The Anderson Files

Editorial, NY Times
The Anderson Files

Published: April 24, 2006

Over four decades as one of Washington's most famous investigative journalists, Jack Anderson and his staff amassed thousands of documents that a lot of top officials wanted to keep secret. Mostly, they concerned embarrassing missteps or were leaks by whistle-blowers who saw things going wrong and wanted to tell somebody. But now, only a few months after Mr. Anderson's death, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to paw through 188 boxes of Mr. Anderson's old files to look for documents they say might have been classified somewhere along the line as secret.

The Anderson family has rightly refused to allow the F.B.I. unfettered access to these papers, arguing that such an intrusion would betray Mr. Anderson's principles as a journalist and amount to a fishing expedition that could intimidate other journalists (and their sources). As the family put it in a letter to the F.B.I., if the columnist were alive "he would resist the government's efforts with all the energy he could muster."

The reasons should be clear to anyone who values the free exchange of ideas. First, much of the substance in those documents has been published. Second, whatever is classified is probably old, and may not have deserved to be classified in the first place. At a recent hearing, Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, said there was widespread agreement among secrecy experts that 50 percent to 90 percent of material currently withheld from the public should not be classified. Finally, the F.B.I. should not have the right to rummage through the files of a journalist, living or dead.

F.B.I. officials say "no private person" may possess classified documents provided to that person "illegally." That sounds as though some in the administration are trying to turn the old and ambiguous Espionage Act into something approaching an official secrets act. It raises fears of a government merely stamping something secret and making it illegal for a journalist to possess it.

This administration always excuses its obsession with secrecy by citing national security. If that's the larger issue, is the Anderson estate really a priority? Is the public really best served in the age of high-tech terrorism by having F.B.I. agents rifling through a dead reporter's files from Iran-contra, the Keating Five and Watergate?