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Commission on
Protecting and Reducing
Government Secrecy
Washington, D.C.
April 23, 1996
Dear Mr. Brent:
I write to express my admiration for the exceptionally important work
in which you and your colleagues at the Yale University Press are
engaged. Your arrangement to publish, through your "Annals of
Communism" series, a comprehensive account of the records that
gradually are being made available from the former Soviet archives is,
as my friend William F. Buckley, Jr. recently put it, essential to our
"understanding of the most important political phenomenon of the
century, the rise and fall of the communist international
movement."
Because of your ongoing commitment to publish these records,
historians and other scholars both here and abroad will be engaged for
many years to come in an enormous reappraisal of the role of the Soviet
leadership, and that of members of Communist parties in this country and
elsewhere, in attempting to influence a wide range of critical domestic
and international policy decisions. The efforts of the Yale University
Press in this regard, combined with the important work being done at the
Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project here in
Washington, thus are critical and warrant the encouragement and support
of all persons interested in developing a more complete understanding of
the 20th century.
Might I simply note, on a personal level, that your accomplishments
already have had important consequences for the work of the Commission
on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Our two-year, bipartisan
Commission is charged with analyzing and making recommendations
concerning the system of classification of national security information
and the procedures for handling security clearances. (I have enclosed
additional information on the Commission’s primary objectives, work
plan, and membership.) To my mind, any understanding of how the
"secrecy system" that by and large remains in place today was
established in the years following World War II requires an adequate
recognition of the activities of the Communist Party in this country
during that time period – and the Federal government’s reaction.
Toward that end, in addition to inviting a cross-section of experts
on classification and personnel security to meet with our Commission
over the past several months, I made certain that among our first
visitors -- at our second formal meeting on May 17, 1995 – were Drs.
Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes. Each of the twelve Commissioners
received a copy of their remarkable volume, The Secret World of
American Communism, part of your Annals of Communism series.
The discussion that ensued on May 17 concerning what the newly-opened
archives in Moscow and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union revealed of
the activities of the CPUSA was hugely helpful to the Members of the
Commission. And it in turn led our Commission, which includes four
Members of Congress and the Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch,
to assume an important role in pressing for additional disclosures from
long-closed American archives – in particular, the release of
the so-called "VENONA intercepts" by the National Security
Agency. The VENONA releases, which should be completed by the end of
this year, also are prompting a long-overdue reevaluation of Communist
activities in this country, most notably with respect to the theft of
atomic secrets at Los Alamos.
All of us who care to ensure that this generation and future ones
possess an adequate understanding of what transpired between 1917 and
1991, and in particular during the terrible decade following the end of
World War II (when, as Edward Shils put it, "[t]he American visage
began to cloud over"), are in debt of the Yale University Press for
your efforts and contribution. I look forward to doing whatever I can to
ensure that your important work is neither thwarted nor diminished in
any way owing to a lack of sufficient financial support.
Sincerely,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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