President's Private Research Articles

The President's Private Dictionary: How Secret Definitions Undermine Domestic and Transnational Efforts at Executive Branch Accountability

The 2016 EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is an agreement allowing companies to move customer data between the European Union and the United States without running afoul of heightened privacy protections in the European Union. It was developed in response to EU concerns that the privacy rights of its citizens have been systematically abrogated by the U.S. government in the name of national security, and contains a variety of assurances that the United States will respect and protect the privacy rights of EU citizens. How trustworthy are the U.S. assurances under the Privacy Shield? Both the Bush and Obama administrations secretly interpreted the terms of treaties, statutes and regulations in a manner that allowed them to take controversial actions, keep those actions secret, and later invoke national security to defend the legality of those actions if they became public. In cases involving torture, bulk data collection, and targeted killing, these administrations did so despite the common and objective understanding of applicable legal constraints not providing authorization for the very actions that they claimed were legal. It remains an open question as to whether the Trump administration will interpret the Privacy Shield in a similarly misleading manner: one in which public assurances suggest compliance with the Privacy Shield’s constraints, but the administration’s private interpretation of the Privacy Shield secretly breaches EU privacy protections. This paper considers possible ways to constrain the executive branch from relying on secret interpretations that would undermine the Privacy Shield’s transnational attempts at accountability.

The President's Private Dictionary: How Secret Definitions Undermine Domestic and Transnational Efforts at Executive Branch Accountability

The 2016 EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is an agreement allowing companies to move customer data between the European Union and the United States without running afoul of heightened privacy protections in the European Union. It was developed in response to EU concerns that the privacy rights of its citizens have been systematically abrogated by the U.S. government in the name of national security, and contains a variety of assurances that the United States will respect and protect the privacy rights of EU citizens. How trustworthy are the U.S. assurances under the Privacy Shield? Both the Bush and Obama administrations secretly interpreted the terms of treaties, statutes and regulations in a manner that allowed them to take controversial actions, keep those actions secret, and later invoke national security to defend the legality of those actions if they became public. In cases involving torture, bulk data collection, and targeted killing, these administrations did so despite the common and objective understanding of applicable legal constraints not providing authorization for the very actions that they claimed were legal. It remains an open question as to whether the Trump administration will interpret the Privacy Shield in a similarly misleading manner: one in which public assurances suggest compliance with the Privacy Shield’s constraints, but the administration’s private interpretation of the Privacy Shield secretly breaches EU privacy protections. This paper considers possible ways to constrain the executive branch from relying on secret interpretations that would undermine the Privacy Shield’s transnational attempts at accountability.

Hunger and Containment: How India Became “Important” in US Cold War Strategy

Hunger and Containment: How India Became “Important” in US Cold War Strategy

In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era

South are utterly anonymous today. A few extraordinary women who managed to escape from slavery are well known, such as Harriet Tubman-the heroine of Underground Railroad.' But vast majority of slave women who remained in bondage led lives left entirely unrecorded and unremembered. One striking exception is Hemings, who has been subject to centuries of commentary-quite possibly more than any other black woman who lived out her life in slave South. A woman of many nicknames, dashing Sally has long been famous as female slave whose name was coupled with that of founding father Thomas Jefferson in an 1802 scandal about widowed president's private life.2 At that time, a disaffected Republican journalist wrote of Jefferson that the man, whom it delighth people to honor, keeps, and has for many past years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.3

Nixon's Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy

Dean J. Kotlowski's thesis, to paraphrase Richard M. Nixon's attorney general John N. Mitchell, is that we should look at what the Nixon administration did, not what the president said. Or, to paraphrase Leonard Garment, Nixon's most liberal aide on civil rights matters, we should note the progressive policies clouded by retrogressive rhetoric. Putting aside the president's private bigotry, as disgusting as it is commonplace on the released White House tapes, and the public denunciations of “forced integration of housing or education,” so central to his “southern strategy” of exacerbating racial polarization and courting white southerners and others attracted to Alabama governor George Wallace's race-baiting, Kotlowski avers that Nixon genuinely believed in equality of opportunity, in giving every-one—even African Americans, who he believed were inherently unequal to whites—a chance fairly to compete. Accordingly, Kot-lowski credits the Nixon administration with solidifying affirmative action, expanding set-aside programs for minority-owned companies, aiding black colleges, desegregating southern public schools, championing Native American tribal self-determination and the Alaskan claims settlement, backing bilingual education for Hispanic children, and broadening the boundaries of the era's “rights-conscious” spirit by including the aged, the handicapped, and women in executive orders and legislation prohibiting bias in education and employment. This creditable civil rights record, Kotlowski further claims, looks even better when compared with that of the Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, whose grander eloquence on race proved a poor substitute for failed initiatives and weak enforcement, and that of the Republican presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, whose rhetoric and actions were too right wing, too extreme in their exploitation of American racial divisions.

The President and the Baseball Player

N ow that most of the Starr Report has been released and read by people all over the world, one can stand back a little and try to make sense of this quite extraordinary episode in American history. The fact is, first of all, that there is simply no precedent for it whatsoever. The Independent Prosecutor Act, by which Congress established the office of a special investigator for executive branch misdemeanors, is hardly a decade old, and the kind of powers it gives this prosecutor are virtually unlimited. So no president has been so intimately investigated as Clinton, and it is likely no one ever will be again. And for the first time in history the American public has been virtually inundated with detail about the president's private life, not just information from the Starr Report. For most of 1998 the media-unprecedented in its power and reach-has bombarded everyone who can read, listen to radio, or watch television, with literally innumerable stories, speculations, reports, and interviews concerning Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, David Kendall, plus the whole immense cast of players in this outrageous farce. Yet perhaps the most egregious aspect of the story has been the prying into an individual's private life without limits set either by law or by taste. The idea that even a U.S. president-arguably the most powerful person on earth-should not be immune to this kind of vicarious prurience is frightening, but that indeed is what has happened. Despite this, however, the polls show that a majority of Americans still seem to believe that no matter how gruesome or unsavory the details of Clinton's private life, they approve of his performance on the job for the time being.

Economic Planning, 1943-1951: A Guide to Documents in the Public Record Office.

Cabinet minutes and memoranda cabinet office registered files Lord President's committee (wartime) miscellaneous standing committees (wartime) ad hoc Cabinet committees (wartime) reconstruction committees central statistical office reconstruction secretariat Lord President's private office and secretariat Lord President's secretariat private papers ad hoc Cabinet committees (post-war) Lord President's committee (post-war) miscellaneous standing committees Commonwealth and international conferences Prime Minister's private office central economic planning staff economic section treasury board of trade other departmental papers official war histories.

Why America's Military Base Structure Cannot Be Reduced

The U.S. military base structure comprises 5,600 bases and installations around the world and occupies 24 million acres in the United States alone. ' It was established during World War II, and its retention was justified after the war by the possibility of a similar conflict. Today, however, it is both too large and inappropriate to military realities. Nevertheless, despite the improbability of another world war fought by conventional forces, the training camps, technical centers, headquarters facilities, and supply depots established during the war remain largely intact.2 The current military base structure imposes two kinds of costs on the American public: opportunity costsi.e., the sacrifice of any better or higher uses to which these millions of acres of real estate could be put-and, excess operating costs. These costs are somewhat conjectural, but unquestionably large. If, for example, we could allocate the two million of these acres with the highest market values to their best alternative economic uses without harming the national defense, we could reduce the opportunity cost of maintaining the existing base structure by at least $35 billion and perhaps by as much as $90 billion.3 Excess bases must also be operated and cared for. The President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (commonly known as the Grace Commission after its chairman, J. Peter Grace) concluded in 1983 that a ten-percent reduction in the existing military base structure could reduce outlays for operations by $2 billion per year4-which implies a discounted present value of approximately $20 billion. This conclusion has been confirmed by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and endorsed by knowledgeable officials in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).5

The President's private sector survey on cost control:

The President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (The Grace Commission Report) identified and suggested “remedies for waste and abuse in the Federal Government,” in an effort to get the Government “off the backs” of the American people. This article assesses the Report as a political document, a research study, and a proposal for increased efficiencies in Government operations. The author concludes that equating politics with strategies for improved efficiency in Government is little more than a “con game.” J. Peter Grace's response appears in the next issue.

The presidents private sector survey on cost control: A response to an opinion essay on its proposals

This article is a reply to Robert M. Hayes, “The President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control: An Opinion Essay on the Grace Commission Report,” Government Information Quarterly, 3, no. 1 (1986): 73–81. The President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government (PPSS) welcomes factual analysis of its report and debate on its recommendations. The author's article on the PPSS Report to the President in the last issue of GIQ, however, provides no evidence that he looked at our report in detail, evaluated our proposals based on factual knowledge, or had any intent other than to discredit the report. While the author states that the PPSS report “should be read with the greatest care by everyone concerned with governmental policies,” our response concludes that he uses innuendo and misdirection to derive his conclusions, since he presents no evidence to support his opinions.

The Grace Commission: Seeking Efficiency for the Whole People?

The following is an assessment of the work of the Grace Commission, officially known as the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (PPSSCC). The assessment is a personal one, although in making it I have attempted to reflect the point of view and concerns of the public administration profession. An evaluation of the commission's work from this perspective is necessary, in my view, for this organization has not only conducted an intensive investigation of the federal portion of public administration's vineyard, but has done so from an explicitly outsider orientation. Has this orientation introduced a refreshing and useful set of new ideas about federal public management? Or has it been misguided in its analysis and less than constructive in its recommendations? And, more broadly, what implications do its methods and proposals have for public policy in this country and the future of the public service? To attempt to answer these questions I have personally read 45 of the 47 reports of the Grace Commission.* Perhaps I am one of the few persons to have nearly scaled this particular Mount Everest, for the reports are published in 38 volumes of single-spaced, duplicated typescript that occupy well over two feet of a bookshelf. In addition, I have examined the many reports, hearings, analyses, and press commentaries generated by the PPSSCC undertaking, and have discussed its work with many knowledgeable individuals.

Masking inconsistency: The Tonkin gulf crisis

Because crises evoke images of threatening events appearing beyond control, they supercede previous rhetorical acts and assessments of them, helping to reconcile potential contradictions within an administration's stance. President Lyndon Johnson's response to the August 1964 naval skirmishes in Tonkin Gulf is a case in point. As the early months of 1964 unfolded, Johnson became convinced of the necessity of a United States intervention in Vietnam. This sentiment, however, was not reflected in his public discourse; there thus emerged a disjunction between the president's private image and public persona and between his actions and the proposed policies of Barry Goldwater—Johnson's political rival. The naval encounters in Tonkin Gulf allowed Johnson to reconcile his public persona with his private image without arousing suspicion. Tonkin Gulf, therefore, was an episode in masking inconsistency. It demonstrated how international crises permit chief executives to establish a credible and consistent public image.

Soirée of the Royal Microscopical Society

ON Friday, April 2ist, Mr. H. C. Sorby, president of the Royal Microscopical Society, gave a large soirée in the apartments of King's College. Invitations had been issued for above 1,500, including the whole of the Fellows of the Royal Microscopical Society, the presidents and leading officers of many of the London Scientific Societies; all the distinguished foreigners now in London as commissioners from the various foreign Governments to the Exhibition of Scientific Apparatus at South Kensington; and many of the President's private friends. About 800 were present, including about 300 ladies. After having been received by the President and one of the secretaries, the visitors passed into the various rooms of the College, in which were exhibited many objects connected with microscopical science. For the number, variety, scientific value, or general interest of the specimens, this exhibition has probably never been surpassed. Amongst the new instruments may be mentioned Mr. Sorby's arrangement for accurately measuring the wave-length of the centre of absorption-bands in spectra; a new form of Stephenson's erecting binocular microscope, by Mr. Bevington, and another by Mr. Browning, of somewhat different construction. Mr. Browning also exhibited his new portable microscope, which is so constructed that the body can be turned on one side and reversed in such a manner as to reduce the height to about one half. The President also exhibited a large series of specimens illustrating his own special subjects, shown by means of fifty microscopes, lent to him by four of the principal makers in London (Becks, Browning, Crouch, and Ross), and about 150 first-rate instruments and objects were contributed by the Fellows of the society and other friends. These were so distributed over the large apartments of the College as to avoid crowding in any part. Almost every branch of science to which the microscope has been applied was well represented, and many of the finest specimens ever prepared were shown and described. Many very interesting living objects were sent direct from the Brighton Aquarium and elsewhere. In the lecture theatre were exhibited Dr. Hudson's most beautiful drawings of microscopic objects shown in a new manner as transparencies; Mr. Spottiswoode's splendid polarising apparatus, and various objects shown with the oxy-hydrogen microscope by How and Company. The large entrance hall was decorated with plants and flowers, and used as a promenade. The two museums of the College were also thrown open. Refreshments were supplied by the steward of the College. The guests were provided with a classified catalogue of the objects exhibited, but they were so numerous that it was impossible for any one to examine more than a small part of the whole. One of the most satisfactory results of the soirée is the great impression produced by it on the foreign scientific men, who appear to have been quite unprepared for, and greatly surprised at, what they saw during the evening.