The War on Leakers: National Security and American Democracy, From Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden

About this book

Four days before Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, someone leaked American contingency war plans to the Chicago Tribune. The small splash the story made was overwhelmed by the shock waves caused by the Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet anchored in Hawaii—but the ripples never subsided, growing quietly but steadily through the Cold War, Vietnam, the fall of Communism, and into the present.Torn from today’s headlines, Lloyd C. Gardner’s latest book takes a deep dive into the previously unexamined history of national security leakers. The War on Leakers joins the growing debate over surveillance and the national security state, bringing to bear the unique perspective of one of our most respected diplomatic historians. Gardner examines how our government and our media have grappled with national security leaks over nearly five decades (in often sharply contrasting ways), what the relationship of "leaking" has been to the exercise of American power during and after the Cold War; similarities and differences between leakers over time, and the implications of all this for how we should think about the role of leakers in a democracy.