The Dominican Intervention Reconsidered
The issue of access to information-and the terms on which that access is made available-is a matter of the most serious concern to all students of recent and contemporary public policy. Occasionally a book is published which poses in particularly acute form one or another aspect of the dilemma involved in the issue of access to information: can the evidence on which some conclusion is based -without which it is impossible to evaluate that conclusion-be withheld on grounds of raison d'etat or made available only to some members of the scholarly community. The publication in 1963 of Emmet John Hughes's The Ordeal of Power provided an opportunity to discuss certain aspects of the problem, and the editors of the Political Science Quarterly invited Professors Adolf A. Berle and Malcolm Moos, both of whom had had experience as presidential advisers, to discuss the issue of "The Need to Know and the Right to Tell" (PSQ, LXXIX, June 1964). In the article which follows, Mr. Theodore Draper, author of The Dominican Revolt: A Case Study in American Policy, reviews a recent important book on the same subject-Jerome Slater's Intervention and Negotiation: The United States and the Dominican Revolution-and raises crucial questions concerning the terms which control access to information relating to matters of recent foreign policy.