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Washington cover-up

Chapter 23: APPENDIX E Executive Privilege Correspondence between President Kennedy and Congressman John E. Moss
By Clark R. Mollenhoff
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About This Book

The author examines government secrecy as a recurring obstacle to democratic accountability, tracing its practice through historical scandals, congressional investigations, and executive claims of privilege. He shows how withholding information weakens the press’s watchdog role, impedes effective legislative oversight, and allows administrative defensiveness and short-term political calculations to persist. The work analyzes legal and institutional mechanisms that enable concealment, surveys episodes of foreign and domestic controversy sealed from public view, and critiques the tendency of officials to manage or distort information. It concludes with arguments and practical recommendations for strengthening congressional access to records and restoring the public’s right to know.

APPENDIX E

Executive Privilege Correspondence between President Kennedy and Congressman John E. Moss

February 15, 1962

The Honorable
John F. Kennedy
The President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President:

In your letter of February 8, 1962 to Secretary McNamara you directed him to refuse certain information to a Senate Subcommittee. The concluding paragraph of your letter stated:

“The principle which is at stake here cannot be automatically applied to every request for information. Each case must be judged on its merits.”

A similar letter from President Eisenhower on May 17, 1954 also refused information to a Senate Subcommittee, setting forth the same arguments covered in your letter. President Eisenhower did not, however, state that future questions of availability of information to the Congress would have to be answered as they came up.

I know you are aware of the result of President Eisenhower’s letter. Time after time Executive Branch employees far down the administrative line from the President fell back on his letter of May 17, 1954 as authority to withhold information from the Congress and the public.

Some of the cases are well known—the Dixon-Yates matter and the investigation of East-West trade controls, for instance—but many of the refusals based on President Eisenhower’s letter of May 17, 1954 received no public notice. A report of the House Committee on Government Operations covering the five years from June, 1955 through June, 1960 lists 44 cases of Executive Branch officials refusing information on the basis of the principles set forth in the May 17, 1954 letter.

I am confident that you share my belief that your letter of February 8, 1962 to Secretary McNamara should not be seized upon by Executive Branch employees—many of them holding the same policymaking positions of responsibility they did under the Eisenhower Administration—as a new claim of authority to withhold information from the Congress and the public. A Subcommittee staff study indicates that during the year between the time you took office and February 8, 1962 the claim of an “executive privilege” to withhold government information was not used successfully once, compared to the dozens of times in previous years administrative employees held up “executive privilege” as a shield against public and Congressional access to information.

Although your letter of February 8, 1962 stated clearly that the principle involved could not be applied automatically to restrict information, this warning received little public notice. Clarification of this point would, I believe, serve to prevent the rash of restrictions on government information which followed the May 17, 1954 letter from President Eisenhower.

Sincerely,
/s/ John E. Moss
Chairman

THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington

March 7, 1962

Dear Mr. Chairman:

This is in reply to your letter of last month inquiring generally about the practice this Administration will follow in invoking the doctrine of executive privilege in withholding certain information from the Congress.

As your letter indicated, my letter of February 8 to Secretary McNamara made it perfectly clear that the directive to refuse to make certain specific information available to a special subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee was limited to that specific request and that “each case must be judged on its merits.”

As you know, this Administration has gone to great lengths to achieve full co-operation with the Congress in making available to it all appropriate documents, correspondence and information. That is the basic policy of this Administration, and it will continue to be so. Executive privilege can be invoked only by the President and will not be used without specific Presidential approval. Your own interest in assuring the widest public accessibility to governmental information is, of course, well known, and I can assure you this Administration will continue to co-operate with your subcommittee and the entire Congress in achieving this objective.

Sincerely,
/s/ John F. Kennedy

Honorable John E. Moss
Chairman
Special Government Information
Subcommittee of the Committee
on Government Operations
House of Representatives
Washington, D.C.