Reining in the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras by Katherine A. Scott (review)

Lynn Abrams (Oral History Theory [New York: Routledge, 2010]) includes the practice of conducting interviews in her definition of oral history; Valerie Janesick (Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher: Choreographing the Story [New York: Guilford Press, 2010]) defines oral history as the collection of stories and remembrances of a person or persons who have firsthand knowledge of any number of experiences. In this vein, then, Katherine A. Scott’s book, Reining in the State, is a prime example of work that both employs and deploys interviews to craft a richly detailed, oral history–based historical narrative. As Assistant Historian of the US Senate, Scott has had access to a plethora of writings, including manuscript collections and oral history interviews, amassed in the US Senate from the end of World War II to the present. She utilizes all of these materials to chronicle the public response to and revelations about the expansion of the US domestic security apparatus in the 1970s, a response that ultimately led to revisions of the Freedom of Information Act (1974), the Privacy Act (1974), the Government in Sunshine Act (1976), and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978).

Scott’s introduction accomplishes the basic requirement of any piece of writing, letting the reader know her objective: “to trace the growth of [efforts to legitimate the national security state] from a small but vocal coterie of the nation’s most powerful news editors and journalists in the 1950s to its apex with the passage of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) in 1978”(7). Using material available in the US Senate Library, the book comprises seven chapters that support her objective. Although her study ends in the 1970s, Scott also acknowledges that her book is an attempt to deal with continuing discussions and debates about domestic and foreign security practices within the United States. As she notes in her conclusion, “battles over government transparency and accountability continue to inform our national policy debates and structures our political culture in the early twenty-first century” (185).

Scott begins her analysis with the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidency, in the wake of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s vocal criticism of that administration and his rise to the position of chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations; she focuses her narrative by recounting the first committee hearing, chaired by Representative John Moss, on freedom of information. Scott delicately, deliberatively, and expertly uses available firsthand material to weave together the story of the ways in which various officials and publics answered Congressman Moss’s inquiry regarding whether or not the US public had all available information about the day-to-day operations of the federal government; such thoroughness continues throughout the text. In each and every chapter, Scott’s presentation of her research materials as they relate to specific and general historical events, as well as her discussion of the primary people who were active in the events, is to be commended. The detail is to such a degree that, in the early part of the text, the reader almost needs a “playbook” to follow all of the characters and actions, not simply who they were but what those individuals brought to the table of governmental transparency.

By chapter five and the Watergate era of President Nixon, however, the names become much more recognizable to a general audience unfamiliar with the intricacies of those earlier governmental years. Scott’s handling of this era is new and refreshing, especially given that many participants in Watergate, including most of President Nixon’s staff and the congressional committee members who participated in the subsequent senate committee meetings, wrote books about their experiences during this tumultuous time (there was also Alan J. Pakula’s cinematic adaptation of Robert Woodward and Carl Berstein’s account of uncovering the scandal during their tenure at the Washington Post [All the President’s...