Letters

From the December 2004 issue

Watergate Blowback

For all its selective history, aggregated statistics, dated anecdotes, and anecdotal dates, Matt Welch's "Watergate Blowback" (August/September) manages to avoid almost completely the central issues of the last three years, if not the last 13: the fact that America is under attack by fanatical terrorists whose widely trumpeted goal is to murder at least 4 million Americans and destroy much of our territory, possessions, and economy. Could it be that some of those millions of documents Welch laments being classified would help terrorists discover and use vulnerabilities in our nuclear facilities, water treatment plants, or other vital infrastructure?

Welch manages to make multiple innuendoes about the Bush administration's alleged propensity toward secrecy for secrecy's sake--or worse, for purposes of corruption, lying, and political advantage. He gives no hint of legitimate purposes or objectives of any kind. Yet Welch offers not a single example of those crimes and misdemeanors tied to this administration. Instead he cites the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak (33 years ago), unspecified 1948 accident reports (56 years ago), and the August 2001 briefing that ultimately revealed nothing of significance.

While it may well be tedious to have to show that a document was wrongly classified, it would be far, far worse to have terrorists attack vulnerabilities the document exposed.

Jeffrey E. Levinger

San Francisco, CA

Matt Welch replies: Many advocates of openness, including myself, believe that declassification will enhance, not endanger, national security. As Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) warned in an August 26 New York Times op-ed, "Too often, Congress and the American people lack the best information--in the form of declassified intelligence and national security materials--to ensure that the job [of national security] is done right. The United States cannot preserve an open and democratic society when one branch of government has a free hand to shut down public access to information."

Taking Science Seriously

Cathy Young's "Taking Science Seriously" (August/September) should be required reading for doctrinaire conservatives and radical feminists. As usual, Young cuts through half-truths and pseudoscience as well as camouflaged political agendas.

Something about the conservative view of working women has long troubled me: They claim that women who work outside the home for pay when they have children of school age deprive their children of their presence and companionship and abdicate parental responsibility to others. Is this not also true of women whose children go to boarding schools? Is this not also true of women who have live-in nannies and housekeepers and fill their days with social activities?

I was raised in the '50s--the Holy Grotto for conservatives--in an upper-middle-class community where live-in housekeepers were the norm. As a rule, children did not come home to their mothers; they came home to their housekeepers.

Danielle Crittenden (mentioned in the article) and Nancy Reagan, both conservative heroines, sent their children to boarding schools. There is no shortage of conservative women who travel the country urging other women to stay home.

I believe the real reason conservatives do not want these women in the work force is to deprive them of economic power. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, and the majority of divorces are initiated by women. A woman with an independent income is in a better position to leave a marriage. Conservatives are putting marital stability ahead of personal freedom.

Gloria M. Stewart

Thousand Oaks, CA