It did not matter that much of the information had already been released —or leaked—to the public. The effect was still overwhelming: a stunning, dismaying indictment of U.S. intelligence agencies and six Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, for having blithely violated democratic ideals and individual rights while gathering information at home or conducting clandestine operations abroad.
The two-volume, 815-page report released last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was 15 months in the making. It documents as never before how the White House and the baronies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency took the law into their own hands in the cause of preserving liberty. To cure the sweeping excesses, the eleven-member Church committee—so named for its chairman, Idaho Democrat Frank Church—proposed some sweeping reforms, 183 in all. Yet many of the key reforms may well be gutted or killed by the full Senate.
Scarcely anyone who was involved in the operations—bugging phones, breaking into houses, slipping LSD to unsuspecting bar patrons, planning assassination attempts, undermining governments—seems to have wondered whether he was doing anything wrong. The values of the men who operated in the shadowy underground world were summed up by William C. Sullivan, for ten years the head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division: "Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: 'Is this course of action ... lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?' We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatic."
Foremost among the pragmatists were the six Presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike. Before World War II, F.D.R. authorized wiretaps of suspected "subversives" without ever defining just what a subversive was. He also asked the FBI to file the names of Americans who criticized his national defense policies and supported those of Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who was then preaching isolationism. With similar Executive arrogance and in the same tradition, the Nixon Administration was installing illegal wiretaps and using the Internal Revenue Service to hound its domestic "enemies" 35 years later.
There was guilt aplenty to go round.
As U.S. Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy gathered information on the "sugar lobby" by tapping ten telephone lines of one law firm, plus the phones of two lobbyists, three Executive Branch officials, a congressional staffer and North Carolina's Congressman Harold D. Cooley, then chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. A squad of FBI men used informants, undercover agents and bugging to let Lyndon Johnson know what was happening behind the scenes at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City.
"Black Bag." Trying to sniff out subversion, the FBI, the CIA, the Army and the National Security Agency violated Americans' rights over the years by opening some 380,000 first-class letters, staging hundreds of "black bag" break-ins, securing copies of millions of private cables and tapping an unknown number of telephones.