July 19, 1971
Page 25946
TO RESTORE AMERICA'S TRUST: COMMENTS ON THE PENTAGON PAPERS
(Remarks by Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE at the Eugene Nickerson Testimonial Dinner, Garden City, N.Y., June 20, 1971)
This is not really the right week for a political stump speech or predictions of partisan victory. This is instead one of those very few, very critical moments when we must think together about the future and the fate of America. So I would like to borrow some time from your celebration tonight to talk about a fundamental question – a question we must answer, not only for ourselves, but for our children and their children after them. It is a question about what kind of country America should be.
Our forefathers wrote the first answer almost eight generations ago in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The words they left us are the principles of our free system, where the allegiance of Americans is supposed to come from their trust in a Government worthy of trust. On all the vital issues, our country's founders affirmed, people on every side have a right to know and to decide – and the Government has a responsibility to tell them the truth, to hear their voices and heed their will.
The skeptics – and they were most of the world then – scoffed at the principles of the first Americans. They believed that the exercise of power required a secure elite and could not stand real elections or real liberty. They pointed to the past – to Government by privilege, economic strength, and force of arms – and there they found proof for their case against the survival of a society designed, not to coerce, but to command loyalty.
How wrong the skeptics were. The whole long history of America confounds their view and validates the vision of our forefathers. Through time and trials and even in the toughest moments, we have remained a Government by the informed consent of the governed. We have seen the death of virtually every other system alive at America's birth. And we have kept our country and our freedom. Because Government has trusted people to choose, people have trusted Government to rule.
But not in 1971. In 1971, we are living with the results of an incredible erosion in faith during the last half-decade. You can see the erosion across our land.
A ten year old who was opening toys under the Christmas tree in 1955 has now wronged his country and himself by joining the weatherman's campaign of violence and terror. Some of his friends down the street have given up, copped out, and turned on. And there is also a new vocabulary for the feeling which pervades his parents and people everywhere. The phrase-makers call it a credibility gap. But behind the phrase, there is the simple fact that countless citizens no longer believe their government. What they do believe is that the government lies – and some of them are even convinced that government itself is a lie.
And disbelief has reached a new high with this week's publication of the Pentagon papers in the Times and the Washington Post. They are the daily front page story – and the urgent concern of anyone who cares about the tie of trust that binds America together. Few of us have read all of the documents. But most of us share a common sense of pain and danger.
There is pain and danger in the spreading suspicion that talking peace was a disguise for planning war.
There is pain and danger in the shocking evidence that what some officials were saying to the Congress was the opposite of what they were doing in the Pentagon.
And there is pain and danger in the certainty that we remain uncertain about whether the Pentagon papers were or were not contingency plans – whether they were or were not accepted by the President. The appalling reality is that the Senate, the House, and the Nation were never told that they were considered or even possible.
If the American people or their representatives had read those reports as they were written – if they had seen the advice to sacrifice lives in order to save face – if they had looked at the proposed diagrams for provoking a wider conflict – they would have resisted the policy of escalation then, perhaps even before it was made. But we cannot go back now – and we must go forward. The question is the direction we will take.
In a speech only hours old, the Republican National chairman opted for partisan recrimination.
From him, the Nation is now hearing the hard, unsmiling hypocrisy of exploiting the disclosures he damns as irresponsible to damn the entire Democratic party as responsible for the war. It is as though all Republicans opposed Vietnam from the beginning – and as though nothing was concealed from Democrats outside the Executive branch. That is not true – and Senator Dole knows it is not true. He should also know how destructive it is to play politics with this tragedy. Too much is at stake.
We cannot pronounce history's judgment on men – all the facts are not yet in. But our own history tells us that we cannot risk a further corrosion of the trust which has nurtured and sustained America for almost two centuries. Our imperative task – yours and mine and Senator Dole's – is to restore that trust so we can believe again in our country and ourselves.
We must again be able to trust Government to make our policies a reflection of our people's will. The essential first step is to end the war by the end of the year. That is what more than seventy percent of Americans want. And as long as the administration refuses to set a date, millions of them will remember the past and doubt Washington's assurances about the future. We surely understand by now that our cause was a mistake. And we should understand that prolonging the mistake is surely not worth a lengthened shadow of suspicion here at home.
But a decision to stop the wrong will not alone make things right. We must also be able to trust Government to subject its past conduct to the scrutiny of our people. The Justice Department should drop the constitutionally dubious attempt to muzzle the Times and the Post. Unless they publish and unless the Pentagon papers are declassified, too many Americans will think there is still something to hide. Whatever the facts are, they cannot inflict more damage than a rising tide of disbelief.
And more disbelief would be the sad result if newspapers had to prove their patriotism by sitting down with Federal officials to decide what they could or could not publish. A patriotic press should stand up and publish the news, which is almost never unfit to print. Such freedom is the only way to check the accuracy of Government – the only way to prove that Government trusts us enough to tell us what has really happened.
We hear arguments that the Pentagon papers are stolen property – property which belongs to the Defense Department. But in a free society, the truth finally belongs to the people. And it is stolen property only when it is unjustly concealed from them.
We are cautioned that national security may be threatened. But the sole evidence is purely hypothetical charges from high officials and a report that the Government is still trying to establish a possible break in our secret codes. No American wants to play fast and loose with security. And the threat here is so slight that no American should want continued suppression of the news.
We are also warned of the potential harm to some reputations. But this is not Russia or the Politburo – and it is not the business of our Nation to protect anyone's bad name at the price of losing a free press or an informed public.
This does not mean indifference to the claims of those damaged by the Pentagon papers. We must not permit fragments of the story to form any completed assessment. And we must put as much as we can into the open as fast as we can.
We must begin now Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's proposed investigation of the origins of the war – so we can discover every fact and give every official, in Senator Mansfield's words, "the right to defend himself from unfair accusations."
A total accounting could go a long way toward restoring trust. But the restoration will be a fragile and temporary thing, unless we act to assure that another Pentagon papers will never happen again. We must be able to trust Government to decide with the knowledge of the people.
Vital choices must be made in public view. In domestic affairs, that may be easy. In foreign affairs, it will often be hard. But it is perhaps the definition of liberty in a Nation that it is ready to do things the hard way.
When a genuine danger to security is present, the facts may have to be withheld from the people. But they must be given to the Congress – so the people's representatives will be full partners in any decision to commit America's sons and America's wealth and America's prestige to a foreign conflict. There will be rare cases where there is no time to consult. But more often, the temptation will be over-secrecy. In 1964, everyone including our adversaries was apparently aware of potential escalation – everyone except our own people. The next time, our citizens if possible and the House and the Senate for certain must have the chance to know and to react.
That is fine in principle – but virtually everyone who has violated the principle has paid lip service to it. What we must have is a procedure to insure that the principle will prevail.
That is why I intend to propose the necessary legislation to permit the Congress and the Executive Branch to create an independent board responsible for declassifying documents. After a two year waiting period, the board could make a document public. And at any time, it could send relevant documents to the appropriate committee of the Congress. This system would give the President and the departments the strongest incentive to be frank about the facts – which would in any case come out almost immediately or very soon. At the same time, an independent board could protect national security without using it as an excuse to hide blunders or launch covert policies.
My hope is that the executive branch will cooperate by supporting this refdrm. Nineteen seventy-one has brought a vast widening in the credibility gap. It is not the time for the President to resist disclosure by retreating to institutional defenses like executive privilege. The national interest must overcome personal interest. We must give people a reason to believe anew in their ability to control the great events that shape and alter their fate.
And that is why the Board must also be independent in appearance as well as in fact. Members should serve a substantial, nonrenewable term. One of them should come from the press, one from the Government, and the other five from private life. They should be split as closely as possible between the two political parties. And the Board's staff should be recruited both inside and outside the Government.
It is said that in the modern world nations always decide in secrecy. But in a free country, that is not necessary and it is not safe. Fair procedures can strike the essential balance between security and the right to know. And what we have now will only forfeit more trust and weaken the bonds of allegiance to Government.
A free society has never been easy. But our forefathers out on the edge of the only world they knew, with danger on every side and so much to lose, had the courage to start the first modern experiment in liberty. In 1971, we are the most powerful Nation in the world and we can at least sustain the awesome inheritance they left us. We must heal the doubts and restore trust and build a nation worthy of their beginnings.
We often tend to think of America's foundation principles as obvious or even cliches. We have heard them in school and on the Fourth of July and from every politician. And so we sometimes forget that the principles of liberty exist not only to be listened to, but to be lived up to. Recent events should remind us of that – and of some words spoken by an embattled President in our country's hour of maximum danger, when the survival of America itself was in question.
Abraham Lincoln knew what he was fighting for then – and we must fight for the same goal now.
It is a goal so simple to say, so hard to reach. It is the hope that "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth."