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The U.S. public tends to be generously tolerant of the withholding of material when it concerns military affairs. Such tolerance gives Pentagon bosses a lease to play games that are not always strictly tied to military security. In one glaring example, the Pentagon went into a culprit-hunting mode a few months ago when somebody made public certain classified information: a budget figure, as it turned out, and a blue-sky one at that, interesting (and embarrassing) not because it endangered the nation's security but because it suggested that coming deficits would be much bigger than the Administration had yet admitted. More usual in the military's perennial game of hide-and-leak is the sudden declassification of scary intelligence about the Soviet Union at just those moments when the Pentagon is leaning on Congress for fatter appropriations. Nobody questions the need for military secrecy, but even military leaders realize that the hiding of information can be carried too far: post-mortems on the failed mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran showed the rescue team to have been handicapped because of security so tight that one team element did not always know what the other was doing.
The practice of concealment can become excessive in any walk of life, but it is especially susceptible to being overdone when it is used purely to serve power, as in government. Officials, administrators, bureaucrats and legislators can come to enjoy the capacity to hide not only legitimate sensitive material but incompetence, wrong judgments and ethical transgressions. It is no wonder that in democracies as well as in tyrannies, government tends to expand its capacity to hoard information. The U.S., to be sure, took steps to check and curtail this federal capacity in the wake of the excesses surrounding the Viet Nam War, the Watergate scandals and some mischief credited to the CIA and FBI in recent decades. The Government has nonetheless already accumulated a good deal of momentum toward a yet greater capacity for keeping the public in the dark: in an executive order last spring, the Reagan Administration made the hiding of records easier for civil and military bureaus while, at the same time, undermining the 1966 Freedom of Information Act that was designed to give citizens better access not to secret but to "ordinary" Government information. Viewing particularly the Administration's move to restrict the flow of scientific information, Congressman George Brown Jr. of the House Science and Technology Committee says that the effect could be "to shoot ourselves in the foot."
One may be tempted to shrug off Government ways, consoling oneself with the cynical belief that even the most guarded information eventually leaks out. The trouble is that leakage is neither dependable nor always timely. "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead," Benjamin Franklin said, and there may be truth to that. But such folklore is no substitute for a sensible public policy. The public vs. Government skirmish over how much classification there should be will probably go on forever and, in any democracy, should.