Who Needs a Security Clearance?

The current falderall over laxity in White House security clearances for the President’s son-in-law,  private secretary and speech writer make sense, because we can’t have people who are handling some of the most secretive and sensitive information of our nation being subject to blackmail or other pressure because of undisclosed weaknesses in their background or character. That is why our government has security clearances in the first place. And it is also why it is inconceivable that exceptions have been made at the highest level of that government.

I had a personal experience with security clearance when I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army just over 50 years ago. I went straight from college graduation into a 10-month Army training program to become an officer, and was immediately assigned to be a staff officer at the headquarters of the Army War College in bucolic Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A couple of months into service there, an Army security agency officer from D.C. showed up to interview me in conjunction with the Secret security clearance required for my posting.

It turned out that the security officer had attended high school with me, though we never had been friends. He had one concern. It turned out he found a record of a prank that my college roommate and I had been involved with several years before. He relished making me explain what was the very silly and unexplainable behavior that got us into trouble.

After the inquisition into a college prank, I got my Secret clearance, and went on as a staff officer at the military’s highest bastion of learning, and also became the public affairs officer for the Army’s nuclear emergency team for the American northeast, and later served as a public affairs officer in Vietnam and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal for similar service in Chicago.

My point is this: the Army took very seriously the investigation related to a low-level security clearance for a new second lieutenant, a half-century ago. And now we have this kurfluffel over repeated lax security investigations at the highest level in the Trump White House. What gives? How are we, the people, supposed to have confidence in our current government leadership, when these high-level people don’t seem to get a fraction of the security oversight given to the lowest level officer in the Army 50 years ago?