Geoffrey Stone has made a powerful argument that the U.S. should strike a new balance between secrecy and liberty and that the Obama administration should do more than its predecessor has to defend individual freedom, disseminate honest information, and promote open government. Stone's characterization of Bush's and Cheney's penchant for secrecy at a time of national security threats is detailed, insightful, and convincing.

One point that I would add to bolster Stone's argument is that during the cold war, secrecy was the prevailing approach when it came to what was a big issue back then--civil defense. The federal government on numerous occasions told the public one thing when it knew that the information was misleading or just plain wrong. Deception reigned at the highest levels of American officialdom. It did little to make us any safer though.

By grasping that legacy of cold war secrecy, we can have an even stronger appreciation for why secrecy doesn't in fact make us safer and erodes people's faith and confidence in their elected officials. While President Harry Truman has been lionized in recent times, he and his team operated with as much secrecy as their contemporaries running DHS, raising questions about the federal government and the veracity of its information.

Take Truman's civil defense chief Millard Caldwell: he feared that when the public learned about the gravity of the nuclear threat, mass panic would ensue, and Americans would lose faith in civil defense programs. Thus, Caldwell decided that he would operate as if he were a doctor who had a terminal cancer patient because for the patient's peace of mind "doctors often conclude against telling the hopeless cancer patient what the situation is."

The deception was sweeping. In private, Caldwell knew that any nuclear attack would result in mass casualties and that there was little that people could do to save their own lives. Still, his agency assured Americans that if they came out to see an "Alert America" road show, it "may save your life." Civil defense officials misleadingly vowed that if people built private fallout shelters, they could survive a nuclear attack. The government also later actually assured Americans that if they titled their hats at a particular angle, they could shield themselves from radiation unleashed by a hydrogen bomb and survive unscathed.

While President Eisenhower did better, he and his civil defense advisors were also secretive and evasive when discussing issues of home-front defense--with little positive effect. Ike's civil defense chief Val Peterson predicted behind closed doors that if a nuclear attack came to the U.S., "hysteria" and "mass panic" would be one result; "dictatorship," he added, would be the only remedy. Popular films, news articles and books on civil defense began in the fifties to skewer federal authorities as incompetent buffoons unworthy of the public's support, and some Americans came to mistrust civil defense as an ineffective strategy because federal officials had cloaked the program in a veil of misinformation and propagandistic statements.

The Truman and Eisenhower Administrations' approach presaged the partisanship, ideology and secrecy that later became prominent features of President Bush's approach to homeland security. Decades later, there is little evidence that any of these cold war-era deceptive communications--reams of government pamphlets, film reels ("duck and cover"), and magazine articles--significantly strengthened America's security. While the terrorist threats we face in 2009 differ from those the nation confronted in the cold war, the penchant for secrecy remains a powerful draw. And it's as harmful to the spirit of democratic openness today as it was in the late forties and fifties. Let's hope that Obama's administration follows Geoffrey Stone's advice, enacts his four recommendations, and adopts an approach to governing that errs on the side of candor, honesty, and openness.