Ramblings  

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld covers Washington, D.C.

Remembering April 1865—the Month that Saved America

      Widespread ignorance of American history among students and teachers at high schools and colleges is a major threat to national security, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author David McCullough recently told a U.S. Senate committee.

      “We are raising a generation of people who are historically illiterate” and ignorant of the basic philosophical foundations of our constitutional free society, said the past president of the Society of American Historians. “We can’t function in a society if we don’t know who we are and where we came from.”

      At the same time, serious works of history have become bestsellers, among them McCullough’s own biography of John Adams. Another best-selling work of history that is worthy of serious study is April 1865: The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik, senior scholar at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs.

      This single month, April 1865, witnessed the fall of Richmond, a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare, Lee’s retreat, and then, Appomattox. It saw Lincoln’s assassination just five days later and a near successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South and, finally, the start of national reconciliation.

      “April 1865 is a month that could have unraveled the American nation,” Winik writes,

Instead it saved it. It is a month as dramatic and as devastating as any ever faced in American history—and it proved to be perhaps the most moving and decisive month not simply of the Civil War, but indeed, quite likely, in the life of the United States.

      For most Americans, it is at a small red brick house in Appomattox, Virginia on April 9, 1865—Robert E. Lee’s fateful meeting with Ulysses S. Grant—that the story of the Civil War stops. This, Winik argues,

. . . is a mistake. For one thing, the war was still not over; it could have lasted more hard months, even years. For another, no period was more harrowing, or had so great an impact upon this country, as the days that followed Lee’s surrender. Within six days, Abraham Lincoln was dead, the first-ever assassination of an American president. Never before or since in the life of this nation has the country been so tested as in this one week alone. . . . Time and again, things might have gone altogether differently.

      The story of April 1865 is not just one of decisions made, but also of decisions rejected. Lee’s rejection of continuing the war as a guerrilla battle, the preference of Jefferson Davis, and Grant’s choice to be magnanimous at Appomattox cannot be overestimated in importance.

      With the fall of Richmond, Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government were on the run. Davis, Winik writes,

. . . was thinking about such things as a war of extermination . . . a national war that ruins the enemy. In short, guerrilla resistance. . . . The day after Richmond fell, Davis had called on the Confederacy to shift from a conventional war to a dynamic guerrilla war of attrition, designed to wear down the North and force it to conclude that keeping the South in the Union would not be worth the interminable pain and ongoing sacrifice. “We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for the ages,” he declared. “Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own county, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free”

      But Robert E. Lee knew the war was over. Grant was magnanimous in victory and, Winik points out,

. . . was acutely aware that on this day, what had occurred was the surrender of one army to another—not of one government to another. The war was very much on. There were a number of potentially troubling rebel commanders in the field. And there were still some 175,000 other Confederates under arms elsewhere; one-half in scattered garrisons and the rest in three remaining rebel armies. What mattered now was laying the groundwork for persuading Lee’s fellow armies to join in his surrender—and also for reunion, the urgent matter of making the nation whole again. Thus, it should be no great surprise that there was a curious restraint in Grant’s tepid victory message passed on to Washington.

      Appomattox was not preordained. “If anything,” notes Winik,

. . . retribution had been the larger and longer precedent. So, if these moments teemed with hope—and they did—it was largely due to two men who rose to the occasion, to Grant’s and Lee’s respective actions: one general, magnanimous in victory, the other, gracious and equally dignified in defeat, the two of them, for their own reasons and in their own ways, fervently interested in beginning the process to bind up the wounds of the last four years. . . . Above all, this surrender defied millenniums of tradition in which rebellions typically ended in yet a greater shedding of blood. . . . One need only recall the harsh suppression of the peasants’ revolt in Germany in the 16th century, or the ravages of Alva during the Dutch rebellion, or the terrible punishments inflicted on the Irish by Cromwell and then on the Scots after Culloden, or the bloodstained vengeance executed during the Napoleanic restoration, or the horrible retaliation imposed during the futile Chinese rebellion in the mid-19th century . . . 

      Lee was not alone in rejecting the idea of guerrilla war. General Joe Johnston, offered generous terms of surrender by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, cabled the Confederate government for instructions. The order was to fight on. Johnston was told to take as many of his men as possible and fall back to Georgia. Johnston refused and decided to surrender. “Johnston was, in effect, willingly ignoring the edict of the Confederate president,” writes Winik.

He himself would later acknowledge that he directly “disobeyed” his instructions. But Johnston, who wired back to Davis that such a plan of retreat was “impracticable,” saw no other way. In his view, it would be “the greatest of crimes for us to attempt to continue the war,”. . . To fight further would only “spread ruin all over the south.”. . . What ultimately must stand out is not Johnston’s military ability or his daring in battle, but this one decisive act in which he brazenly violated the chain of command—and in doing so, helped heal a country.

      In early May, when the Mississippi governor and the former governor of Tennessee rode out and urged General Nathan Bedford Forrest to retreat with his cavalry to continue a guerrilla war, Forrest barked back: “Any man who is in favor of further prosecution of this war is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum.” The attempt to establish “a separate and independent confederacy had failed,” Forrest noted, and they should meet their responsibilities “like men.” He added, “Reason dictates and humanity demands that no more blood be shed.”

      Then Forrest took one final step that would long surprise many in the North. Echoing the sentiments of Lee before him, in places almost word for word, he added:

I have never on the field of battle sent you where I was unwilling to go myself, nor would I advise you to a course which I felt myself unwilling to pursue. You have been good soldiers, you can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and will be magnanimous.

      As the war came to an end, writes Winik,

Hate, despondency and vengeance now loomed like a hydra for America: they could have steeped the country in rancor and chaos, and destroyed any possibility of true union. But they did not. Over 620,000 lay dead, one-twelfth of the North and an astonishing one-fifth of the South; all told, it was the most battle deaths in the country’s history, as great as in all of the nation’s other wars combined. Yet remarkably, as the North and South, leaders and citizens alike, struggled to adjust to the new order, they rose to the occasion.

      At the war’s end, the question of whether the United States would prosper and endure or disintegrate and decline remained an open one. Winik declares that,

Throughout history’s long, checkered span, for republics, particularly those that undergo civil wars, the odds were not good, and, in fact, never had been. The Greek example, to recall Alexander Hamilton’s immortal words, was “disgusting.” After a reign of splendor, the Roman Republic fell ignominiously. There were a few republics in Europe, but none of them was large—and most had not acquitted themselves particularly well either. . . . The Founding Fathers were, of course, aware of all this, and more than that, were haunted by it.

      After the Civil War’s end, Winik argues,

. . . obliterated was any serious thought of future secession by any side, any state, any section. Before the war, Americans often spoke of the United States in the plural—“The United States are . . .” For example, in his classic work on the history of America, noted historian John H. Hinton wrote in 1834: “By some, the United States are highly eulogized; by others, they are eagerly depreciated.” Sometime after the war, however, so changed was America that this was now modified to a singular noun. Thus, Hinton’s words would become “The United States is . . .” The war’s end—and how it ended, both manner and means—had, in fact marked a decisive break with the past, the great chasm between the era of contingent republics and permanent nations, which until then was all of human doings. No less than the Founders who assembled in 1776 it made America.

      Winik concludes:

April 1865 was incontestably one of America’s finest hours: for it was not the deranged spirit of an assassin that defined the country at war’s end, but the conciliatory spirit of leaders who led as much in peace as in war, warriors and politicians who, by their example, their exhortation, their deeds, overcame their personal rancor, their heartache, and spoke as citizens of not two lands, but one, thereby bringing the country together. True, much hard work remained. But much, too, had already been accomplished.

Supreme Court Takes a Step Backward from the Ideal of a Color-Blind Society

      The Supreme Court had an opportunity in June to reaffirm the ideal of a color-blind society—precisely the kind of society that the leaders of the civil rights movement sought to achieve.

      Instead, they equivocated. By a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy—which awarded 20 points out of 150 to specified minority groups (eight more points than were earned by a perfect SAT score)—was unconstitutional. In a 5-4 decision, the University of Michigan’s use of racial preferences in determining who gets into its law school—a somewhat more subtle formula—was upheld. Thus, for all intents and purposes, affirmative action programs based upon race remain alive and well.

      Even many liberals, some of them former supporters of affirmative action, found these decisions contradictory and illogical. Columnist Michael Kinsley, for example, notes that,

Admission to a prestige institution such as the University of Michigan or its law school is what computer types call a “binary” decision. It’s yes or no. You’re in or you’re out. There is no partial or halfway admission. The effect of any factor in the decision is also binary. It either changes the result or it doesn’t. It makes all the difference or it makes none at all. Those are the only possibilities. . . . Any factor that changes the result has the same impact as if it were an absolute quota of one. It gets you in, or it keeps you out. And this is either right or wrong. . . . The majority opinion says that its preferred flexible-flier style of affirmative action does “not unduly harm members of any racial group.” Well, this depends on what you mean by “unduly,” doesn’t it? . . . We’re dealing with an all-or-nothing-at-all decision here. Every time affirmative action changes the result, a minority beneficiary benefits by 100 percent and a white person is burdened 100 percent, in the only currency at issue, which is admission to the University of Michigan. This burden may be reasonable or unreasonable, but it is precisely the same size as the burden imposed by the mathematical-formula-style affirmative action that the court finds objectionable. . . . The court’s message to universities and other selective government-financed institutions is: We have fudged this dangerous issue. You should do the same.

      Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the opinion upholding the University of Michigan law school’s affirmative action program, rationalized her rejection of the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which provides that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” She cited a previous Supreme Court decision in doing so, Adarand Construction v. Peña, that says “Government may treat people differently because of their race only because of the most compelling reasons.”

      What, then, was the “most compelling reason” to support race-based admissions policies? Her answer: minority “underrepresentation.” Another liberal columnist, Richard Cohen, provides this assessment of that reasoning:

In one form or anther, O’Connor uses the term repeatedly. But she never defines it. Like pornography, she knows it when she sees it. Underrepresentation would not be, say, 14.5 percent of the law school class—the actual figure of minority students enrolled—but it would be, say, 4 percent of the class, the predicated percentage if there were no affirmative action program. That calamity enables her to suspend the Constitution.

      The argument that minority students are needed for “diversity,” Cohen argues,

. . . is total nonsense—and insulting to blacks and Hispanics, who are not mere condiments recruited to add spice to an otherwise bland law school class. . . . The use of such numbers not only implies an impermissible quota but also suggests there really is such a thing as a correct figure. . . . O’Connor’s opinion is an intellectual mess. . . . The Supreme Court is supposed to clarify the very issues that befuddle the rest of us. O’Connor not only failed to do that, but she and her colleagues failed so spectacularly that maybe it is the high court that could use some affirmative action itself. Clear thinkers are underrepresented.

      In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s only black member, quoted from a speech by the noted black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, delivered nearly 140 years ago,

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. . . . All I ask is give him a chance to stand on his own legs. Let him alone!

      The dream of a color-blind America that motivated men and women of good will during the years of struggle for equal rights has been abandoned by many who now seek a system of proportional representation in which individuals will be judged not on the basis of their own merit but as members of a particular race or ethnic group. In the end, it is “racism” to judge men and women on the basis of race—whether it be to bestow rewards or to inflict penalties.

      Our legal tradition mandates individual rights, not group rights. This has, in fact, been the goal of the civil rights movement for many years. Thurgood Marshall, arguing for the NAACP in the case of Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (332 U.S. 631, 1948) declared: “Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society.”

      The Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically states that no employer would be required to hire on the basis or race in order to correct some racial imbalance in the work force. What the law does is forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex and age.

      Title VII, Section 703 (j) says:

Nothing contained in this title shall require any employer . . . to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number of percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex or national origin employed by any employer.

      In supporting this legislation, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) declared that the act

. . . does not require an employer to achieve any kind of racial balance in his work force by giving any kind of preferential treatment to any individual or group.

He said that there must be an “intention to discriminate” before an employer can be considered in violation of the law.

      Beyond all of this, as Justice Thomas has said, affirmative action programs based on race are demeaning to the very groups they are meant to serve, implying that members of these groups cannot compete successfully in the open marketplace.

      From the very start of affirmative action there have been many eloquent black voices raised in opposition. The Supreme Court would have done well to consider those voices more carefully.

      In an article, “The Moral Crisis of the Black American” (The Public Interest, Summer, 1973), Orlando Patterson writes:

There can be no moral equality where there is a dependency relationship among men. There will always be a dependency relationship where the victim strives for equality by vainly seeking the assistance of his victimizer. In situations like these we can expect sympathy, even magnanimity from men, but never—and it is unfair to expect otherwise—the genuine respect which one equal feels for another.

      Mr. Patterson notes that judging individuals on the basis of race legitimizes “atavistic sentiments” and “awakens and lends respectability to the most primordial of group identities—race.”

      Professor Shelby Steele of San Jose State University in California declares:

Good intentions can blind us to the effects they generate when implemented. In our society, affirmative action is, among other things, a testament to white good will and to black power. . . . But after years of implementation I think that affirmative action has shown itself to be more bad than good and that blacks . . . now stand to lose more from it than they gain. . . . By making black the color of preference, these mandates have reburdened society with the very marriage of color and preference (in reverse) that we set out to eradicate. . . . I think one of the most troubling effects of racial preferences for blacks is a kind of demoralization. Under affirmative action, the quality that earns us preferential treatment is an implied inferiority. The effect of preferential treatment—the lowering of normal standards to increase black representation—puts blacks at war with an expanded realm of debilitating doubt, so that the doubt itself becomes an unrecognized preoccupation that undermines their ability to perform.

      In his important book, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, Professor Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover institution at Stanford University, examines such programs in a number of countries. He concludes that,

One of the clearly undesired and uncontrolled consequences of preferential policies has been a backlash by non-preferred groups. This backlash has ranged from campus racial incidents in the U.S. to a bloody civil war in Sri Lanka . . . Preferential honors for members of particular groups can easily render suspect not only those particular honors but also honors fully merited and awarded after free and open competition. . . . To jeopardize the respect and recognition of individuals from preferred groups by rewarding “honors” tainted with double standards is not only to downgrade their own achievements but also to downgrade their chances of accomplishing those achievements in the first place. . . . After the media revealed that black students were admitted to the Harvard Medical School with lower qualifications, white patients began to refuse to be examined by such students . . .

      In the latest Supreme Court decision, Justice O’Connor says:

We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

What lies ahead, it seems, is another quarter century of litigation to determine whether the American society is to be “color blind,” as Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders urged, or to be based upon race and some form of proportional representation. If it is the latter, with our ever-changing demographics—a recent study shows that Hispanics are now America’s largest minority group—we are setting the stage for inter-group strife and tension.

      The Constitution calls simply for “equal protection” of all citizens. When, finally, will that standard become good enough for the Supreme Court? 

How Much Government Secrecy Is Consistent with a Free and Open Society?

      Secrecy on the part of government and freedom for citizens may be compatible if that secrecy is limited to matters that clearly relate to national security. But when secrecy has little relationship to matters of security, it becomes a serious threat to constitutional government and to the limits upon government power that make us free. At the present time, there can be little doubt that too much of what government is doing is being kept from the American public.

      The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) became a crusader against government secrecy late in life. He declared that it “can confer a form of power without responsibility, about which democratic societies must be vigilant,” Secrecy, he argued, “unless carefully attended to, is a source of considerable sorrow in government.”

      In 1997, the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, chaired by Moynihan, concluded that government classifies too many documents—millions every year—while failing to distinguish among different sorts of documents and to protect secrets of real importance. The commission declared that secrecy is inherently antithetical to open debate in a flourishing democracy, and the perception of a government bloated with secrets erodes public trust.

      The Bush administration has shown a potentially dangerous penchant for secrecy that has alarmed both liberals and conservatives. Mark Tapscott, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy, asks

Why does the White House seem so determined to close the door on the people’s right to know what their government is doing?

      Mr. Tapscott cites three examples: Section 204 of the White House’s original proposal to establish a Department of Homeland Security, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s March 2002 directive that agencies restrict access to “sensitive but unclassified” information, and the administration’s claim of executive privilege to keep secret information regarding President Clinton’s infamous midnight pardons.

      In Clinton’s case, 140 people were pardoned, including his Whitewater partner Susan McDougal, his brother Roger (convicted on cocaine-related charges), and international fugitive Marc Rich, wanted by the Justice Department for allegedly conspiring with the Iranian government in 1980 to buy 6 million barrels of oil, contrary to a U.S. trade embargo.

      “It is doubtful that the full facts behind the pardons will ever be known,” states Tapscott,

. . . as long as the administration refuses to disclose nearly 4,000 pages related to the former president’s actions. The Bush administration has taken a similar position on documents related to former attorney general Janet Reno’s controversial decision not to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible Clinton administration campaign finance illegalities. There was a time when at least one senior Bush administration official thought the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) essential because “no matter what party has held the political power of government, there have been attempts to cover up mistakes and errors.” That same official added that “disclosure of government information is particularly important today because government is becoming involved in more and more aspects of every citizen’s personal and business life, and so access to information about how government is exercising its trust becomes increasingly important.” So spoke a young Illinois Republican congressman named Donald Rumsfeld, in a floor speech on June 20, 1966, advocating passage of the FOIA, of which he was a co-sponsor.

      In March, President George W. Bush signed an executive order that makes it easier for government agencies, including the White House, to keep documents classified and out of public view. The order delays by three years the release of declassified government materials from 1978 or earlier. It treats all materials sent to American officials from foreign governments—no matter how routine—as subject to classification. It expands the ability of the CIA to shield documents from declassification. And for the first time, it gives the vice president the power to classify information. All of this amends an earlier order that actually eased the process of declassification.

      Some of the Bush policies, such as closing previously public court proceedings were prompted by the September 11 terrorist attacks and are part of the administration’s drive for greater domestic security, Others, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s battle to keep records of his energy task force secret, reflect a determination to strengthen the authority of the executive branch.

      Generally, said Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, while secrecy has been increasingly attractive to recent administrations, “this administration has taken it to a new level.” Its “instinct is to release nothing,” said Professor Brinkley, adding that this was not necessarily because there were particularly embarrassing secrets to hide, but “they are just worried about what’s in there and what they don’t know about.”

      In the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2001, most of which came during the Bush presidency, 260,978 documents were classified, up 18 percent from the previous year. And since Sept. 11, three new agencies were given the power to stamp documents as “secret”—the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.

      Both Democrats and Republicans in the Congress have expressed concern. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) said things were getting worse, and “it seems like in the last few months I’ve been running into more and more stone walls.” Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who was first elected in 1974, said that, “Since I’ve been here, I have never known an administration that is more difficult to get information from.”

      Secrecy, Daniel Moynihan has argued, does more harm than good. The CIA’s exaggerated estimates of Soviet economic strength for example, would have stopped influencing U.S. policy, he believed, if they had been published and any correspondent in Moscow could have laughed at them. “Secrecy is a formula for inefficient decision making,” said Moynihan, and plays on the instincts of self-importance of the bureaucracy.

      Mary Graham, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, sees two major risks in this administration’s level of secrecy.

      Graham said:

What are often being couched as temporary emergency orders are in fact what we are going to live with for 20 years, just as we lived with the Cold War restrictions for years after it was over. . . . We make policy by crisis, and we particularly make secrecy policy by crisis.

      Moreover, she said, it ignores the value of openness, which “creates public pressure for improvement.” When risk analyses of chemical plants were available on the Internet, she said, people could pressure companies to do better, or move away.

      On November 1, 2001, President Bush issued a sweeping order under which former presidents and vice presidents, or representatives designated by them or their surviving families, could bar release of documents by claiming one of a variety of privileges:

. . . military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, presidential communications, legal advice, legal work or the deliberative processes of the president and the president’s advisers.

Before the order, the Archivist of the United States could reject a former president’s claim of privilege. Now he cannot.

      House Republicans were among the order’s sharpest critics. Rep. Steve Horn (R-CA) called a hearing within a few days and Rep. Doug Ose (R-CA) said the order “undercuts the public’s right to be fully informed about how its government operated in the past.” The order, Rep. Horn said, improperly “gives the former and incumbent presidents veto power over the release of the records.”

      Historian Robert Dallek, a biographer of Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy, says,

This order of Bush, we feel it’s a disgrace—what it means is if this policy applies, they can hold presidential documents close to the vest in perpetuity, the way Lincoln’s papers were held by the family until 1947.

      At the First Amendment Forum’s National Freedom of Information Day conference in March, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jack Nelson, retired Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times said:

No president since I’ve been a reporter has so tried to change the very structure of government to foster secrecy.

      Conservatives in the Congress are as concerned about present secrecy policies as liberals. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) says he had to use “strong-arm tactics” to get the information he needs. Burton reports that his committee has had difficulty getting the Justice Department to turn over documents relating to a 30-year-old case of FBI corruption in Boston, not a matter he sees as impacting national security in any way, “We finally got them but we had to be pretty strong-armed. We had to use strong-armed tactics to get the information,” he said.

      During a Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Department of Justice, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) chided Attorney General John Ashcroft for being unresponsive to his requests for information, “I want to ask you about how busy you are,” Specter asked Ashcroft.

Now, maybe you’re too busy to respond to senators’ letters. And if you are, frankly, I could understand that. But if that’s so, then I know I can always track you down, find you at the White House. But it is a little difficult. How do we communicate with you?

Conservative commentator David Brooks of the Weekly Standard says that the Bush administration is

. . . in danger of getting addicted to secrecy the way Clinton was to sex. There is a congealing sense that secretiveness is the flaw of the Bush administration.

This comment was prompted by the stonewalling of the White House in providing details of the pre bankruptcy contacts between Enron and the administration.

      “The cumulative message from the White House and from Ashcroft is: Stall, don’t release.” said Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, an access advocacy group. “They believe that the trend for 30 years has been to make the White House too open.”

      Judicial Watch, the conservative advocacy group that gained prominence for its campaign to pry information from the Clinton administration, says that the Bush administration’s attitude is one of “arrogance throughout—that the government is not to be questioned.”

      Nearly two centuries ago, John Adams stated that, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1816, Adams said, “Power must never be trusted without a check.”

      In a September 2002 court case in which a three-judge panel in Cincinnati said it was unlawful for the administration to conduct deportation hearings in secret whenever the government asserted that the people involved might be linked to terrorism, Judge Damon J. Keith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declared that, “Democracies die behind closed doors.” He said the First Amendment and a free press protect the “people’s right to know” that their government is acting fairly and lawfully, “When government begins closing doors,” he said,

It selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. . . . A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete opposition to the society envisioned by the framers of our Constitution.

      Excessive secrecy is inconsistent with a free and limited government. It should not matter which party is in power for those who seek to maintain our system to speak out when it is endangered by politicians who seek to expand their own power and prerogatives. Now is surely a proper time for the expression of that concern.     Ω