How does one write about the history of the U.S. intelligence services without sounding like you either hate America, or you are a paranoid lunatic? One thing that you can rely on about Americans is that we like to feel good about ourselves; we like to feel virtuous. And, in a lot of ways, we are virtuous. We’re generous, confident, idealistic, and justifiably proud of many of our accomplishments as a nation.
We believe in our own myths, not so much because we hold them to be truths, but because we believe the myths are the right myths to have. Our aspirations for a just society may never be perfectly met, but by valuing the ideals of the Founding Fathers we further the cause of approaching those ideals. Our country may be overrun by dangerous wingnuts at the moment but, to a great extent, even the wingnuts share this progressive optimism. Even for the neo-cons, if we allow ourselves to ascribe any sincerity whatsoever to their delusional grand-plans, the belief that reality will succumb to good intentions and high ideals is strong. This uniquely American mindset is simultaneously responsible for our unique place in the world (it works), and responsible for our greatest blunders (it has a big downside).
Simply put, we want to believe in our unique virtue, courage, and exemplary history. We slew the dragons of fascism and communism. We shone light on a world half-shrouded in darkness. And, while we can debate how much of the credit for the defeat of fascism and communism is truly due to America’s contributions, we can’t dispute the critical role that our nation played in their defeat.
We also cannot dispute the unique contribution our Founding Fathers made in laying out principles that are nearly universally respected, and increasingly enshrined in international law. Our nation’s imperfect effort to live out those ideals has been a shining example that those ideals are workable, desirable, and approachable.
So, we’re proud.
And proud people frequently suffer from hubris. Proud people have a hard time facing up to their own shortcomings. We’ve been through this before. We went through it in the late 60’s and early 70’s. In Vietnam we met a reality that would not bend to our will. In Watergate, we learned that our government was capable of falling far short of our own pollyannaish self-image. But it was the Church and Pike Committees that most clearly showed the nefarious underbelly of American power.
This was a period in American history when the public was outraged at revelations that shattered our myths about our own unique virtue. The experience was an anguish for many, but it also was exhilarating and liberating to learn the secrets unearthed by the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate investigation, the ensuing Congressional inquiries, and the dismal end to the war in Vietnam. But this date with introspection was brief, and it was CBS reporter Daniel Schorr who stood at the crossroads where the pendulum began to swing back to self-congratulatory self-worship. Schorr received and leaked a classified annex of the Pike report to the Village Voice. And he was immediately assaulted by the Establishment and abandoned by his erstwhile friends in the press. Even before the leak, a Harris poll from December 1975 had indicated more respondents disapproved of the Church and Pike Committees than approved of them. The country had had enough of airing our dirty laundry. The election of Reagan in 1980 was, in some sense, an investment in forgetting the recent past in order to believe in America again.
Perhaps this is understandable. But something critical was lost; something crucial was papered over. And that something was the idea that the government must be accountable to the people, and that the Executive must submit to the oversight and powers of both the Congress and the judiciary. We forgot not only what the CIA had done in its, then, thirty-year history, but much more importantly, why they had done it. We forgot whose interests they had been serving. And now the chickens have come home to roost.
The Downing Street Leaks have revealed an almost unimaginable conspiracy to defraud the American people, the British people, and the people of the world. As we begin to dig into this history, we will discover that members of the press were working for our intelligence agencies, helping to fix the facts around the policy. And we’ll resist believing it. But we wouldn’t be shocked if we remembered the revelations of the Church and Pike commissions. We wouldn’t be shocked if we had paid closer attention during the Clinton era.
What many don’t realize as we battle to prevent the right-wing from erasing the reforms of the sixties, is that we have already lost the battle over the reforms of the seventies. The United Fruit of yesteryear is the Halliburton of today, but the abuse of power is the same.
The pendulum is slowly swinging back, and the backlash will be terrible. America’s attention span and patience for self-recrimination will be brief. But soon there will be hell to pay. As an American, believing this is my own brand of virtue, optimism, and hubris.
