Washington Cover-Up

Written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent decades inside the Washington machinery, Washington Cover-Up is a searing indictment of the ways government learned to hide from its own citizens. Mollenhoff had watched presidents and bureaucrats develop increasingly sophisticated methods of dodging accountability, and he lays it all bare with the precision of a man who knows where the bodies are buried. The book traces how executive privilege transformed from a narrow constitutional concept into a weapon of wholesale obstruction, how congressional investigations were systematically undermined, and how the public's right to know became a casualty of institutional self-preservation. Through specific scandals and behind-the-scenes battles, Mollenhoff demonstrates that secrecy isn't merely inconvenient for democracy; it is democracy's quiet death. The book feels especially urgent now because the patterns he identified in 1962 have only grown more entrenched. Anyone who cares about how power actually works in America, rather than how it's supposed to work, needs to understand what Mollenhoff documented.