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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
As one long preoccupied with American foreign policy and its impact on Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, I should like to talk to you about a problem that has been with us for a rather long time but whose dimensions have in recent years become considerably more extensive. I refer to the great disparity in access to information pertinent to the formulation of foreign policy as between the executive branch of our government on the one hand and Congress along with the news media and the general public on the other. I am not here, of course, to speak in behalf of the AAS or its officers, but rather in accordance with my own personal convictions. But I shall be discussing a matter that I believe should especially command the concern of those of us who specialize in the study of modern and contemporary Asia, and I hope that my remarks will not be alien to the interests of the rest of you.
1 Letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822.
2 Stuart Symington, “Congress's Right to Know,” New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1970.Google Scholar
3 Wilcox, Francis O., Congress, the Executive and Foreign Policy (Harper and Row, for the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 1971), PP. 73–74.Google Scholar The Congressional research service of the Library of Congress is, of course, available to Congressmen and their assistants, but it is' widely acknowledged that its staff is still too limited and hard-pressed to be really effective in matters of foreign policy, with many Congressmen using its facilities, as Wilcox observes, “… as means of filling requests from constituents for anything from an Information Please-type question to a student's term paper.” Ibid., p. 75. Although as a result of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 the committees of Congress were provided with professional staffs, which were slightly aug-mented a few years ago, these staffs are still miniscule and, despite the generally high level of ability of their members, their specialized area knowledge is perforce usually rather modest.