Empirical work about governmental secrecy faces an obvious hurdle: The more extensive, thus worthy of analysis, that secrecy is, the less there is to analyze. Yet given recent events and their stakes—the potential that secrecy has for “destroying or undermining the legal, political, and cultural traditions that undergird our political system” (p. 5)—the kindling of scholarly light to shine into this void is vital. In this comprehensive if sometimes polemic narrative detailing modern presidents' institutionalization of secrecy in the executive branch, Robert M. Pallitto and William G. Weaver take a welcome step in this direction.

The authors argue that presidents, with the alternately active and unintended collaboration of Congress and the courts, have managed to create a secrecy regime that protects them “against political accountability and legal scrutiny” (p. 3). The substantive chapters of the book lay out its ingredients: Presidents and their staffs can classify documents as secret, no matter their substance; they can claim executive privilege against outside inquiry; they can remove cases from the public processes of the justice system and, when complaints appear in the civilian courts, claim that “state secrets” make it impossible for them to proceed. Also explored are post-Watergate enactments like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and post-9/11 statutes like the Patriot Act, along with a wide array of court cases addressing these topics and tools.

The common theme, the authors argue, is the expansion of presidents' power to conceal and the consistent failure of legislators and judges to limit that power. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who wrote his own book on the topic—might have put it, secrecy has been “defined down” to become the norm and not the deviant.

The fact is, presidents—of all personalities and parties—like secrecy. George W. Bush comes in for the most criticism here (charged with making “a concerted effort to pursue broad means of concealing executive activity, irrespective of legitimate needs to keep such activity secret” [p. 136]). But the clever vignette detailing the thoughts of Messrs. Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Bush turns out to be from the Ford administration, with “Bush” being the current president's father. The participants' complaints about congressional limits on presidential discretion and (cf. Henry Kissinger) the “threat to national security” (p. 168) posed by the Justice Department's new commitment to transparency could have been overheard today. Even Jimmy Carter is tagged as the president who ramped up use of the state-secrets doctrine (p. 106).

Indeed, laws seeking to limit presidential authority have instead often legitimated it by providing “a legalized space for … secrecy” (p. 218)—space that presidents have continued to widen. This merely reinforces the normalcy of what once would have been considered abuses, since Congress has provided a statutory process for using a given power. Examples of this go back to early laws detailing classification, most of which delegate wide authority to the president, for example to define the “talismanic” term “national security” (p. 83). The poster child, though, is FISA, which—combined with recent court decisions—has provided a wiretapping vehicle far more friendly to abuse (and concealment of that abuse) than other extant law. “We are worse off with FISA than without,” the authors conclude (p. 190).

Having thus written off congressional oversight and executive self-regulation (which requires potential publicity to check bad behavior, a vicious circle in this context), Pallitto and Weaver turn to the courts. A major theme of the book is that the judiciary has been “a willing participant in the destruction of its own constitutionally granted powers” (p. 134). In this view, judges have failed both the Constitution and common sense, uncritically accepting administration assertions and even aiding them with legal constructions, such as the “mosaic theory” (where even public information may be hidden if it might be combined with other unclassified information to damage national security). The prudence that judges claim in refusing to take “political” cases “has given way to surrender” (p. 90). In fairness, one might note that Congress's failures to act, plus its actions—as in the case of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—have precipitated some of the decisions decried here. Still, the narrative deals deftly with complicated issues of complicated jurisprudence and legal doctrine; the domestic surveillance chapter is particularly cogent. And whichever branch one relies on to provide balance, it has largely been absent. For Pallitto and Weaver, the result is that the presidency has been “permanently deformed by the unchecked and unaccountable power it wields” (p. 22).

This claim, as regards either the institution or the deformation, is perhaps not fully explored. The authors place their narrative firmly on the “institutional” side of the presidency literature, but beyond this the theoretical frameworks discussed are not really utilized. Additional leverage might have been derived from the burgeoning scholarship exploring presidential unilateralism; after all, the perceptive notion that secrecy itself is a tool for translating presidential preferences into policy without the inconvenience of open debate places it firmly in that field. Such an approach might provide more extensive discussion of what (if any) inherent presidential powers do exist, and their legitimacy: Is it always true that (p. 154) “as the executive gains power, the people lose” it? And it might explore the conditions under which presidential commands, even in secret, are as efficiently implemented as the narrative seems to assume. Consider, for example, what we have learned about the internal battles over President Bush's FISA override or the Judge Advocate General corps' resistance to the military tribunal system.

The authors' broader worry—the potential for institutionalized secrecy to undermine American democracy—is nonetheless very well taken. Their conclusions are at times too prominent; the evidence can be trusted to speak for itself. But it would be unfortunate if that resulted in this valuable book's preaching mainly to the choir: Its lessons are well worth heeding.