Finally, 40 years after the summer when President Nixon's secret White House taping system was revealed — yielding the evidence that ultimately brought down his presidency — the government this week released the last batch of those tapes.
Now we can say definitively that Richard Nixon, to what would surely be his great consternation, headed the most transparent administration in American history. Nobody before or since has given us such an ear on the precincts of power.
So let us revel in irony as we hail Richard Nixon, champion of open government. Maybe the effort to bug the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel back in 1972 was just an effort to force that very openness on the opposition, too — a sort of guerrilla good government campaign led by a gang known as the White House plumbers. You know, maybe.
Actually, Nixon wasn't the first president to record what was going on in the White House. Between 1940 and 1973, six American presidents from both political parties — Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon — secretly recorded some 5,000 hours of meetings and phone calls. Nixon ruined things, though, by conspiring to commit felonies on his tapes. It seems that the fear of repeating his error has kept his successors from flipping the switch back on.
But all was not lost. Watergate spurred a demand for more openness in government that has, in some ways, lasted decades. Campaign finance reporting laws were strengthened, though subsequent court decisions have given back-door donors some new protection. The federal Freedom of Information Act, implemented shortly before Nixon was elected, was greatly strengthened in 1975 — a post-Watergate reform that forced more government activity to function in the open.
More significant has been a shift in attitude. Americans have a greater expectation of transparency in government than they did before Watergate. It's not clear what purpose Nixon had in mind for his White House tapes, but in addition to making people more cynical — who knew that a president could be so profane and manipulative? — they have made us less willing to tolerate public officials keeping us in the dark about what they are doing and why.
So it's surprising that New Yorkers seem mostly unconcerned by the secrecy that grips the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. If only there were tapes operating in that great Romanesque building on State Street.
Cuomo promised the most transparent government in the state's history. To be sure, he has launched some initiatives that seemingly embrace that vow. Notably, a new state website, open.ny.gov, features data on economic development, health, public services and recreation, and links to sites of other states and the federal government. It's a good 21st-century tool for finding raw data on public spending.
But in an era when email and text messaging are key ways that government officials communicate with each other and shape policy, taxpayers cannot get access to either source from the Cuomo years. The governor's team has implemented a retention policy that tells state officials to purge their emails after 90 days, with the exception of messages that are needed for an agency to function.
You might expect emails to be usefully retained in the State Archives, the better to help us understand the deliberations and intent behind state initiatives. But you might as well forget about that.
Anyway, Cuomo's aides long ago said that he doesn't use email, instead relying on phone calls or the PIN messaging system on his BlackBerry. Neither leaves a record.
And Cuomo has decided that almost everything that recorded his term as the state's attorney general is "attorney work product," thus protected from disclosure by the privilege of confidentiality that attorneys enjoy with their clients.
Argue all you like that an attorney general's clients are the citizens of the state, but don't try to get your hands on documents that were created as your attorney general was at work on your cases. It's really none of your business, apparently.
Why should we care?
Because secrecy is antithetical to democracy. Because secrecy creates a breeding ground for corruption. And, to be practical, because secrecy gives rise to leaks, which rest on morally uneven turf.
Government secrecy ought to be reserved for consequential material that if disclosed would imperil citizens or the government itself. Penalties are rightly meted out to people who disclose such material, like the 35-year term imposed this week on Army Pfc. Bradley Manning for the biggest leak of classified U.S. military and diplomatic files ever.
Nothing in state files is of that consequence, presumably. So it's mysterious why the Cuomo administration is behaving like it's 1973 all over again in deciding what citizens can see.
Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://blog.timesunion.com/editors.