Building Our Own "Iron Curtain": The Emergence of Secrecy in American Government

Abstract

On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill delivered a famous speech that many say signaled the beginning of the Cold War. Addressing an audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill spoke about the deteriorating relationship between the Soviet Union and the Western allies less than one year after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan. In a now famous quote, he warned, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”1 The metaphor caught the imagination of Americans and it was used thereafter to describe the divide that separated the West from the East This metaphor is useful because it also conveys a sense of the divide that now separates Americans from their government because of the latter’s increased use of secrecy to shroud, in the name of national security, many of its actions and decisions. State and local officials have followed the federal government’s example, and today the tilt toward secrecy permeates our entire system of government from the White House to the local school board. There are many ways to make curtains. The Russians did so in 1946 with tanks and barbed wire, but ours is a curtain of our own design, woven with executive orders, legislation, and most of all, the system of classifying sensitive