THE GORED OX

an editorial by John W. Campbell

The hoorah set off by the recent publication of various secret government papers has been analyzed, preached over, and howled over. The amount of heat generated enormously exceeded the amount of light produced.

There still seem to be some points that haven't been touched on by the mass media; one is the magnificently human non sequitur attitudes shown with respect to such items as publication of the stolen FBI files—cheers and hoorays! Wonderful!—and the equally stolen Pentagon Report—hallelujah and the Free Press!—versus the reactions of those same liberal-minded seekers after truth when the question of government use of telephone taps and the validity of evidence obtained without a search warrant are considered.

If a government agent steals the Syndicate's books and proves their loan-sharking business—throw that evidence out of court! The Court of Justice has no right to use stolen data, even if it does happen to he true!

Stealing and publishing the FBI files is a great idea—three cheers for the sneak-thief who did the noble act! It's a good thing because the stolen material shows the FBI was gathering data that was mere rumor and speculation, and wasn't proper data, and that was proven by publishing it publicly.

Actually, of course, newspapers that had known all of that data for years weren't able to publish it because of libel laws; they may have known the facts, but couldn't get legal evidence to prove it, and therefore didn't dare publish it.

But publishing FBI data files is something else; they can claim no responsibility for what the FBI said in their files.

A year or so ago some magnificent Syndicate dirty linen got washed very publicly when a series of FBI bugging tapes was released by court order. One Syndicate member in deep trouble in court, partly by reason of data the FBI had found through use of their bugging tapes, demanded through his attorneys that the FBI tapes be made available to him for study. The results were, from the Syndicate's viewpoint, a disaster; it meant that all the tapes had to be made part of the legal court record, and therefore public documents.

Now since most of the tapes were made up of assorted Syndicate members gossiping, discussing rumors, and bragging about how much power and influence they had—what government officials they'd bribed or blackmailed into cooperation—the percentage of truth was about what you'd find in the average gossip-factory output.

It certainly loused up the Syndicate's operations—but it was just the sort of thing to ruin the career of a strong, honest politician. The men who can't be bought, and won't yield to pressure, are the ones the crime bosses most want to push; they stand out as the key log in a logjam. Because they won't yield, a lot of other more amenable politicos can heave a sigh and say, "But I can't so long as he doesn't!"

Wherefore when boasting about their power and achievements, the juiciest boast is the claim to have pressured, or bought, the tough ones into compliance. After all, it's no boast to say you've bought-out some weakling who sells out to anyone for a few bucks!

But inevitably, any well-running gossip-factory produces a few items of truth; the business of a detective is to collect all the statements and suspicions and spiteful claims he can, and then winnow them, cross-check, and search out implied data, until he finds the small percentage of truth that can establish the guilty ones.

Anyone who reads detective stories knows the essence of that business; suspect everyone, listen to anyone's comments, consider all possibilities, and derive the truth from the bits and pieces that come mixed with unreliable, untruthful, and totally irrelevant data. Three of the possible killers won't reveal where they were at the crucial time; it's a good bet all three are innocent of the killing, but you've got to pry out the data somehow. So one of 'em was busy cheating on his wife, who owns all the money in the family. One of 'em just happened to be busy helping two associates rob a jewelry store in the city. And the third was equally busy about nonpublic business which had nothing whatever to do with the murder case, but which the public has no right to know.

Now be it noted that the public's desire to know does not establish any right to know. None whatsoever. Just because you're nosy, and have a violent curiosity, and think it's important, doesn't mean that you have a right to pry into other people's private affairs.

That is a point which many liberals and press people have a total in ability to appreciate. The fact that they want to know something establishes, in their minds, the right to know it. Freedom of the press means they can pry loose any information they want, any way, legal or illegal, they want, and it's right because they have a right to know.

Consider this: If Jack Ruby hadn't done the nation the great favor of shooting Oswald dead, there was considerable danger we'd have wound up with the interesting situation that the President's assassin would have walked out of court a free and untouchable man. Thanks to the work of the free press, the liberal ideas, and the remarkably incompetent district attorney in Dallas. There was, of course, a tremendous howling, hammering, screaming demand for news about the case—not only the United States, but all the rest of the world wanted to know. The pressure of the world press beating down on a relatively small-town midwestern police force and district attorney, did not help their use of sound judgment.

They cooperated with the press. They gave out so much news, so much data, information, and discussion of what was going on, and what was believed to have happened, that there is great doubt that Oswald could ever have been brought to trial. There had been so much public discussion of both evidence and speculation that competent defense attorneys could have had practically all of the evidence thrown out of court.

The one thing that Oswald might have been tried for successfully would have been the murder of the policeman he shot—the act that actually led to his arrest. The world wasn't very interested in the murder of the policeman; they wanted to know all about Kennedy's assassination.

Any effort to try Oswald for the murder of the President would probably have wound up being a fiasco—because the free press got, too freely, what it wanted.

The Supreme Court has not yet had the courage to lay down any sort of rules defining what the limitations on free speech and free press are; Justice Holmes's famous dictum that one doesn't have free speech to the extent of yelling "Fire! Fire!" in a crowded theater is about as far as that's been defined.

The FBI—and any crime-detection agency—must have a right of privacy. It's granted that a doctor, lawyer, or priest have a right of privacy in that they can gather information and refuse to reveal that information to anyone else. It's been recognized that the press reporter has a right to keep his sources of information confidential—and my, oh, my how the press howls when that right is even slightly, peripherally, threatened!

But the press is very loudly, and self-righteously proud of its feats in fencing stolen documents and publishing information gathered by the FBI and the Pentagon.

There's been a hoorah going on about the CBS news documentary "The Selling of the Pentagon," with CBS flatly refusing to provide the Congressional investigators with all the film they made in the process of making that news special.

Judging by the liberal press's attitude, the thing the Congressional committee should do is hire some expert burglars to break in and steal the CBS film records, or suborn some CBS employee to sneak it out to them.

It all boils down to a very old expression—one so old that the very words are obsolete today: "It depends on whose ox is gored."

Now if you hold a concept of Justice that basically comes down to "Justice is when things are done the way I think they should be done—the good, right, proper way!" you are in very serious trouble, but don't know it yet. Like a kid who's found that heroin makes life pleasurable, delightful, and exciting; he's already dead, but just doesn't realize it yet. The disease called heroin addiction, like cancer of the brain, has almost zero cure rate. Usually, survival is less than five years.

A concept of justice that is not based on fundamental rules of ethics, but on "what I think now is the way I want . . . er, that is, think it ought to be," is actually about as risky as playing catch with 80% dynamite.

The public does not have a right to know.

It's long been recognized that a man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. It takes years of specialized training to understand the implications, meanings, and effects of statements made in court; no ordinary man knows which end is up in that complex field of battle. It takes an expert to read the documents and know what they imply.

Anyone who goes in for reading his own symptoms and prescribing the necessary treatments is also a fool in any condition more serious than a stubbed toe. Doctors spend years learning how to interpret the data that the patient and the assorted instruments bring him.

A friend of mine some years ago went to an eye specialist; in the last week or so he'd had trouble focusing his left eye, and was beginning to get headaches when he tried to read.

The doctor didn't fit him with new glasses; he sent him to a major hospital where, that afternoon, they gave him a dose of X rays so massive that it would have killed him within thirty days.

That kept him alive for almost another ten days; autopsy showed his brain cancer had already metastasized to more than one hundred twenty different locations throughout his body.

Want to try treating that headache with aspirin because it's just a minor nuisance?

The simple fact of the matter is that, given all available data, what an expert sees and what a nonexpert sees are apt to be totally different.

Try looking at an X-ray picture; it takes years of experience to recognize meaning in that foggy, blurry mass of blacks and grays—and on tough ones, even experts can only make an educated guess, with resultant disagreement of experts.

Incidentally, notice that expert information gatherers are by no means automatically expert information interpreters.

For example, a top-notch CIA information gatherer has no need to be a senior statesman; it takes a lifetime to learn to be a competent international statesman, and it takes years to learn the trade of being an effective information gatherer. The two careers tend to be somewhat mutually exclusive.

Of course the press always wants to know what's going on undercover in Washington, or at the State capital, or in the DA's office—of course they're always prying and talking about the public's right to be informed.

Because the public is totally incompetent to evaluate the information involved in international affairs—precisely as incompetent as they are to correctly interpret a chest X ray—they not only do not have a right to be informed: They must not be informed fully.

With the data available—that foggy picture of the political scene that's about as blurry and dull as a chest X ray—they'll almost certainly get the wrong answers.

Yes, and the experts get the wrong answers, too. But remember the Finagle's Law corollary that says, "No matter what happens, there's always somebody who predicted it," and will be exceedingly loudmouthed about it.

Then, too, any modern schoolboy is far wiser than Aristotle; he knows a lot of things that Aristotle couldn't figure out in his whole lifetime. There's nothing like 20-20 hindsight, but 20-20 foresight is against the law, you know. It's called fortune telling, and you get arrested for practicing it.

The hullabaloo over the Pentagon Papers stems about 95% from a bunch of annoyed liberal press people who wanted in, and weren't given all the inside scoop they wanted at the time—and now are pointing out that their 20-20 hindsight is inestimably superior to the foresight of Presidents and Cabinets. The fact that newspapers don't have any international responsibilities makes their judgments far clearer.

That isn't the terms in which anyone wants to be judged—it's the old, real-life variant on the ancient protest "Now you tell me!"

The principal problem of Justice involved, however, is the still completely unsettled problem of the right to secrecy vs. the right of a free press.

The fact is that a government must operate in secrecy, or it simply cannot operate. A doctor who was forced to turn tapes of all his patient interviews in to the local news editor would cease to be able to function. The press guards their right to keep their sources private most jealously; they feel secrecy is essential to their function. The privacy of the confessional was acknowledged millennia ago. Human life cannot continue without areas of privacy.

Would any ambassador of any other country consider discussion of possible actions, tentative plans, or potential trades if he knew that complete recordings would be made available to the press services?

The public has no more right to invade that governmental—international governmental—privacy than it does to invade the doctor's consulting room, the priest's confessional, or the individual's bedroom.

A lot of members of Congress—both Senate and House—have yowled loudly that they weren't fully informed of what was going on at the time.

Getting yourself elected to Congress does not make any miraculous instant transformation of a blabbermouth into a wise statesman. The human personality type that is most acutely driven to find out about everything that's going on—particularly things marked "secret" by someone else—is the human personality type that most enjoys proving their "insider" status by talking about what they know. This is what makes a news reporter; he pries out the clues and rushes to get them into print; only the senior reporters have the wisdom and restraint to hold the information to himself till the story matures, and the rest of the data comes in.

The same type of personality can be found in political life—and that is the reason why Congress and the Senate cannot be taken in on all the negotiations and cogitations of the government.

Many of the governmental secrets are not our government's secrets to share. During WWII—which can, now, be discussed and considered somewhat more objectively than can the Vietnam problem—you can safely bet that President Roosevelt and his Cabinet and senior military advisers had been pretty fully informed as to the military position of England in 1940, before we got into the war. Undoubtedly the British had, in confidence, supplied our leaders with information that would allow the U.S. government to understand what their real and present danger was.

That information would have been of immense value to Herr Hitler & Co.

Did our government have any ethical right to inform our Congress and Senate of the information Churchill and his officers had given them?

Remember that such information could have been used to great personal political advantage by a lot of Congressmen and Senators who were strongly opposed to Roosevelt and his policies. That there were Congressmen and Senators at the time who were anglophobic, and sincerely hoped Hitler would conquer England. That, inevitably,' a certain proportion of members of Congress were weak men, blundering small-town men incapable of world statesmanship, men too anxious to be "in on the secret" publicly—which can be demonstrated only by spilling the secret—to be trusted with vital information.

If the President informs only a "trusted few" of the leaders of Congress, he is immediately subject to accusations of favoritism, and of political bias. Obviously, he can better trust Senators who agree with his policies, and don't seek his political injury than he can someone who wants nothing so much as to ruin him. This means he will select as the "chosen few" members of his own party, plus a few members of the other party who agree with his viewpoint. And that proves it's really political cliquism at work.

The problems of secrecy, privacy, and the rights of a free press are not simple.

Almost precisely the same complex problems exist in the field of the right/duty of the FBI to gather information. The FBI is the national detective agency; its duty is to gather information to solve and to prevent crimes. Remember the FBI and the Secret Service came in for a lot of criticism when President Kennedy was shot; they hadn't guarded him adequately. They had carefully spotted the known violent extremists, crackpots, and potential homicidals, and arranged to keep them under surveillance. The trouble was that Oswald was an unknown; they hadn't gathered enough data about him to recognize the potential for murder in him.

Obviously, to protect the President, and the Nation, the FBI must gather data concerning so-far-blameless individuals who have a potential for violent crime.

It's true that their data covers people who have committed no crimes, and don't plan to—but most people who commit emotional crimes don't intend to, remember. They don't plan it months or weeks in advance.

The quite effective work that has been done on stopping airplane hijacks in this country depends on potting personality types that are potential hijackers, and reacting to such people before they board the plane. The air marshals on board are a last desperate line of defense; the real line of defense is secret information about individuals who have never hijacked a plane before, and against whom there is no evidence any court of law would consider.

Just as an example of the right of privacy vs. the right to invade privacy:

Some years ago an insurance company was asked to provide a surety bond on a young executive of a large corporation. Since he'd be in the treasurer's office, the bond was to cover the company, in case of his malfeasance, to $500,000. The insurance company naturally had their agents investigate the young man's background. They found his record completely satisfactory, but . . . they also found that the man's wife had served a three-year term for embezzlement, and that her ex-partner was still finishing off the rest of his term. All evidence indicated that the young executive had no idea of his wife's criminal past.

This makes a nice question of ethics and secrecy. If the insurance company refused to give the bond, it would end the young man's career; certainly there would be a demand that reasons for the refusal be given. If the facts were stated, it would probably break up the young man's marriage. The woman in the case might be completely reformed, and not constitute any danger of misleading her husband.

Should the insurance company get off the hook by leaking the information to an eager-beaver scandal sheet news reporter?

Figure out a good answer to that one, while you're deciding whether the joker that stole the FBI reports files was such a wise and noble creature.

THE EDITOR