed critics. Others like Neier, Common Cause, and numerous journalists thought domestic spying, impenetrable secrecy, and a lack of official accountability threatened the Republic.

The analysis is strongest when the author establishes the connections between civil society and members of Congress. Here, Scott uses key committee chairs Senator Sam Ervin and Representatives John Moss and William Moorhead to advance the narrative. These men were responsible for drafting, pushing through, or revising the bills mentioned above. The author’s deep research into the ACLU archives demonstrates that public interest groups worked in concert with Congress. For example, in 1970 the ACLU filed lawsuits, launched a media campaign, and lined up witnesses for Congressional hearings into the Army’s domestic surveillance program. Working with Ervin, members of his Congressional staff, and Pyle, the pressure the organization brought to bear led the Department of Defense to discontinue the program that year. This coalition held together through the mid-1970s and played important roles on both the legislative and judicial fronts. Scott arranges her chapters around the passage of these laws. Emphasis on a handful of key events leaves the narrative a bit disjointed at times, but overall the story holds together well.

While the new information adds a great deal to our understanding of political development in this period, the major criticism of the book is that at times it seems like the events take place in a vacuum. The broader context beyond the specific organizations and Congressional actors is largely absent. For example, chapter one begins with Russ Wiggins, the managing editor of the Washington Post, and his crusade against government secrecy in the early 1950s. Through his role at the Post and his membership in the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Wiggins led a campaign against Executive Order 10290, Harry Truman’s guidelines for the classification of government materials. This is an understudied occurrence for sure, but the story is told almost exclusively from the perspective of the journalists defending the ‘Right to Know’ against unnecessary censorship. Absent is the larger fight over the ‘Garrison State;’ the fear held by some conservatives and civil libertarians that the creation of the Cold-war security apparatus would impinge on basic freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The bulk of Scott’s narrative is about civil society fighting against the same adversary a decade and a half later, yet itdoes not mention this important precursor. Linking the narrow concerns of


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journalists to this overarching debate found in Michael Hogan’s A Cross of Iron would give Scott a stronger foundation for her study.3

When Scott reaches the 1970s, she is more sensitive to overarching trends, but still more could be done to connect her subjects to the political moment. Scott alludes to participatory democracy in her introduction but her account is purely elite driven. Aside from a discussion of a handful of constituent letters, it is unclear in the book how the average American processed the news that their government was spying on them. Furthermore, Scott fails to connect her subjects with groups like Common Cause, whose papers are cited in the bibliography. Gardner’s organization played a supporting role on the national security front, but was incredibly successful in its quest to restrict the political uses of other agencies and unchecked campaign funds. A bit more information on the civilian side of the public interest movement, even as background, would round out the story.

These criticisms should not take away from the overall project by any means. Reining in the State is both timely and important. Published in the year when Edward Snowden’s highly-publicized leaking of classified National Security Agency documents made him a household name, Scott’s book details how a previous generation of lawmakers struggled to square technological innovations with the protection of civil liberties. Though concerns over computerized databanks and unauthorized wiretaps seem quaint when compared to the sheer volume of e-mail communication and locative data the National Security Agency allegedly captures on a daily basis, they were no less real or threatening to those living in the 1960s. Scott’s work could serve as a road map for contemporary lawmakers and civil society groups looking once again to restrain America’s domestic intelligence networks.

3 Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).


Review by Lori Clune, California State University, Fresno

“In The Sacred Name Of Security”1

syndicated columnist criticized the federal government for investigating journalists who were seeking out information the government wanted to keep secret. He charged that he was being wiretapped, “in the sacred name of security” (22). This could be a critique from 2013, but it’s not. He does not refer

to the July 2013 debate to add privacy protections to National Security Administration (NSA) programs. The author, Joseph Alsop, Jr., was complaining about transparency issues in the Dwight Eisenhower administration; the year was 1955.

Katherine A. Scott tackles the overlapping issues of national security, privacy, and government transparency in her deeply researched and engaging work, Reining in the State. Scott succeeds in adding historical perspective, and fresh voices, to this complex story. Her work is a must-read for anyone struggling to understand the current debate over executive power and national security.

Broadly speaking, Scott’s “book is a history of the movement to rein in the state during the 1970s” (2). While she covers the 1950s through creation of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 1978, she correctly acknowledges that many of these struggles “between the White House and the press” (14) and “between legislative and executive” (20) have a history as long as that of the country itself. Certainly issues of security have, as Scott points out, gathered in importance in the years since World War I, reaching a fever pitch during the Cold War when security issues bled over into political considerations that caused “secrecy [to] spread like cancer” (22).

Scott acknowledges that she “chronicles the efforts of a group of unheralded heroes who battled to reinvigorate judicial, legislative, and civic oversight of the executive branch to prevent abuses by government agencies in the future” (2). The author labels this bipartisan group of activists, who embraced reform over revolution, “neo-progressives” (4). Some names are familiar: Pentagon staffer Daniel Ellsberg, long-time presidential advisor Clark Clifford, Senators Sam Ervin, Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale, journalist Seymour Hersh, CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, and Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Other are far less known. Scott paints compelling portraits of these individuals and unsung heroes, for example: the Center for National Security Studies and Committee for Public Justice’s Mark Halperin, Congressman William Moorhead, House Post Office and Civil Service Committee chair John Emerson Moss, Jr., ACLU executive director Aryeh Neier, Senator Gaylord Nelson, Washington Monthly publisher Charles Peters, Army Captain Christopher Pyle, Chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Russ Wiggins, and the undisclosed members of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.

Scott, who is Assistant Historian with the U.S. Senate, makes clear that any success to curb government overreach was the product of Congress working with dedicated individuals in public interest groups. Subsequently she provides “…a more complex picture of policy reform than examinations of congressional hearings alone would allow” (149). Ironically, one of the unsung spokesmen for the reform movement was American editorial cartoonist Herbert Lawrence Block. With his spot-on political cartoons, which surely

1 A slightly different version of this review was published on H-Diplo in September 2013. http://www.h-

net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39073

A

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39073

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39073


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influenced countless Americans, sprinkled throughout the book, the reader is left wishing Scott had taken a moment to discuss Herblock’s background and significant editorial cartooning career. Scott does sketch out the motivations of the government officials responsible – sometimes unintentionally – for such government abuses, i.e., Attorneys General Ramsey Clark and John Mitchell, CIA Director William Colby, Senator John McClellan, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and of course FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Richard Nixon.

Scott begins with the story of the glacial pace that plagued the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). While producing a slender volume, the author succeeds in clearly explaining in captivating detail the complexities of policy development. The “right to know” (12) movement found spokespeople in journalism and Congress. What started out as an investigation into the Harry Truman administration’s dismissal of federal postal workers suspected of being communists evolved into an effort to pull back the “paper curtain”--or censorship--imposed by the executive branch in the name of national security (13). The demand for government transparency gathered steam through the 1960s, especially when confronted with Lyndon Johnson's policies in Vietnam. Success came in the form of the passage of FOIA, which Johnson reluctantly signed in 1966. Using FOIA, Congress began investigating “government invasions of privacy including wiretapping, letter opening, and other forms of surveillance” (32).

In chapters two and three, Scott goes beyond the well-documented abuses of the FBI--including COINTELPRO--to explore the intelligence-gathering operations of the Departments of Justice and Defense that heretofore have “escaped public scrutiny” (45).2 With the creation of the Interdivisional Information Unit within the Justice Department in December 1967, Attorney General Ramsey Clark hoped to gather its own intelligence and “rely less on Hoover’s FBI” (45) in combating escalating urban violence. While Clark consistently opposed “wiretapping and electronic surveillance at the federal level,” (35) concern about escalating crime and rioting prompted Congress to take matters into its own hands and pass legislation that, among other measures, legalized wiretapping and electronic surveillance. Also in 1967, Johnson ordered Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara “to assume more of the burden of managing and executing the administration’s civil disturbance strategy” (51). In response, McNamara oversaw the creation of the CONUS (Continental United States) Intelligence Branch, which “centralized control for army intelligence under the Army Intelligence Command” (55). By the end of the Johnson administration the Justice Department “presided over a grand intelligence clearinghouse with extraordinary new capacities for data collection and retrieval” (50). Meanwhile, the Army was aggressively gathering intelligence to find a Cold War link between domestic unrest and international Communism, sparking the concern of some army officers.

Disturbed by domestic security operations of Justice and Defense, an “unlikely coalition” (94) of organizations and individuals intent on transparency and reform came together in the early 1970s. Scott explores this coalition in chapters four, five, and six, and its successes in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In 1974, Congress passed amendments adding more teeth to FOIA and approved the Privacy Act. Scott’s discussion of Nixon’s false effort to curb government over-reach--the Domestic Council Committee on the Right of Privacy--highlights the President’s ironic and “laughable” (116) political ploy. When the Supreme

2 Among others, see David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York:

W. W. Norton, 1981); Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Alan Theoharis, The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).


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Court refuted Nixon’s claim of “executive privilege” as justification for defying a subpoena--a claim Senator Ervin described as “poppycock”--it seemed to sound a death knell for abuse of executive power (118). FOIA revisions and a seemingly comprehensive Privacy Act--along with well-documented congressional investigations of the FBI, CIA, and NSA--prompted some to label 1975 the “Year of Intelligence” (149). Scott concludes with a description of the complex compromise that was necessary in order to create the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). The act authorized the creation of a “secret courts…to review electronic surveillance warrant applications” (162).

The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan “marked the end of intelligence reform” (178), but neo-progressives were comforted by the safeguards they had managed to put in place. Perhaps they did not grasp, as Scott provocatively observes, that hers “is also a story of how these reformers’ efforts, ironically, had the long-term impact of legitimating the national security state” (7). And once legitimized, abuses were all-but-certain to resurface.

Scott uses extensive archival sources including journalistic accounts, progressive organization documents, and a wide representation of pertinent government archives. The book’s organization is clear and logical and her writing is smooth, concise, and engaging. And her topic is so timely. Scott admits that other scholars will need “to bring some of the issues that I have explored here into the twenty-first century” (184), yet it is challenging to engage this work without constantly being brought back to the present. This is especially true when one reads: “famously, the NSA refused to cooperate with Church committee investigators until the Times broke a story alleging that the NSA eavesdropped on the electronic conversations of American citizens.… The committee discovered that the agency had, with the full cooperation of telecommunication companies, monitored international telegrams since 1947” (144). Everything old is new again.

Scott’s assertion that when the George W. Bush administration “circumvented and revised FISA, stonewalled FOIA requests, and demonstrated little regard for the Privacy Act…[it did] not undermine the significance of the reform movement of the 1970s” (183), is a bit optimistic. Revelations about the actions of the Barack Obama administration, particularly those of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, demonstrate that technological advancements and an ongoing concern with national security continue to challenge the United States. Snowden exposed “vast domestic surveillance programs that vacuumed up data on phone calls, e-mails, and other electronic communications.”3 And changes to FISA in 2008 undermined judicial oversight, asking judges to “approve broad categories of surveillance” rather than “individual surveillance requests,” leaving “little leeway to reject proposed surveillance programs.”4 One wonders what Scott’s neo-progressives would think of the label the Washington Post recently applied to America’s current surveillance state -- “unaccountable.”5

3 David A. Fahrenthold, “With NSA Revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s Vague Warnings About privacy Finally

Become Clear,” The Washington Post, 28 July 2013.

4 Timothy B. Lee, “Obama Says the NSA Has Had Plenty of Oversight. Here’s Why He’s Wrong,” The Washington Post, 7 June 2013.

5 Ibid.


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Results of the 1970’s reforms may, as Scott asserts, give “new tools with which to pry into the state’s dark recesses and expose its secrets” (178). If so, then the New York Times’ recent assertion that public opinion is now primed for “a repeat of a scandal-reform cycle from almost four decades ago”6 is spot-on. We can only hope so, since secrecy is surely toxic. As Kathryn Olmsted cautions: “Since the First World War, officials of the U.S. government have…engaged in conspiracies and used the cloak of national security to hide their actions from the American people…they have promoted official conspiracy theories, sometimes demonstrably false ones, for their own purposes. They have assaulted civil liberties by spying on their domestic enemies. If antigovernment conspiracy theorists get the details wrong--and they often do--they get the basic issue right: it is the secret actions of the government that are the real enemies of democracy.”7

Katherine Scott rightly puts ‘the people’ back into the story of national security reform in her important and timely book. In highlighting what scholars have largely overlooked and exposing “how the citizenry’s distrust of and anger with their government resulted in a large-scale and largely successful campaign to limit the power and reach of the national security state” (69), she may be providing the most provocative lesson of all. It appears in 2013 that it is the power of the people that once again must strive for a more transparent and accountable democracy.

6 Scott Shane, “Challenges to U.S. Intelligence Agencies Recall Senate Inquiry of ‘70s,” The New York Times,

26 July 2013, A13.

7 Kathryn Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 2011), 239-240.


Review by Thomas W. Devine, California State University, Northridge

atherine A. Scott’s Reining in the State sets out to tell the story of several ‘neo-progressive’ individuals and organizations fighting for government transparency and against domestic surveillance of innocent citizens. Unlike previous accounts that have focused on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and

the threats the Bureau posed to privacy and the right to dissent, Scott’s book examines the ‘data collection’ efforts of the Departments of Justice and Defense. It also calls our attention to the efforts of ‘civil society’ groups that played a crucial role in lobbying elected officials to pass a series of laws that enhanced oversight, protected privacy, and limited domestic surveillance. Acknowledging that the Watergate scandal drew national attention to the dangers of executive branch overreach and government spying in the name of ‘national security,’ Scott reminds us that these issues long predated the Nixon administration and that many unheralded heroes had worked tirelessly through the 1950s and 1960s to educate the public about the need to ‘rein in’ the state’s power to censor and control information. When Watergate provided them their political moment, these activists were ready to advance a legislative agenda aimed at strengthening democracy by curtailing unchecked government power. Although the post-Watergate reforms did not prove to be as sweeping as good government advocates might have liked, Scott nonetheless concludes that theirs is a tale of triumph, albeit perhaps a limited one. This, then, is a story with a (reasonably) happy ending, and Scott tells it well. Reining in the State, however, has other stories to tell – of unintended consequences, staggering incompetence, and confounding ironies – and, to me, these stories proved to be just as, if not more, compelling than the central narrative. In chapter two, Scott recounts the efforts of Attorney General Ramsay Clark to find out “what’s going on in the black community.” (34) Distrustful, even disdainful of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and his secretive surveillance of Civil Rights leaders, Clark set up an alternative information gathering system, the “Summer Project.” He hoped the system would provide the Justice Department and local police forces with useful, unbiased intelligence that would enable authorities to prevent (or at least respond effectively) to urban unrest. Aware of the potential for abuse inherent in a system that surveilled the inhabitants of black ghettos, Clark put the “intelligence clearinghouse under his direct watch” (35). As the urban crisis grew more acute, however, the perceived need for more information grew apace. Clark established the Interdivisional Information Unit (IDIU) within the Justice Department to coordinate surveillance efforts. As Scott makes clear, the Attorney General’s motives were hardly nefarious – he genuinely supported the Civil Rights movement, considered himself a staunch defender of civil liberties, and was committed to improving conditions in poor black neighborhoods. Still, Scott notes, “Without establishing a system of checks and balances or even parameters for intelligence gathering, Clark encouraged the development of a vast surveillance apparatus” that provided intelligence “without regard for how that intelligence was obtained” (46-47). Convinced that “technology could and should advance modern society,” Clark “used the latest in computer technologies to implement a nationwide catalogue of dossiers that, intentionally or not, included persons with no connection to urban riots” (49). Clark’s IDIU, Scott concludes, “was a logical manifestation of liberal conviction that the state could ameliorate society’s ills if managed by technocrats drawing on the latest technologies and gathering all the necessary information. Well-informed technocrats, Clark believed, could make well-informed decisions in the best interests of the nation and its citizens.” The unintended consequences that resulted from such “unflagging faith in government and those who managed it” were not long in coming. (50) The Nixon administration would soon employ Clark’s formidable apparatus – its power now enhanced by the Safe Streets Act of 1968 – to pursue political enemies. In scrutinizing the origins of the IDIU, Scott reminds us that the growth of the surveillance state was not entirely attributable to J. Edgar

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Hoover’s FBI. When they let their craving for ‘data’ and ‘factual information’ outweigh their commitment to civil liberties, dedicated liberals like Clark played a part as well. The social upheaval of the late 1960s also brought the U.S. army into the domestic surveillance game. Scott’s account of Lieutenant General William P. Yarborough’s application of counterinsurgency tactics to combat civil disorder in the United States makes for delightfully entertaining reading. According to Scott, Yarborough “could not believe that the spontaneous eruption of dissent, revolution, and mass protest in the United States could be possible without the funding and organizational capacities of the international communist movement” (56). To Yarborough, violence and looting in Detroit constituted an “insurgency” and was to be dealt with as such. “There we were,” one officer later recalled, “plotting power plants, radio stations, and armories on the situation maps when we should have been locating the liquor and color-television stores instead” (56). Nonetheless, Yarborough remained convinced that rioters “were trained in Havana or Peking or some damned place,” so army intelligence resources flowed freely into efforts to substantiate his dubious theory. (58) College campuses also drew the attention of counterintelligence officers, where, one explained, they spent time “chaperoning college students…taking part in their discussions and monitoring their private lives” as well as investigating drunken brawls. (63) Scott concludes such efforts were a “waste of army intelligence resources,” (63) yet given the amount of resources made available and the even more serious damage to civil liberties that could have been done with them, it may have been for the best that the money was squandered on such absurd diversions. The army’s ill-advised effort to quash domestic unrest using techniques designed to combat foreign foes does raise an interesting issue, however. As Scott observes, for fifty years “historians of foreign relations have developed a rich literature that explores how domestic imperatives (economic growth and the spread of democracy, for example) have driven American foreign policy” (66). Yet in this case, specific tactics meant to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives were employed to achieve domestic policy goals. Historians might wish to investigate further this ‘cross-pollination’ of Cold War initiatives.1 If the stories of Ramsay Clark and William Yarborough highlight the themes of unintended consequences and wasteful incompetence, the public reaction to the national security state and to the reformers’ attempts to rein it in present confounding ironies. Activists valiantly fought the establishment to defend the public’s ‘right to know.’ Yet, as Scott acknowledges, had the public known about the various secret surveillance programs the state initiated to monitor and limit dissent during the late 1960s, “a majority of Americans likely would have supported them.” Indeed, in a 1970 poll, 76 percent said they “did not support the First Amendment right to assemble and dissent from government policies” and “a majority did not even support the freedom of the press” (68). These attitudes changed swiftly in the wake of Watergate, yet the outrage against government surveillance soon diminished – as the privacy advocates themselves predicted it would. This raises troubling questions about the consistency of ‘the people’s’ commitment to civil liberties and a democratic political culture. Scott observes a second irony in her introduction – the efforts of those who sought to stop repressive government power “enlarged the state, simultaneously legitimating and normalizing domestic security programs. Reformers built up the state in order to restrain state power” (7), Though this paradox might not detract from the reformers’ victories of the 1970s, it should encourage us to examine carefully the trade-offs we make today. It would seem – or so we are told – that only by enhancing the power of the state to infringe

1 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era Revised and Updated Edition

(New York: Basic Books, 1999), for example, explores how the foreign policy of “containment” came to be applied in the domestic setting of the American family.


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on our privacy can our civil liberties be insured. As we continue to grapple with such contradictions, studies like Scott’s will be invaluable in providing historical context and in demonstrating that the growth of state power is historically contingent and not an irreversible process.


Review by Kathryn Olmsted, University of California, Davis

t the time, the 1970s seemed to be the decade that everyone wanted to forget. As Time magazine said, “Nobody is apt to look back on the 1970s as the good old days.”1

The 1970s appeared forgotten in historical scholarship as well. Who wanted to study the period of the doldrums between the 1960s (which offered war, assassinations, sex, drugs, and rock and roll) and the 1980s (the era of Reykjavik, Iran-contra, and the triumph of conservatism)? Even the titles of books about the 1970s were defensive: It Seemed like Nothing Happened, according to Peter Carroll (while he argued that quite a lot did), or Something Happened, by Edward Berkowitz.2 Philip Jenkins suggested why scholars avoided the 1970s with the title of his book on the era, Decade of Nightmares.3 But recently, scholars have revived the study of the 1970s and invested the decade with immense historical significance. It was, they say, the hinge decade of the postwar era: the moment when Everything Changed, or perhaps Everything Could Have Changed. The best work on the decade – Rick Perlstein’s Invisible Bridge, Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, Laura Kalman’s Right Star Rising, Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies, and some of the essays in Schulman and Julian Zelizer’s edited collection Rightward Bound – suggest the lost promise of the 1970s.4 It was a moment of possibility for dramatic policy change – in energy, or foreign affairs, or health care. And then it was gone. Katherine A. Scott has a different take on the 1970s. In her view, the late 1960s through the late 1970s was a moment of triumph for liberals, a time when open-government advocates rose up and successfully “battled to reinvigorate judicial, legislative, and civic oversight of the executive branch to prevent abuses by government agencies in the future” (2). Reining in the State is a history of the right-to-know movement, from the campaign to pass the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966 to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. It is, in Scott’s telling, a story of the triumph of democracy. Scott valorizes the “unheralded heroes” (2) of the transparency-in-government movement. There are plenty of heralded heroes in the book as well: Senators Sam Ervin (D-NC) and Frank Church (D-ID), Congressman

1 Quoted in Peter Carroll, It Seemed like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s

(New York: Henry Holt, 1984), xxi.

2 Edward Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

3 Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the ‘60s and the Making of ‘80s America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

4 Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2012); Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980 (New York: Norton, 2010); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002); Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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Otis Pike (D-NY), and journalist Daniel Schorr all receive due credit for their efforts to expose governmental abuses of power. But these men have received extensive treatment in other books. Scott thus correctly focuses on the lesser known advocates of openness in government. Congressman John Moss, a Sacramento Democrat, spent years working for freedom of information legislation before the passage of the first FOIA. Congressman William Moorhead, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, led the campaign to expand the act in 1974, after Watergate generated new momentum for transparency laws. Scott also details the contributions of civic groups and individual activists. Christopher Pyle, the counterintelligence officer who revealed the Army’s domestic spying program, and Morton Halperin, the former Henry Kissinger aide whose home phone was illegally wiretapped by the Nixon administration, brought insiders’ perspective to their crusades against government abuse of civil liberties. As executive director of the ACLU, Aryeh Neier focused the nation’s attention on government surveillance. Scott’s contribution is to tell the stories of these men. They combined to promote the principle that “the people have a ‘right to know,’ that transparency strengthens democracy, and that the state cannot be allowed to accumulate unchecked power without impinging on the rights of its citizens” (9). Their legacy includes the creation of permanent House and Senate intelligence committees in 1976 and 1977, as well as FOIA and FISA. But did these laws and oversight committees really make a difference? Scholars and former participants have offered dramatically different answers to this question. Conservatives argue that the reform movement succeeded in its goals – an outcome which, in their view, was a bad thing, because it meant that the intelligence community was hobbled and the government could no longer to protect its citizens. Texas Senator John Tower, for example, charged that the Church Committee, on which he served, destroyed the CIA for years: “Morale was shattered, dedicated intelligence professionals felt betrayed, and there were many resignations from the CIA and other agencies.”5 President George H.W. Bush later alleged that the mid-1970s intelligence investigations had “unleashed a bunch of untutored little jerks” to fetter the intelligence community.6 In 2003, Vice President Richard Cheney told journalists that the Ford administration had seen “the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy,” in part because of the reforms that Scott describes.7 But some historians have contended that the mid-1970s intelligence reforms actually strengthened the national security state by restoring public confidence in secret agencies. John Ranelagh maintains that the intelligence investigations gave democratic sanction to covert action, while Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones argues that “the debate laid the foundation for a new legitimacy” for the CIA.8 The CIA’s in-house historians –

5 John G. Tower, Consequences: A Personal and Political Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 134.

6 Quoted in Kalman, Right Star Rising, 83.

7 Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 58.

8 John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 599; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 195.


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somewhat surprisingly – agree with this interpretation. L. Britt Snider, for example, says that it helps the CIA to have informed overseers “who understand and are able to defend the Agency’s interests.”9 Other scholars maintain that reforms placed on the intelligence agencies were “limited and temporary,” as Laura Kalman has suggested.10 Samuel Walker indicts the public and its representatives in Congress for failing to press for serious constraints on executive authority; “the collapse of public interest in reform,” he writes, “helps to explain the resurgence of presidential power in later years.”11 Perlstein points out that Senator Church shied away from implications of his investigation and thus enabled right-wing politicians like Ronald Reagan to ignore them.12 I have argued in my book Real Enemies that the right-to-know advocates actually exacerbated the public’s loss of faith in government and thus helped their anti-statist enemies on the extreme Right.13 By contrast, Scott contends that the reformers’ campaign to “rein in the state” was successful and ultimately helped to fulfill America’s democratic promise. Though she mentions briefly that the reforms actually strengthened the national security state, her epilogue seems to undercut this analysis. She argues that the FISA, for example, “restrained the ability of the president and, more generally, the executive branch of the federal government from operating independently of democratic oversight and running roughshod over the civil liberties of the American citizenry” (183). Given recent events, that view seems rather optimistic. Scott argues that President George W. Bush’s decisions to ignore FISA and deny FOIA requests “do not undermine the significance of the reform movement of the 1970s” (183). The nation’s laws “are only as good as those citizens and institutions willing to use them,” and after September 11, Americans were not willing to use them – “and understandably so,” she says (184). Perhaps. But perhaps the lesson to take away is that changing the law was a necessary but insufficient step. Certainly since 2001, and arguably since 1981, Congress and civic groups have had little success in continuing to rein in the presidency or the state. Though Scott mentions the George W. Bush administration’s flouting of the laws she celebrates, she does not discuss President Barack Obama’s similar dismissal of openness legislation, despite Obama’s promise to be the more transparent president in history. In 2013, according to the Associated Press, the Obama administration

9 L. Britt Snider, The Agency and the Hill: CIA’s Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004 (Washington, D.C.:

Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2008), 42. See also Michael Warner and J. Kenneth McDonald, U.S. Intelligence Community Reform Since 1947 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2005), iv, 29.

10 Kalman, Right Star Rising, 83.

11 Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 341.

12 Perlstein, Invisible Bridge, 536.

13 Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 164.


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refused a record number of FOIA requests on national security grounds.14 Some openness advocates have labeled him the least transparent president in history.15 Meanwhile, Obama has embraced and expanded George W. Bush’s policy of ordering assassinations of alleged terrorists. The President welcomed photographers into the Situation Room to record his reaction to the raid that led to the assassination of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.16 He personally chooses targets for the CIA’s drone assassins.17 During the investigations of the CIA in the 1970s, top intelligence officials protested that they had no documentary proof that the president had ordered assassinations because they had promised him ‘plausible denial.’ As former CIA Chief Richard Helms testified, “I can’t imagine anybody wanting something in writing saying I have just charged Mr. Jones to go out and shoot Mr. Smith.”18 Such naïve days. Now presidents take it as a point of pride. Scott’s book does an admirable job of telling the story of how civic-minded citizens tried to rein in the national security state in the 1970s, but her analysis fails to acknowledge how far they fell short of their goals.

14 “US cites security more to censor, deny records,” March 16, 2014, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-cites-

security-more-censor-deny-records, accessed September 21, 2014.

15 See Kevin Gosztola, “’Most Transparent Administration Ever’ – Obama Administration Makes Mockery of Open Government,” March 17, 2014, http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/03/17/the-obama-administration-the-most-transparent-administration-ever-makes-mockery-of-open-government/, accessed September 21, 2014; Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History,” March 27, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/27/barack_obama_the_least_transparent_president, accessed September 21, 2014.

16 See “Rock Center with Brian Williams,” December 27, 2014, http://www.nbcnews.com/video/rock-center/47272581#47272581, accessed September 21, 2014.

17 “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times, May 29, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&., accessed September 21, 2014.

18 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 151.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-cites-security-more-censor-deny-records

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-cites-security-more-censor-deny-records

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/03/17/the-obama-administration-the-most-transparent-administration-ever-makes-mockery-of-open-government/

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/03/17/the-obama-administration-the-most-transparent-administration-ever-makes-mockery-of-open-government/

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/27/barack_obama_the_least_transparent_president

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/rock-center/47272581#47272581

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/rock-center/47272581#47272581

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&


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Author’s Response by Katherine Scott, Associate Historian, U.S. Senate Historical Office1

would like to thank Tom Maddux for commissioning these reviews, Diane Labrosse for her helpful edits, and Michael Bowen, Lori Clune, Thomas Devine, and Kathryn Olmsted for taking the time to read the book and offer thoughtful comments. The reviewers have provided thorough summaries, so I will focus

on areas where our analyses differ, and suggest topics which deserve further exploration.

Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations (or confirmations, depending on your point of view) of massive secret domestic surveillance operations have revived historic debates about the need to balance national security interests with individual rights. During the early years of the Cold War, as Michael Bowen suggests, the National Security Act of 1947 sparked similarly contentious discussions. Bowen’s criticism that I should have connected early Cold War concerns about the Garrison State with Seventies-era reform efforts is a fair one.

It is tempting, as Lori Clune writes, to read this book with an eye to recent developments. Clune and other reviewers (here and in other publications) have found my conclusion to be “a bit optimistic.” I concede that the checks and balances put in place following the congressional investigations of the 1970s have been weakened since 9/11. I do not agree that these reforms have failed. Rather, the expanding power of the intelligence community in the past fourteen years underscores what Thomas Devine correctly identifies as the central focus of the book: successful efforts to rein in state power are historically contingent.

Opponents of reform, then and now, have persistently argued that congressional and judicial oversight of the intelligence community weakens the nation’s security. Kathryn Olmsted’s thought-provoking work on congressional intelligence investigations in the 1970s, Challenging the Secret Government, describes how critics of these inquiries aided (sometimes unintentionally) by the media, mounted an aggressive campaign to discredit investigators in the 1970s.2 Olmsted has shown how opponents of reform developed a persuasive narrative of congressional ineptitude (Pike Committee), and naked political ambition (Church Committee). Congressional intelligence oversight, they argued, would weaken the intelligence community for decades and following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, these critics blamed Congress for hamstringing the intelligence community in the 1970s.

Reining in the State, I believe, challenges this narrative in several ways. It shows that congressional intelligence oversight was not a headline-grabbing effort, but a long, slow, and at times careful process in the Senate (consider that the first notable domestic surveillance investigation began in 1970, years before the Watergate and Church Committees). Members of Congress responded to declining public confidence in these agencies; the American public expected elected officials to investigate allegations of abuse.

While the narrative of irresponsible congressional intelligence oversight has persisted, it has not gone unchallenged. On March 17, 2014, sixteen former staff members of the Church Committee published an open letter to President Barack Obama, Congress, and the American public, praising the Church Committee

1 The views presented here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Senate or the United

States Government.

2 Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1996).

I


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inquiry and calling for Congress to establish a special congressional committee tasked with investigating allegations of intelligence abuses, declaring that “As former members and staff of the Church Committee we can authoritatively say: the erosion of public trust currently facing our intelligence community is not novel, nor is its solution.”3

In anticipation of the fortieth anniversary of the creation of the Church Committee, the Senate Historical Office has conducted interviews with former Church Committee staffers, and one former Committee member, Vice President Walter Mondale. Interviewees describe the contributions made by senators of both parties, the furious pace of investigative work, and the extraordinary arrangements made to protect classified records. From the perspective of Church Committee staff, the effort was not a fly-by-night operation driven by Senator Church’s desire to raise his national profile in anticipation of a presidential campaign. Rather, it was a serious effort to reaffirm checks and balances and make policy recommendations that would lead to effective reform. Following the conclusion of the Senate investigation, many staff transitioned to the Carter Administration and helped to implement statutes and guidelines based upon the committee’s reform proposals.

These interviews also suggest new areas worthy of further exploration. Church Committee staff recall meetings with representatives of foreign intelligence agencies who expressed concern that the congressional investigations would expose their relations with the U.S. intelligence community. The Snowden revelations have provoked objections from foreign leaders, created domestic unrest—at home and abroad—over intelligence methods, and damaged the reputation of the U.S. intelligence community with key allies. Foreign-relations scholars might consider how U.S. intelligence operations complicate international relations.

Finally, to adequately evaluate Seventies-era intelligence reform, we need to recognize the historical contingencies that enabled and restricted those efforts. When Olmsted writes that my analysis “fails to acknowledge how far [reformers] fell short of their goals,” she suggests that reformers agreed upon a set of policy goals. The reality is more complicated; reformers in the 1970s carefully negotiated policy (sometimes for years) among competing individuals and institutions. Reforms such as permanent congressional intelligence oversight committees and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), while not perfect, reflect those political compromises. A better understanding of the political, social, and institutional factors that shaped policy outcomes in the 1970s may be instructive to today’s advocates for reform.

3 Letter available online at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

https://www.eff.org/files/2014/03/16/church_committee_-_march_17_2014_.pdf (accessed June 25, 2015).

https://www.eff.org/files/2014/03/16/church_committee_-_march_17_2014_.pdf

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