Appendix D

Letter from President Kennedy to the Secretary of Defense

February 8, 1962

DEAR MR. SECRETARY: You have brought to my attention the fact that the Senate’s Special Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee intends to ask witnesses from your department to give testimony identifying the names of individuals who made or recommended changes in specific speeches.

As you know, it has been and will be the consistent policy of this administration to co-operate fully with the committees of the Congress with respect to the furnishing of information. In accordance with this policy, you have made available to the subcommittee 1500 speeches with marginal notes, hundreds of other documents and the names of the fourteen individual speech reviewers, eleven of whom are military officers. You have also made available the fullest possible background information about each of these men, whose record of service and devotion to the country is unquestioned in every case; and you have permitted the committee staff to interview all witnesses requested and to conduct such interviews outside the presence of any departmental representative. Finally, you have identified the departmental source of each suggested change, and offered to furnish in writing an explanation of each such change, and the policy or guideline under which it was made.

Your statement that these changes are your responsibility, that they were made under your policies and guidelines and those of this administration and that you would be willing to explain them in detail, is both fitting and accurate, and offers to the subcommittee all the information properly needed for purposes of its current inquiry. It is equally clear that it would not be possible for you to maintain an orderly department, and receive the candid advice and loyal respect of your subordinates, if they—instead of you and your senior associates—are to be individually answerable to the Congress as well as to you for their internal acts and advice.

For these reasons, and in accordance with the precedents on separation of powers established by my predecessors from the first to the last, I have concluded that it would be contrary to the public interest to make available any information which would enable the subcommittee to identify and hold accountable any individual with respect to any particular speech that he has reviewed. I therefore direct you, and all personnel under the jurisdiction of your department, not to give any testimony or produce any documents which would disclose such information; and I am issuing parallel instructions to the Secretary of State.

The principle which is at stake here cannot be automatically applied to every request for information. Each case must be judged on its own merits. But I do not intend to permit subordinate officials of our career services to bear the brunt of congressional inquiry into policies which are the responsibilities of their superiors.

Sincerely yours, JOHN F. KENNEDY

APPENDIX E

Executive Privilege Correspondence between President Kennedy and Congressman John E. Moss

February 15, 1962

The Honorable John F. Kennedy The President of the United States The White House Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President:

In your letter of February 8, 1962 to Secretary McNamara you directed him to refuse certain information to a Senate Subcommittee. The concluding paragraph of your letter stated:

“The principle which is at stake here cannot be automatically applied to every request for information. Each case must be judged on its merits.”

A similar letter from President Eisenhower on May 17, 1954 also refused information to a Senate Subcommittee, setting forth the same arguments covered in your letter. President Eisenhower did not, however, state that future questions of availability of information to the Congress would have to be answered as they came up.

I know you are aware of the result of President Eisenhower’s letter. Time after time Executive Branch employees far down the administrative line from the President fell back on his letter of May 17, 1954 as authority to withhold information from the Congress and the public.

Some of the cases are well known—the Dixon-Yates matter and the investigation of East-West trade controls, for instance—but many of the refusals based on President Eisenhower’s letter of May 17, 1954 received no public notice. A report of the House Committee on Government Operations covering the five years from June, 1955 through June, 1960 lists 44 cases of Executive Branch officials refusing information on the basis of the principles set forth in the May 17, 1954 letter.

I am confident that you share my belief that your letter of February 8, 1962 to Secretary McNamara should not be seized upon by Executive Branch employees—many of them holding the same policymaking positions of responsibility they did under the Eisenhower Administration—as a new claim of authority to withhold information from the Congress and the public. A Subcommittee staff study indicates that during the year between the time you took office and February 8, 1962 the claim of an “executive privilege” to withhold government information was not used successfully once, compared to the dozens of times in previous years administrative employees held up “executive privilege” as a shield against public and Congressional access to information.

Although your letter of February 8, 1962 stated clearly that the principle involved could not be applied automatically to restrict information, this warning received little public notice. Clarification of this point would, I believe, serve to prevent the rash of restrictions on government information which followed the May 17, 1954 letter from President Eisenhower.

Sincerely, /s/ John E. Moss Chairman

THE WHITE HOUSE Washington

March 7, 1962

Dear Mr. Chairman:

This is in reply to your letter of last month inquiring generally about the practice this Administration will follow in invoking the doctrine of executive privilege in withholding certain information from the Congress.

As your letter indicated, my letter of February 8 to Secretary McNamara made it perfectly clear that the directive to refuse to make certain specific information available to a special subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee was limited to that specific request and that “each case must be judged on its merits.”

As you know, this Administration has gone to great lengths to achieve full co-operation with the Congress in making available to it all appropriate documents, correspondence and information. That is the basic policy of this Administration, and it will continue to be so. Executive privilege can be invoked only by the President and will not be used without specific Presidential approval. Your own interest in assuring the widest public accessibility to governmental information is, of course, well known, and I can assure you this Administration will continue to co-operate with your subcommittee and the entire Congress in achieving this objective.

Sincerely, /s/ JOHN F. KENNEDY

Honorable John E. Moss Chairman Special Government Information Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations House of Representatives Washington, D.C.

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 27 Changed: political figures organized a constuction to: political figures organized a construction

pg 57 Changed: records or testify even when suppoenaed to: records or testify even when subpoenaed

pg 81 Changed: effective administration that employes to: effective administration that employees

pg 164 Changed: and Hardy decided to to try to: and Hardy decided to try

pg 238 Changed: executive privilege in withholdng to: executive privilege in withholding