The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2011

26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 1 gress and the press, the depart- ment would stress a sort of col- lective or organizational respon- sibility. This meant that individ- ual Foreign Service officers were not to be held publicly account- able for the words they wrote as government servants. In effect, the department permanently re- moved the notion of individual authorship and in its place substituted a version of corporate authorship. The Secretary of State used the ghost of McCarthyism to advance his and the administration’s own interests. Mo- bilizing the image of himself as benevolent protector of the Foreign Service against the threat of a McCarthyist renewal, Kissinger argued that he and other senior poli- cymakers in the department, and not the rank-and-file, should be “held accountable” for the agency’s foreign pol- icy decisions. To this end, the Secretary volunteered to testify before the committee. In lieu of handing over the memos sub- mitted to him, he offered to prepare a “summary” of all the dissenting documents he had received (and rejected) in relation to the Cyprus crisis so that the names of the individual authors would remain confidential. No decent liberal, or any American for that matter, could take issue with the department’s stance when framed in such terms. Or could they? Congress had certainly witnessed these tactics before. It had only been two years since the scan- dal of Watergate had begun to rock the nation. In his grand effort to cover up the scandal, Nixon had instructed his subordinates to do everything they could to prevent the investigation from airing the administration’s dirty laundry. The precise directive was to “stonewall.” When Congress began to request tapes from the White House in the spring of 1973, stonewalling took the form of execu- tive privilege. Despite severe criticism of the Christmas bombing campaign in North Vietnam and the beginning of the Wa- tergate investigation, Nixon’s popularity peaked in early 1973, after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. It was the legal battle between Nixon and Congress on the one hand, and Nixon and Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on the other, that sparked the first dramatic decline of confidence in the president. After a series of decisions and appeals on behalf of the Justice Department, the case went to the Supreme Court, which in 1974 deliv- ered a unanimous verdict against the White House. Executive priv- ilege, while not without its merits, was not absolute. Not So Fast Yet in 1975 only Rep. Pike voiced concern over Kissinger’s in- vocation of executive privilege. More than any other member of the committee, Pike saw a relationship between Kissinger’s foreign policy authority and his power to control and contain the writing of his sub- ordinates in the State Department. When the Secretary testified before the committee on Oct. 31, 1974, the chairman questioned whether a sum- mary could ever substitute for the original. “This Con- gress,” Pike told Kissinger, “has been subject to alleged ‘summaries’ before. There is no such thing as a ‘full sum- mary.’” Even if the Secretary did not deliberately intend to distort the policy recommendations contained in Boy- att’s memo, Pike declared, by summarizing it and the other documents, Kissinger would, by definition, alter them. Congress must follow the “best evidence rule,” argued Pike. And “the best evidence of what Mr. Boyatt said is not your summary of it, or anybody else’s summary of it. It is what Mr. Boyatt said.” In a compromise gesture, Kissinger offered to provide the committee with an “amalgamation” of the dissenting views on Cyprus. Unlike a summary, the amalgamated document would, he promised, contain “the full contents of Mr. Boyatt’s memorandum to me.” These words would be “interspersed among the other paragraphs and without any identification of authorship.” But for Pike, it would not suffice to say that all the words of Boyatt’s memo would be in the amalgamated document. By that measure, he pointed out, “The submission of a dictionary to the com- mittee would be in compliance with the subpoena.” “What I am trying to find out,” Pike explained to his peers, “is the form in which the words are going to be pre- sented to us.” The most fundamental problem with both a summary and an amalgamation, argued Pike, was the fact that it blurred perspective. “If we are not familiar with say, four or six documents, and all the paragraphs of four or six documents were interspersed and mixed up like some sort of magnificent jigsaw puzzle and there was no picture, how could we elicit from those mixed-up paragraphs what we are trying to get?” F O C U S The Boyatt case sheds light on the limits of post-Watergate reform, particularly in terms of transparency in foreign policy.