First, let me say that Patrick Moynihan is an intelligent man. However, this book is bunk. He states that the Cold War was completely unnecessary - that the USSR was going to collapse anyway. Therefore, all the money/effort spent on it was wasted. That's like saying that we would've won World War II anyway, so all that money spent on D-Day was a waste.

The USSR was in trouble BECAUSE of the Cold War pressure. According to Moynihan Russia was on the verge of collapse for years, but the FBI and CIA covered it all up. Here's what he's saying - Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter & Reagan - and maybe earlier Presidents as well - had no idea that the USSR was in trouble all those years. The FBI and CIA can cover up things, but not an entire economy on the brink of collapse. That's what Moynihan wants you to believe.

I would've thought it would be beneath Moynihan to engage in the now widespread practice saying that Reagan had nothing to do with the end of the Soviet Union.

For example, the premise that Truman had Russia on the ropes is ridiculous. How handing over all of Eastern Europe contributed to the defeat of Communism is beyond me. Carter's boycott of the 1980 Olympics, his idea of a blow to the Soviet machine, was purely a symbolic gesture. And a weak one at that.

That was the extent of Carter's efforts to contain Russia. Both of these men did some good things in office, pressuring the USSR was not one of them.

Moynihan is just another party liner, as intelligent as he is. He proved it by endorsing Hillary Clinton to take his place, despite catching her in a lie. In making her case to be his successor, she actually claimed to have been the originator of legislation that Moynihan himself had created (You can read about it in the Vanity Fair article). The fact that he called her on it and STILL endorsed her should tell you something. By doing that, and by writing this book, he proved to be all about toeing the party line.

This is an important documentation and history of the blight of screcy overtaking the American Government in the wake of the Second World War, especially in the context of the Cold War. Moynihan is especially critical of the way in which the gestation of classified information supporting fallacious conclusions (e.g. the Missile Gap)thwared proper open discussion and review of wrong policies. Moynihan makes a sound case for the excessive use of classification, to the point of absurdity. This erosion of the open society requires an active correction, although it is hard to see how this usurpation of power can be stopped in the short term. In any case, the threat to 'government by the people' is direct and ominous.

Senator Moynihan applies his intellect and his strong academic and historical bent to examine the U.S. experience with secrecy, beginning with its early distrust of ethnic minorities. He applies his social science frames of reference to discuss secrecy as a form of regulation and secrecy as a form of ritual, both ultimately resulting in a deepening of the inherent tendency of bureaucracy to create and keep secrets-secrecy as the cultural norm. His historical overview, current right up to 1998, is replete with documented examples of how secrecy may have facilitated selected national security decisions in the short-run, but in the long run these decisions were not only found to have been wrong for lack of accurate open information that was dismissed for being open, but also harmful to the democratic fabric, in that they tended to lead to conspiracy theories and other forms of public distancing from the federal government. He concludes: "The central fact is that we live today in an Information Age. Open sources give us the vast majority of what we need to know in order to make intelligent decisions. Decisions made by people at ease with disagreement and ambiguity and tentativeness. Decisions made by those who understand how to exploit the wealth and diversity of publicly available information, who no longer simply assume that clandestine collection-that is, 'stealing secrets'-equals greater intelligence. Analysis, far more than secrecy, is the key to security....Secrecy is for losers."

A very interesting account of governmental secrecy during various times of conflict. Would make a nice supplemental reading for professors teaching a American Politics course. I touches upons foreign policy and the relationship between the Executive, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Most of the material deals with the development of secrecy as a standard operating procedure during WWI and WWII. Vietnam and the Iran-Contra Affair are touched upon but could have been expanded.

Moynihan presents an array of anecdotal evidence of instances where secrecy produced unintended, and unfortunate results, and draws that sweeping conclusion that secrecy is bad. A more modest conclusion, such as that the government designates too much stuff as secret might be supported, but Moynihan's generalization is too much. Also, the introduction to the book written by Richard Gid Powers far outshines the portion written by Moynihan. Moynihan's stuff is a dry as dust.