Tuesday, January 10, 2023

When We Had People Like Goldwater and Moynihan Heading a Key Senate Committee on Intelligence

Dear Bill:

 . . . On the mining of the harbors. I would ask you in particular to remember that I was defending the word of Barry Goldwater. In a public letter to [CIA Director] Casey he stated that our committee had not been informed of an elementally important event. He left for Taiwan. I look up and [National Security Advisor] Bud McFarlane has told an audience at the Naval Academy that contrary to Senator Goldwater's assertion, the committee had been fully briefed. I said if you're going to call Barry Goldwater a liar, you're going to have to get yourself another vice chairman. Casey apologized. McFarlane - who, I think, had been misled - has since testified that we should have been informed and were not.

Trust - not propriety - is the coin of this realm.

- From a June 27, 1988 letter from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr. [Published in Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, edited by Steven R. Weisman]

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