class="body">Dred Scott was a black slave, originally owned by an army officer in St. Louis. This officer presently was transferred to duty in Rock Island, Illinois, and later to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. He took Scott with him, and when at last he was ordered back to St. Louis he took Scott along; and now Scott was suing for his freedom, on the ground that he had lived for some years in free states and that Fort Snelling was on soil which Congress, by the Missouri Compromise, had declared forever free.

If the Supreme Court did not want to handle a hot potato it had an easy way out. It could hold that Scott as a slave could not be a citizen and so could not sue in federal court, and it could also hold that it was his status in Missouri that determined whether he was a slave or a free man. But the interesting part about the case was the Missouri Compromise angle. Did Congress have the power to legislate freedom in a territory? If it did not, the old Missouri Compromise was dead; furthermore, if Congress could not prohibit slavery in a territory, the territory itself—a creature of Congress—could not do so either; in which case Senator Douglas’ Popular Sovereignty plan was as dead as Moses … and in which case, also, Mr. Buchanan would be off of a cruel hook.

So in the weeks before his inauguration the Presidentelect undertook to open a leak. He wrote to his friend Justice James Catron asking how the court was going to rule, and when Justice Catron, after stalling briefly, indicated that the odds were favorable and suggested that Buchanan write also to Justice Robert Grier, Buchanan did so. Grier replied that he had shown the letter to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and Justice James M. Wayne, and that “we fully appreciate and concur in your views as to the desirableness at the time of having an expression of the opinion of the Court on this troublesome question.” This was plain as a pikestaff; the court was going to make a sweeping ruling on the whole broad question of slavery in the territories, and knowing the justices as he did, Buchanan had no doubt at all what the ruling was going to say.

Fortified by advance knowledge, then, Buchanan in his inaugural referred to the vexing question of slavery in the territories. This, he said, was “a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled.” With unctuous rectitude he went on to say: “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit.”

Sure enough, two days later the court handed down its decision, declaring that nobody anywhere could keep slavery out of a territory; whereby it knocked out the Missouri Compromise, destroyed Douglas’ Popular Sovereignty idea, and brought the

nation a long step nearer to its most terrible war.

It was all a little too obvious: Buchanan had so clearly known what the answer was going to be when he piously called on his countrymen to abide by the court’s findings. The Republicans loudly charged that the President and the Chief Justice had been conspiring together; and while this was not true, the President had exposed himself as a weakling who had schemed ineptly. He had succeeded only in splitting the Democratic Party.

A half century later a stronger President was at least partly involved in a leak of a very different sort, with a happier result.

In the early i goo’s the American people were proud of their navy, which was quite new. It was being built up as fast as President Theodore Roosevelt could persuade Congress to act, it had recently destroyed two Spanish squadrons in spectacular one-sided battles, and it enjoyed a worldwide reputation for its fine marksmanship. But in 1902 President Roosevelt had on his desk a letter from an unhappy young officer enclosing two detailed reports indicating that the fine new ships were in fact dangerously inferior because of poor design, that the prized marksmanship was actually atrocious, and that the Navy Department was so badly organized that it could neither admit nor correct these flaws. He added that the promotion system was just about guaranteed to bring mediocrity to the top commands.

This was disturbing stuff, and there was not much the President could do about it just then; most of the reforms called for would take extensive acts of Congress, which was inclined to be quite happy with a navy that was so goodlooking and had recently been so victorious, and never at any time does Congress enjoy having a President tell it how to legislate about the Navy. One thing Roosevelt could do on his own hook, and this he immediately did; he took the officer who had complained so sharply, Lieutenant William S. Sims, and appointed him inspector of target practice.

Sims performed excellently. He had no place to go but up. At the famous Battle of Santiago the American fleet had fired 9,500 projectiles, of which exactly 123 hit Spanish ships—and in the course of a few years Sims had changed things so that the Navy really did rank with the best in the business as far as gunnery was concerned. But on the other points no reform had been made or even attempted, and Sims was getting restless. So, in 1904, he sat down with a friend, a marine artist named Henry Reuterdahl, and gave him the material in the two interdepartmental reports that he had forwarded to the President. This, he cautioned, was not to be published just yet; Reuterdahl was to keep it on the back burner and wait until Sims gave him the go-ahead.

This came, at last, in 1907, when the end of Roosevelt’s time in the

White House was approaching and the Navy was much in the public eye on account of the battle fleet’s famous cruise around the world. Sims told Reuterdahl to print his story whenever he could arrange it, and in January, 1908, it came out in McClure’s Magazine , one of the most aggressive mass-circulation publications of that period.

It made a huge splash. American battleships, it asserted, were so badly designed that their armor belts were actually below the water line. They suffered from low freeboard to such an extent that in any kind of rough weather they could not fight their guns. Open shafts led from turrets to magazines, so that a fire or explosion in a turret could blow up the whole ship. (How serious this sort of defect could be was shown eight years later at Jutland, when a similar flaw led to the destruction of three British battle cruisers.) And the Navy’s famous system of Bureaus was incredibly inefficient—so much so that no seagoing officer ever had anything to say about the design or construction of warships, which were in the hands of shoreside technicians answerable only to the Secretary of the Navy, whose knowledge of how ships ought to be put together depended entirely on what these technicians told him.

All in all, this was quite a bill of goods, and top brass was indignant. The Navy had a regulation forbidding officers to publish, directly or indirectly, information about acts or measures of the department, and Reuterdahl obviously had had access to those reports Sims had written several years earlier. The Secretary of the Navy sent Sims a severe letter remarking on the “very unusual similarity” between the magazine article and the supposedly secret reports, and Sims took the letter to the White House and showed it to President Roosevelt.

It is possible to suspect that Roosevelt had either put Sims up to giving Reuterdahl the reports in the first place or had at least carefully looked the other way while it was being done. In any case, he now gave Sims a light pat on the wrist and then held a sheltering wing over him while the admirals blew up a storm. Sims went on to win promotion, and when the United States entered the First World War he became commander of U.S. naval forces in European waters. Meanwhile a Senate committee investigated the Reuterdahl article in the full glare of publicity (which was exactly what Sims had hoped for), and the complaints about the Navy’s defects were out where naval officers and taxpayers alike were bound to see them and take thought about them.

It would be nice to report that this set everything right, but things don’t often work out so neatly. Reform came slowly—the cumbersome Bureau system was not greatly changed for many years—and the next few battleships that were designed still had all of the shortcomings Sims had been complaining about. But in

time the reforms did come, better design was attained, and seven or eight years later American battleships were recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as leading the pack in plan and performance. When the real showdown finally came, the Navy was precisely the instrument America needed.

One of the most noteworthy dustups about the publication of forbidden information came in 1932, when a man named Herbert Yardley wrote a book on the way the United States had learned how to uncover Japanese military secrets. Yardley knew what he was talking about—he had been head of the intelligence division known as the Black Chamber during and after the First World War, and after Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson closed this project in 1929 with the remark that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” Yardley had written an extremely indiscreet book about what had been done, naming nineteen nations whose secret codes the Black Chamber people had solved. This was unfortunate, because a number of these nations promptly changed their codes, and when Yardley did his book on the Japanese, various people in the government felt that he ought to be stopped. At one time United States marshals seized the manuscript of his book on the ground that it violated a statute relating to the sanctity of secret documents, but nothing came of this and early in the New Deal administration a new law was devised providing fines and imprisonment for any government employee who published or connived at the publication of material prepared in a diplomatic code to which he, as a government worker, had had access.

The Senate was mildly puzzled, apparently inclined to wonder why the government needed to “create a new crime.” Senator Tom Connolly of Texas, guiding the bill for the administration, had a quick reply: “All the bill would do is simply to make it a criminal offense for a scoundrel to betray his confidential relationship with the Government.” In addition, it provided that anyone else who conspired with a government agent to use confidential material “for private gain or private profit ought to be punished.” That seemed reasonable—after all, nobody can object to punishing scoundrels—and in the end the bill was passed, going on the statute books as Section 95 2 of Title 18, United States Code. But Senator Hiram Johnson looked toward the future and expressed a certain worry. This bill, he said, would not touch the particular offense it was aimed at (Yardley’s) but would remain on the statute books … “a criminal law with harsh penalties, until—far in the future, when its original purpose will have been forgotten—it will be used for another purpose for which it was never intended and may do gross wrong.”

Both senators, of course, were right, as far as men can be right in a politically uncertain world, and the two points of view on leakage of government information are still valid. There are government files, dossiers, memoranda, and so

on that ought to remain hidden; some secrets are like phosphorus in that they burst into flame when exposed to the air. So governments are forever trying to devise laws that will protect the sanctity of such matters.

… and yet; pass such a law today and it will fly up and hit you in the face a generation later, when some situation you could not possibly have foreseen (l’affaire Watergate may be a case in point) generates the explosive force that will drive it out into the open. Sometimes the national welfare demands the publication of knowledge that was supposedly suppressed for the nation’s good.

And this perhaps is another way of saying that over the long haul too much knowledge is better than too little. Democracy’s road is always bumpy but it is the only road we have, and if it bruises us at times we at least keep moving. The leaks that cause these bumps now and then seem unendurable, but now and then they are also utterly essential.

THE DAWNING OF THE LEAK