Fifty years ago, in January 1953, my father wrote a long front-page editorial in the Boston Sunday Post hailing the forthcoming inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower as a “momentous day in American history.”
He welcomed the new administration in Washington and rejected those who criticized Eisenhower’s cabinet appointees because they were wealthy businessmen. My father also felt enthusiastic about reversal of a philosophy whereby “the domination of the individual by the State has progressed to a point where it is dangerous to the American way.”
By contrast with my father, I did not “like Ike,” as a presidential candidate and had voted for his opponent Adlai Stevenson. Though, by contrast with my newspaperman father, I stood far removed from public affairs, I would have strongly rejected his scathing appraisal of “the motley crowd that found its way to Washington and into governmental agencies” in the earlier administrations.
To me, Roosevelt’s appointees and, to a lesser extent, Truman’s had led us to both a greater measure of economic fairness for ordinary citizens and to victory in World War II. I admired the work and thinking of people like Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and George Marshall, stars in the two Democratic administrations.
Given our tensions, it would have been difficult for us to exchange views about politics, but I now wish we had been able to. At the time, I was in monastic seclusion in Lenox, Massachusetts, for from the public arena. This business between us will always remain unfinished, much to my continuing regret.
Were he looking at the national scene this January, my father would presumably not mind the presence of wealthy businessmen in the Bush cabinet. The president’s and the vice president’s devotion to big oil companies would not cause misgivings in him the way they do in me.
But the enlarged role of the federal government in the private affairs of individual citizens might well give him pause.
Looking toward 2003, I feel anxious about what is happening to our country as mobilization for war continues. Memory of what happened to us in the early fifties stir in me fear of repression like that led by Joe McCarthy.
Of course domestic Communism posed some threat to the well-being of the United States at that time, but the witch hunt by McCarthy and his henchmen did considerable damage to our fellow citizens and threatened even more. Eisenhower himself seemed afraid to intervene for fear of adverse political reaction.
Apparently more wary of Communism than of the loss of civil liberties, my father sided with McCarthy. Even now I find it poignant and distressing that among the wreaths that arrived for my father’s funeral came one from Senator Joe McCarthy.
But I still believe proposals for the “Total Information Awareness” program that Admiral John Poindexter has been appointed to engineer would trouble a journalist worried about the “domination of the individual by the State.”
Total Information Awareness seems to me a term based on hyperbole but nonetheless terrifying in its import. It would be a way of linking electronic data from sources such as credit card transactions and calling card uses. This so-called “data mining” would be used with “profiling technologies” to reveal suspicious behavior that could be spotted by government bureaucrats.
Thus government could snoop on the actions of private citizens no matter how inoffensive their business might be. Citizens of certain backgrounds would likely suffer suspicion simply by reason of their religion, national origin, or organizational affiliation. All would be done in the name of patriotism and the defense of our country against foreign and domestic attack.
This system has been planned by the Pentagon and would thus give to the military widespread and unprecedented power over civilian life. It would mean the triumph of technology over individual freedoms to a degree that I find frightening. Perhaps the time has come for ordinary citizens like me to voice our misgivings about this system before it becomes too late to exercise any control at all over it.
I take heart from resolutions passed by some two dozen cities and towns, including my own, urging local government officials to oppose the federal war on terrorism when they see it as violating the rights of private citizens. Even places not known for radicalism, like Tampa and Fairbanks have passed such municipal resolutions.
A terribly destructive war in Iraq is a daunting enough prospect for the new year without adding to it a campaign repressive of American’s civil rights. The older I get, the more important these rights appear as the bedrock of our democracy.
Though we disagreed on so much, and he did not consistently uphold it, perhaps I can invoke the same principle that my father espoused at the beginning of the new year 1953. We, too, must be on guard against antiterrorist programs that violate civil rights.
Richard Griffin