Thinning the Veil

Since World War II, Government secrecy has developed into a pervasive bureaucratic habit, an ominous development for a system of, by and for the people. It reached the point where Defense Department subalterns were classifying newspaper clippings, administrators used their SECRET stamps to conceal waste and stupidity, and the vaults of Washington were choked with millions of pages of momentous or banal information that the public was paying millions of dollars a year for the privilege of never seeing.

Last week, after more than a year's review of Government secrecy, the White House overhauled the classification procedures for the first time since 1953. Not that the Government is exactly throwing open its filing cases. The President reduced the number of officials authorized to classify from 5,100 to 1,860. At the other end of the process, the minimum time for automatic declassification of low-sensitivity papers was cut from eight years to six, and most papers will be automatically declassified in ten years.

Nixon said that he wants an "open" Administration. "Fundamental to our way of life," he declared, "is the belief that when information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them." But with a six-year limit on classification, the Administration he was declaring open was Lyndon Johnson's.

The new executive order raised an intriguing question: Would the classification of the Pentagon papers have been "legal" under the new rules? Perhaps. Some of the six-year-old material in the papers could have been acquired by the public without breaking the law, but even that is in doubt, since the study, which dealt with national security, would have required special clearance in any case.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.