Nate Jones at the National Security Archive Blog just put up this post that includes the audio of the June 14, 1971 tape from President Nixon’s White House recording system in which Nixon responds to the New York Times‘s publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Included in this tape is H.R. Haldeman’s memorable quote – a quote that is included in Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, in which Haldeman notes that even though the content of the Pentagon Papers may be “gobbledygook” to the public
. . . out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants [them] to do even though it’s wrong. And the president can be wrong.
Jones notes that
In time for Sunshine Week, the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America†(which relied upon National Security Archive documents) has re-raised the issues of government secrecy, national security, and which types of information the American public has the right to know.
We’d add that Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers does the same.
Pingback: Army Knowledge Leaders Study Cloud Computing | Cloud Computing Journal | Naval Engineering Addict