FindLaw's Writ - John Dean: Hiding Past And Present Presidencies

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HIDING PAST AND PRESENT PRESIDENCIES:
The Problems With Bush's Executive Order Burying Presidential Records
By JOHN DEAN
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Friday, Nov. 09, 2001

On November 1, President George W. Bush signed his latest effort to govern by secrecy — Executive Order 13233. For good reason this Order has a lot of historians, journalists, and Congresspersons (both Republican and Democratic) upset.

The Order ends 27 years of Congressional and judicial efforts to make Presidential papers and records publicly available. In issuing the Order, the President has pushed his lawmaking powers beyond their limits.

The Secret Presidency

As President watchers know, we have a President who likes secrecy.

He has hired only tested leak-proof and loyal staffers, effectively sealing the Bush White House. He has had his records as the Governor of Texas hidden, shipping them off to his father's Presidential library, where they are inaccessible. He has stiffed the Congressional requests for information about how he developed his energy policy — refusing to respond.

No President can govern in a fishbowl. But not since Richard Nixon went to work in the Oval Office has there been as concentrated an effort to keep the real work of a President hidden, showing the public only a scripted President, as now. While this effort was evident before the September 11th terrorist attacks, the events of that day have become the justification for even greater secrecy.

The mystical veil of "national security" has been cast over much of the Bush administration. There were the secret arrests of terror-related suspects (currently over 1000 publicly unknown people). There was the expansion of the wiretap granting powers of a secret federal court hidden within the Department of Justice. There was, and continues to be, an apparent policy of precluding news organizations and congressional leaders from access to anything other than managed and generic news about the war in Afghanistan.

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