unbeknownst

"Stop for a minute and consider what Bush actually told us. It's a staggering thought. Who even knows what it might mean? In the United States, for example, the unemployment rate in the decade of the Great Depression never fell below 14%. In cities like Chicago and Detroit in the early 1930s, it approached 50%. So, worse than that? And yet in the privacy of the Oval Office, that was evidently a majority view, unbeknownst to the rest of us."
- Tom Engelhardt, 'The Day the Earth Still Stood:
What Will Obama Inherit?', tomdispatch.com, 20 January 2009.