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Title: Secrecy: The American Experience by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Gid Powers ISBN: 0-300-08079-4 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Extraordinary Contribution to National Sanity and Security
Comment:
Senator Moynihan applies his intellect and his strong academic and historical bent to examine the U.S. experience with secrecy, beginning with its early distrust of ethnic minorities. He applies his social science frames of reference to discuss secrecy as a form of regulation and secrecy as a form of ritual, both ultimately resulting in a deepening of the inherent tendency of bureaucracy to create and keep secrets-secrecy as the cultural norm. His historical overview, current right up to 1998, is replete with documented examples of how secrecy may have facilitated selected national security decisions in the short-run, but in the long run these decisions were not only found to have been wrong for lack of accurate open information that was dismissed for being open, but also harmful to the democratic fabric, in that they tended to lead to conspiracy theories and other forms of public distancing from the federal government. He concludes: "The central fact is that we live today in an Information Age. Open sources give us the vast majority of what we need to know in order to make intelligent decisions. Decisions made by people at ease with disagreement and ambiguity and tentativeness. Decisions made by those who understand how to exploit the wealth and diversity of publicly available information, who no longer simply assume that clandestine collection-that is, 'stealing secrets'-equals greater intelligence. Analysis, far more than secrecy, is the key to security....Secrecy is for losers."
Rating: 4
Summary: Supplementary book for American Politics Course
Comment: A very interesting account of governmental secrecy during various times of conflict. Would make a nice supplemental reading for professors teaching a American Politics course. I touches upons foreign policy and the relationship between the Executive, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Most of the material deals with the development of secrecy as a standard operating procedure during WWI and WWII. Vietnam and the Iran-Contra Affair are touched upon but could have been expanded.
Rating: 3
Summary: mediocre at best
Comment: Moynihan presents an array of anecdotal evidence of instances where secrecy produced unintended, and unfortunate results, and draws that sweeping conclusion that secrecy is bad. A more modest conclusion, such as that the government designates too much stuff as secret might be supported, but Moynihan's generalization is too much. Also, the introduction to the book written by Richard Gid Powers far outshines the portion written by Moynihan. Moynihan's stuff is a dry as dust.
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Title: Affair of Honor Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz by Robert E. Quirk ISBN: 0393003906 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 1967 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy by Daniel Patrick Moynihan ISBN: 0674574419 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 by Stephen E. Ambrose, Douglas Brinkley ISBN: 0140268316 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: On the Law of Nations by Daniel Patrick Moynihan ISBN: 0674635760 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: February, 1992 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The American Political Tradition : And the Men Who Made it by Richard Hofstadter ISBN: 0679723153 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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