Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.

The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.

Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared,...

Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK “succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders”. Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.