By Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Yale University Press, 1998. U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World. By Loch K. Johnson. Yale University Press, 1996.
Historians enjoy neither the votes nor financial clout to carry much weight with most politicians.
At his prompting, Congress established a bipartisan commission on government secrecy that called for a National Declassification Center in 1997 to speed public access to official documents. Moynihan's latest study builds upon the commission's work to argue the case that government secrecy all too often subverts democratic decision making and national security itself. The clandestine arts of stealing and keeping secrets do not guarantee greater intelligence. In addition, Moynihan writes with the authority of his eight years of service on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. His book is neither a comprehensive history of government secrecy nor a thorough overview of contemporary classification issues.