Presidential Advisors: Why So Much Secrecy

This is the concluding part of the interview by Elinor Langer with Jerome Weisner, President of MIT and George B. Kistiakowsky, Lawrence Professor of Chemistry emeritus that began in yesterday's Crimson.

Wiesner. You see, what is important to McNamara is how the information is distilled.

Kistiakowsky. He gets a short summary. The President gets a summary of a few pages and the Secretary gets 50 pages, but it is that kind of thing. By the time those papers were prepared, there was so much selection and value judgment and so-called agency position--in other words, you don't admit when you are wrong--that, in effect, the top-level papers were bearing very little resemblance to the basic background data.

Wiesner. And this is very important--they didn't show the true uncertainty. That was particularly striking. They simply appeared as if they had real validity. Of course, this problem isn't particularly unique to this situation. I remember that, after I became science advisor, I set out to see where some of the data we were given came from: information that was given as hard intelligence, like the number of Soviet missiles, or the number of tanks the Soviets had, or the number of divisions. And as I penetrated into the raw material I discovered that it often wasn't based on solid basic information. In fact, we caused the intelligence people to modify their estimates extensively by making them throw out the raw data they couldn't justify.

Langer. Well, did you feel obligated for political reasons in the summer study to include something about a barrier, or was that McNamara's previous idea?

Kistiakowsky. No.

Langer. How did that proposal come about?

Kistiakowsky. In our agenda proposal one of the topics we wanted to look into was a way of minimizing or reducing the flow of supplies and manpower from the north in a way that would lead to de-escalation of the war rather than escalation and bombing.

Wiesner. You see the avowed purpose of the bombing effort was trying to stop...

Langer. To stop infiltration.

Wiesner. To stop the flow of munitions. And we wanted to see whether there was an alternate way to achieve that end.

Langer. Was there no possibility of arguing about that objective?

Wiesner. We did that too, but first of all we looked at the question of whether the bombing was an effective way of achieving that objective, and it became clear that it was not. In fact, that's one of the things we said. But we also then asked whether the material coming in was significant. I think the general impression was that there was a significant flow of munitions. Isn't that correct? As I recall it, the amount of munitions coming along the trail could sustain the VC (Vietcong) although a good deal of munitions were coming in other ways too. So then the question was whether there were any technical means that we could see that might do a better job and be much less destructive. We wanted a more benign way of achieving the same end.

Kistiakowsky. We were looking for ways of minimizing the casualties and minimizing...

Wiesner. The destruction.

Kistiakowsky. The idea was to lay the so-called barrier--which had nothing to do with a fence--through the uninhabited jungles through which the Ho Chi Minh trails are cut. We were very uncertain of the feasibility of this scheme. There was a very heated internal debate in August whether we should even present the plan to Mr. McNamara.

Langer. Because of its feasibility or because of its politics?

Wiesner. Because of its feasibility. I don't think we ever argued the politics.

Kistiakowsky. You have to be aware that we thought of ourselves as what might referred to as His Majesty's Loyal Opposition. We were working through the channels, within the organization, as yet. In my case it was a bitter experience, and it led me outside the channels. Our recommendation to Mr. McNamara, made about Labor Day, 1966, was to confirm our ideas by a detailed, larger study of professionals to be organized within the Department of Defense. You remember that?

Wiesner. Yes.

Kistiakowsky. It was a very emphatic recommendation. We had even outlined a plan of what the study would involve in manpower and time and so on. Mr. McNamara's feeling was that time was of the essence. He wanted to develop details of the plan concurrently with the development of special devices, the so-called sensors, and so on, and also with plans for deployment. He felt if it were done in an orderly succession, it just would be much too slow. And at the end of '67, particularly after seeing that Mr. McNamara was essentially fired from his job, I reached the conclusion that it was completely futile to continue. At that point, I resigned, and resigned in what might be called a tactless way. In other words, I didn't claim illness or family business or fatigue. I just wrote that I vehemently opposed the present Vietnam policy and could not be even a minor party to it anymore. That's all I think I can say about it.

Langer. I'd like to say that I think the question of what is public business is sort of up for grabs at this point, and the more that is public, it seems to me, the healthier things can be.

Wiesner. I think that's right, and I believe that we ought to get rid of all secrecy on such matters. I feel strongly about this. But I think that, until there is a change in the security laws, violations of security represent a form of civil disobedience, and when one undertakes to do that, he should do it for a reason. I don't think that there's an issue on this point that justifier either of us doing it.

Langer. I didn't understand that the issue was breaking a law.

Wiesner. The McNamara decision was announced in the fall of '67 and it was then that I began to oppose the ABM deployment publicly. I also stopped working within the government and started to work outside. After the so-called thin system decision, I gave up trying to convince anybody in the government to make sense on the ABM, for I regarded that as basically a political decision. There was no question in my mind that Mr. Johnson made the the deployment decision for political reasons. He still expected to run for President, and he was protecting his flank by making that thin ABM decision. At least this is my view of what he did. There was no rationale to justify the ABM that I could see, and I decided to see if this waste for political reasons could be stopped.

Langer. How do you feel about the ABM battle? What do you make of it?

Wiesner. My feelings are complicated. I'm sorry we didn't win it. I think, nonetheless, it was a vital fight.. It showed that you could make a good fight against a foolish decision.. I believe that it exposed the military issues in a public way for the first time. I think that personally I spent far too much time on it. But I never really felt we lost it, because we kept it down, we helped Congress be responsible, we helped the public become informed. I think much of what has happened since, in the way of public debate on many things like the environment and the SST, grew out of the ABM experience.

Kistiakowsky. I very much agree with Jerry on that. In a personal sense, you might say, Jerry lost; I was a much more minor character in that one, though I lost also. So did York. But in a more fundamental sense we won, because we generated a completely new phenomenon.

Wiesner. I think in a real sense the nation won. Congress looks at everything seriously now. The public will not buy...new weapons without looking at their purposes. You can't scare them by telling them the Russian's have three, as they used to do.

Kistiakowsky. The proposals of these, I might call them "hot-rod military" types, are no sacrosanct anymore. They are challenged, and the ABM debate was the first of these public debates.

Wiesner. The ABM has been held to a modest waste of money, you know, a couple of billion dollars instead of 40 or 50 billion. So even on that score I think there was substantial gain.

Kistiakowsky. You see, in the first years of the existence of the President's Science Advisory Committee, when we were really very involved in military technology, there were similar battles about proposals of the military, but they were held completely in camera, they were on a highly classified level between the White House office and the Pentagon. The new phase is the public debate.

Wiesner. When Johnson became President, he already had a history of differences with the scientists on issues that had nothing to do with Vietnam. We had differed on the space effort. Most of us were against the crash manned space program, and we had, of course, argued about that, I had been opposed to the Mach 3 SST and he was for it. There were a whole variety of issues that had caused tensions between the Science Advisory Committee and Johnson. So when (Donald F.) Hornig became science advisor, he had to carry the burden of Johnson's alienation from the scientists. The tension was greatest on the Vietnam issue. The result was that Johnson's Science Advisory Committee didn't have as much influence on military technology as it had under Eisenhower and Kennedy. Kennedy once told a reporter that the Science Advisory Committee and the science advisor kept the government from going all one way. He appreciated what it did and President Eisenhower appreciated it, too. I don't think that Johnson felt a need for such help. Once that estrangement happened, it became necessary to take the battle elsewhere.

Kistiakowsky. Some of these quarrels that you are referring to, Jerry, took place long before he became President.

Wiesner. Right; when he was vice-president and chairman of the space council and space was the only real problem on which he had initiative.

Kistiakowsky. And I think he thought of the scientific community as being against him.

Wiesner. Because we were. We didn't really believe that the large manned space program made any sense scientifically and we kept saying so. In the end, we were willing to accept the President's judgment that it was necessary politically, but we fought against it being started, on technical grounds.

"...the people of the nation should know what their government is doing in their name to a much greater extent than they do. I think democracy cannot function properly with so much secrecy."

Kistiakowsky. Of course you know Johnson pushed for it before he was vice-president, while he was in the Senate.

Wiesner. Then, in the case of the SST, I wanted the United States to join the British-French consortium and build the Mach 2 aircraft. There were many reasons why, in my office, we didn't believe a Mach 3 SST made sense, but it ultimately went that route because the vice-president wanted it.

Kistiakowsky. And I contributed earlier than that, in the Eisenhower administration, to rejecting an SST project that was pushed about '59 or '60.

Wiesner. So there were many issues of this kind that we disagreed on..

Kistiakowsky. If you go back to, say the late '50's and early '60's, you will find that there was hardly a scientist who was privy to classified information because of his active part in government operations who ever made any public--either written or oral--statements on these matters involving security. The first change in that came about when the partial test ban treaty was signed and came up for Senate ratification. At that time, I was asked by the Administration to testify along with a number of others, like York, who had been in the government but were not in it full time anymore. I had vague qualms as to whether I should testify or not.

Wiesner. But of course, you were talking in support of the Administration.

Kistiakowsky. I was supporting the Administration and so I decided I would testify.

Wiesner. It was regarded as gauche.

Langer. I remember there was a lot of criticism of you (Wiesner) and your office at that time, for not testifying in public, being secretive about the people on your staff, and so on.

Wiesner. I remember an article to that effect in The Reporter, but I think--I thought at the time--it was a total misreading of the role of science advisor. When I became science advisor, it was to be an assistant to the President, not as the representative of the scientific community or anyone else. At least this was my view of the situation. So in that role, I obviously couldn't, and didn't intend to, oppose the President. But there are obviously many different roles. In some you have much less obligation, such as when you become a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee or a Defense Department advisory committee, but are not a full-time participant. Even for such people, it's still regarded as bad taste to engage in public debate. Some of the younger people do testify before Congress, and they've been criticized for doing so. Dick Garwin (adjunct professor of Physics, Columbia University) was criticized for his SST testimony because it opposed the Administration's position. There is a general view that, if you're going to be part of the Administration, you shouldn't simultaneously attack its posture. I believe that, if you join an Administration as a full-time employee, that is a reasonable position. If you become so disaffected with its programs that you want to fight, the proper thing to do is quit. But I don't think advisors should be throttled, that is, silenced on all issues, or the country is handicapped in making decisions. I've personally concluded--and I've thought about this since the Pentagon Papers were published--that the nation has paid a much higher price for its secrecy than it would have paid through a policy of complete openness. We've done many things on the basis of inadequate information, not only in the Vietnam War: I question whether the arms race would have taken the extreme form it did if the intelligence fellows had been forced to say what the bases of their estimates were and to defend them. If they had been exposed to serious questioning and hammered at by skeptics and asked, for example, "What makes you think the Russians are going to have a thousand bombers?" If they had been required to show their evidence, we would never have had that "bomber gap."

Kistiakowsky. And we would never have had a missile gap. And now another missle gap.

Wiesner. And there are many other examples. You mentioned, for instance, the U-2, and the extensive border penetration by U.S. electromagnetic intelligence in the '60's. When I first told Kennedy about it, he said, "My God, if the Russians did that to us, we'd go to war." And it was top secret, so secret that I, as science advisor, had a hard fight to learn about it. And after I finally had a briefing on it, I asked a colleague, "Who the hell are they keeping it from? The Russians know about it." And we concluded it was being kept from the American people so they would not know what was being done in their name. The Pentagon Papers show that there are many things of this kind. Not only should people who are government consultants not be in this embarrassing position, but the people of the nation should know what their government is doing in their name to a much greater extent than they do. I think democracy cannot function properly with so much secrecy.

Copyright 1971 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.