What has happened to the government’s security system? The public appeared to lose interest in the whole business, an over-reaction to the hectic McCarthy years, and it continues to be difficult to get even Congress worked up enough to discover, for instance, the reasons why the State Department’s William Wieland, whose record during the pre-Castro years raised doubts in some minds about his reliability, is not a security risk; whereas the State Department’s Otto Otepka, who blurted out some information to a congressional committee concerning the State Department’s carelessness in security matters is a security risk.
A highly intelligent informant, buried deep inside government, advises me that the internal security system is, notwithstanding the lack of general interest and the harassment of the Supreme Court, growing indeed, as all bureaucracies tend to do. The trouble is, it is growing in such a way as to expand the definition of security in ways that were hardly intended by Congress. The new security risk in Washington is: the man who voted for Goldwater.
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