Politics & Power Quote by Louis Stokes

Bureaucracy is doing damage control with a straight face. Louis Stokes, speaking as a politician steeped in oversight culture, frames personnel files as not just irrelevant but inert: “have nothing to do” becomes a magic phrase meant to stop curiosity cold. The wording is instructive. It’s not “contain no evidence,” which would invite scrutiny of what counts as evidence. It’s “nothing to do,” a broader, softer claim that collapses complexity into a tidy jurisdictional boundary.

The repetition of “persons we hired, persons we fired” has a procedural rhythm, a paper-trail lullaby. It signals normalcy, managerial routine, the comforting hum of an institution that wants to be seen as orderly rather than implicating. Stokes leans on an implicit bargain: accept that government can compartmentalize truth the way it compartmentalizes files. If the assassination is the “real” story, then employment records are framed as administrative clutter, unworthy of public appetite.

That’s the subtext: not that the records are harmless, but that harm is defined narrowly. Personnel files often expose how power protects itself - patterns of misconduct, retaliation, quiet removals, cozy hires. In an assassination investigation, those patterns can matter because they map incentives and credibility inside an agency. Stokes’s “ought to remain” isn’t a neutral archival preference; it’s a claim about who gets to see the machinery and who gets to trust it unseen. The intent is containment, selling institutional privacy as common sense rather than as a political choice.