"In November 1974, a reform-hungry Capitol Hill gave the newly sworn-in President Gerald Ford one of his first real challenges. Congress had passed a significant expansion of Ralph Nader's 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), aimed at prying open for public scrutiny the previously exempt areas of national security and law enforcement.
When Ford was vice president to a commander-in-chief famous for his secrecy, paranoia, and abuse, he had supported the new sunshine amendments. But as chief executive, the interim president allowed himself to be talked into a veto by his intelligence directors and by his young chief and deputy chief of staff: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
"'This was their first battle at Ford's White House,' says Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit at George Washington University that has helped declassify more than 20,000 government documents. It was a battle the FOIA foes lost: Congress overrode Ford's veto.
Thirty years later, Rumsfeld and Cheney are again squaring off against the advocates of government transparency.
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