Politics & Power Quote by Robert Novak

A neat little tautology like this is how Washington launders responsibility into inevitability. Novak’s line sounds almost boring on purpose: of course the government should keep its secrets. But that bland surface is the point. It frames secrecy not as a choice that demands justification, but as an administrative function, like paving roads or issuing passports. The wink is that once secrecy is treated as routine, anyone who disrupts it becomes the problem.

Coming from Novak - a hard-edged, access-savvy journalist who moved comfortably inside the capital’s argument machine - the quote also reads like a tribal boundary marker. “The government’s secrets” implies ownership: information belongs to the state first, the public second (if at all). That’s a reversal of the civics-class ideal where government holds information in trust. Novak compresses an entire worldview into one sentence: secrecy is not an abuse; it’s a duty.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to leakers, whistleblowers, and even aggressive reporters: you may claim to serve the public, but you’re trespassing on sovereign property. It’s also a hedge that protects the press ecosystem that thrives on sanctioned disclosure. If the government is the rightful custodian of secrecy, then the journalist’s job becomes negotiating access rather than challenging the premise.

Contextually, it lands in the long post-Watergate hangover, when “national security” became the all-purpose solvent for accountability - and when journalists increasingly had to decide whether they were adversaries, partners, or licensed intermediaries. Novak’s quip doesn’t just defend secrecy; it normalizes the reflex to treat transparency as the exception.