Reading Other People's Mail with Wikileaks
In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson shut down an ongoing code-breaking operation saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Stimson has come in for a great deal of flack from some historians for this action. A few go so far as to claim it was responsible for American unpreparedness leading up to Pearl Harbor. His was a Victorian outlook, they claim, sadly out of date after World War I and the revelations of the “secret diplomacy” between nations that produced a tangle of alliances and promises. To be willfully unaware of all the maneuverings as the postwar truce broke down and powerful evil forces emerged was like blinding oneself in a knife-fight. Pearl Harbor proved the point.
But there is another way of reading Stimson’s reproach to the code breakers, however, that does have relevance to the hysteria over the most recent Wikileaks “treasure trove” of documents that pertain especially to historians. And it may be closer to what the long-time public servant really meant to convey with his statement. In the first place, his comment that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail ought to be treated by historians as a caution against making too much of gossip about foreign leaders. As we know, policymakers are supplied with short bios of visiting dignitaries to the White House, and the intelligence services provide biographies with psychological profiles for general use on the top floors of the State Department. But brief glimpses are hardly the stuff of serious policymaking. Second, Stimson’s comment refers as much to confidence in government as it does to reading other people’s mail. As American involvement in world affairs grew, the publication of diplomatic papers that began as an attachment to the president’s annual message lagged farther and father behind. Confidence in government remained high, however, despite the “revisionist” studies of American entrance into World War I and World War II.
It was not until the Vietnam War that the “credibility gap” led newspapers to accept the responsibility for publishing the Pentagon Papers. After Gulf War I, President George H.W. Bush declared that the nation had kicked the Vietnam “syndrome.” What he meant was not simply achieving victory in that brief encounter, but the more important objective: recapture of public trust in government. He was as premature in declaring that particular “Mission Accomplished” as President George W. Bush would be in voicing his boastful assurance that the invasion of Iraq had been a monumental triumph and open the way to a new birth of freedom across the sands of the Middle East.
Perhaps it cannot be asserted that Wikileaks’s greatest revelation is really about public disappointment with, or disapproval of, American foreign policy. Historians will need to examine the hysteria over the release of the documents, nevertheless, as a symptom of government concern about such mistrust and come to terms with that problem. Assange’s opposites in the Tea Party, particularly Rand Paul, share with him such a mission, if they do not wind up in the same camp about what to do. Daniel Ellsberg has long called for a new Pentagon Papers. One great difference, of course, between the Papersand the Wikileaks documents are the commentaries. The original Pentagon Papers volumes included narratives by the historians who compiled the attached documents, the usual formula of many history texts. Wikileaks are raw material given out first to papers in Great Britain and Europe. And the approach each newspaper, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and finally the New York Times (which obtained them as a leak of a leak) takes in framing the documents is different. The Pentagon Papershistorians were less interested in formulating current policy than in explaining the way the United States got into the terrible predicament in Vietnam.
Julian Assange has asserted, however, that it is his goal to embarrass the United States government, and, presumably, to force a change in American foreign policy. He may succeed—but not in the way he hopes. Historians have already expressed fears to me that the way the documents are framed in the American press (the NYT and derivative stories), could well increase pressure on Washington to go along with those countries that want to carry out, or say they want to carry out, a military strike to cripple Iran’s nuclear programs. Of course what they mean is that they would like the United States to carry out an attack that would give them plausible deniability. We have known from some time from other “leaks,” that Israel is the exception and would attack Iran if given American aid and protection. What an irony it would be if Wikileaks unleashes a campaign like the “Yellow Press” before the War of 1898!
Already there are charges from the Iranian government that Wikileaks is little more than a subset of American intelligence, releasing documents as it would launch an assault with military weapons in an effort to bring down the government in Tehran. The attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists at exactly the same time as the documents are leaked, says its leaders, offers the proof of this campaign. The fallout from the Wikileaks revelations may therefore depend much less on the documents themselves than how they are used to advance a particular objective. What is instructive is how quickly the documents can be fitted into such a use, and/or how quickly an objective can be formed around the documents that might have trouble being achieved otherwise.
Historians will have to grapple with all these questions in ways that looking at “old” documents did not require. New York Times editor Bill Keller weighed the pros and cons of publishing the documents and finally concluded, “it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.” Historians will wish to concern themselves with the cultural preoccupations of the American public with Hollywood gossip about foreign leaders, and how that will spill over into policy from eavesdropping on other people’s mail. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed in some ways to be updating Stimson when she claimed that releasing these exchanges “was not just an attack on America’s foreign-policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.” Exactly what is meant by that comment is not entirely clear. She suggests that the leaks will set nations against one another, but that assumes other nations are basically naïve about how American foreign policy works. She claims in the next breath that there will be no long lasting impact on relations with America’s allies. So one is forced back to the problem of the American people’s trust in its foreign policy, and her main worry is about what that will bring. Indeed. Wikileaks is a mixed blessing for historians.