From Dick Cheney’s man-sized safe to the National Security Agency’s massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government’s modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. was chief counsel to the U.S. Church Committee on Intelligence, which uncovered the FBI’s effort to push Martin Luther King to commit suicide; the CIA’s enlistment of the mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro; and the NSA’s thirty-year program to get copies of all telegrams leaving the United States. In this important new book, he uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: how much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it.

Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. has had a long and uncommon legal career, mixing the highest level of private practice with a series of critically important public service assignments. He has been Chief Counsel of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law since 2002. In private practice at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, he was a litigation partner with a broad and varied practice. He is also the co-author (with Aziz Huq) of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror. He has chaired the boards of the NRDC, the Vera Institute of Justice, and the Fund for the City of New York. He has been awarded the New York State Bar Association’s Gold Medal for distinguished service in the law as well as the Ridenhour Courage Prize “in recognition of his lifelong commitment to strengthening democracy and the rule of law.”