Monthly Archives: February 2011

Reputations and situational ethics

Posted on February 23, 2011 | 1 comment

An unexpected cri de coeur. That is how former Nixon foundation director John H. Taylor described to me the comment made to him in the early 1990s by Carlos Narvaez, a Nixon agent, that [portions of?] “the tapes must never come out. His reputation never will recover.”

If, as I’ve suggested in some of my previous posts, the National Archives may have struggled in its defense of Stanley Kutler’s Nixon tapes lawsuit because of (self-imposed?) insularity, then Nixon’s side, too, may have faced some challenges in this area. Nixon knew, although he may not have remembered it all in detail, what he had said in conversations recorded by his secret taping system in the White House. Fred Graboske, the NARA Nixon tapes supervisor, and I, the two people who signed off concurrence of all disclosure decisions on the tapes during the 1980s, certainly knew. I had left NARA by 1992; Fred had been reassigned away from the Nixon Project.

Individual members of the tapes processing staff knew bits and pieces of what was in the recorded conversations (the segments on which they had worked). It’s not as if Fred and I spent time gossiping with staff about everything we had heard on the tapes. We did both discuss emerging issues that affected disclosure standards with staff as needed.

By the time Stanley Kutler filed his lawsuit in 1992, many members of the Nixon project tapes staff had fled. (A satire referring to Hugh Hewitt, who briefly served as director of the private Nixon library and birthplace foundation in California, apparently captured the mood of many members of NARA’s Nixon project staff in the Washington area in the early 1990s.)

Only a couple of people who had worked for Graboske and for former project director James Hastings remained in their positions by the time the government started formulating its defense of the Kutler lawsuit. Narvaez’s assertion that “the tapes must never come out” may provide context for the Bush Justice Department’s seeming lack of interest in defending Graboske and his staff. Of course, the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush, himself was the subject of and even participant in, some of the then largely secret tapes. Even without that complication, the Department of Justice often struggles because it cannot reconcile easily the need to represent federal employees and enforce compliance with statutes and the need to establish or maintain precedents that protect presidents’ interests.

John Taylor does not remember passing on Narvaez’s alarm call to Nixon’s lawyers but my guess is that Narvaez did. He worked in Washington with them while Taylor, who replaced Hugh Hewitt, was based in California by then. Nixon’s side certainly followed a scorched earth policy after Narvaez concluded the tapes could not be released. They switched from what earlier had been assertions that “reasonable people can disagree” over disclosure standards and that the government’s regulations too narrowly defined privacy to attempts to prove bias among the tapes archivists (Graboske was the main target) and public denigration of us. The federal judge assigned to the Kutler Nixon tapes case (Norma Holloway Johnson—Royce Lamberth presided over one hearing) had no idea what was on the tapes, of course.

Tellingly, the earlier assertions by the former president’s representatives centered on the processing of the Nixon textual files while the ramped up attacks focused on the tapes. The tapes which contained discussions of Jew-counting at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nixon’s assertion that abortion was permissible in the case of inter-racial couples. Disparaging comparisons of blacks and Hispanics abroad and in the United States. And the recently revealed conversation between Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger that Taylor mentioned at his blog (“a Soviet holocaust would have been at best a humanitarian concern and by no means a U.S. interest; Nixon replies that wouldn’t be worth a thermonuclear war.”)

In the end, after Nixon’s death, the government began releasing Nixon’s White House tapes much as Graboske and I had approved them for disclosure. The scorched earth tactics backfired, as they sometimes do on litigators who advocate on public policy issues. Had Nixon’s lawyers stuck to impersonal arguments about review standards, they would not have left the impression that they were trying to save Nixon’s reputation by blackening that of federal archivists. And the Department of Justice would not have been exposed as an unreliable legal representative on some issues involving presidential precedents.

Most importantly, the Nixon side’s tactics gave NARA’s union officials a chance to shine. Not only did union president Peter Jeffrey rise to our defense after the publication of Taylor’s “Cutting the Nixon tapes,” but he also spoke up publicly on other occasions. As I wrote in a letter published in The Washington Post earlier in 1998,

“In a Jan. 25 article on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), George Lardner described low morale at the archives’ Nixon Project, the prospect of hiring employees of the privately run Nixon Library to work with White House records and concerns voiced by union representatives [“Hopes for U.S.-Run Nixon Library Fade,” news story].

To understand morale problems (as well as historians’ concerns), one must look back at the archives’ failure to protect staff in 1992. During public-access litigation, Nixon’s lawyer then referred to the government’s Nixon tapes archivists as “incompetent clerical-level archivists.” In court briefs, he implied that the processing of Nixon’s tapes had been flawed by anti-Nixon bias. (In reality, both the supervisor and I had voted for Nixon in 1972.)

Nixon’s lawyer appears to have used such tactics to defend his client’s interests at all costs. Historian Stanley Kutler later said that he doubted Nixon ever would have agreed to the release of undisclosed tapes during his lifetime. Some 200 hours of Watergate conversations, which archivists finished processing in the 1980s, were not released until after Nixon’s death.

So Nixon’s lawyer served his client well. But who stood up to defend NARA’s archivists, whose performance earlier had been rated as ‘outstanding’? No one. In a December 1992 article about the Nixon tapes, Seymour Hersh wrote that, in answering his inquiries, the “archives was reduced to anonymous slander” of its own staff. When interviewed by Mr. Hersh, one government lawyer even publicly denigrated Nixon Project archivists for a supposed ‘lack of sophistication.’

Given the National Archives’ failure to stand up to Nixon lawyers, it is reasonable to ask who will protect archivists (and the future of Nixon’s records) if unfair charges of ‘bias’ or other excuses are used in an attempt to replace civil servants with Nixon Foundation staff or to limit public access to records?”

Replacement of civil servants with foundation staff did not become an issue (to my knowledge) when John Taylor, then-U.S. Archivist Allen Weinstein, and Presidential Libraries chief Sharon Fawcett worked out the details of the establishment of a federal library in Yorba Linda eight years later. But there’s no do-over on the most important issue. Who spoke up publicly for Graboske and his staff? I did. NARA union president Peter Jeffrey did. And that’s pretty well it for the 1990s. Little wonder then that I now say “too simplistic, dudes,” and “too late, you blew your chance to build street cred in the past on issues of public integrity” when I hear right wingers debate union issues in the blogosphere now.

But Taylor raises another important point in his essay.   To what extent can a president such as Nixon, who made the terrible mistake of recording his conversations, find reasonable assessment of his presidency as a whole? John writes of “history’s failure to appreciate his deeply introverted temperament, which made each of his public appearances a trial, each meeting with associates an intricate minuet of conflict avoidance, and each conversation with the few people he really trusted an opportunity to release all the tension and anger of being a wartime INTJ.”

I’m here to tell John Taylor, don’t give up. The definitive biographies of Nixon have yet to be written.

Taylor concludes his essay by writing

“Nixon’s toxic theories and statements about race are especially problematical. It will take scholars decades to sort it all out. When they do, I remain hopeful that they’ll understand that he was a far more serious, diligent, and gracious person than history now remembers. For 37, there should be countless better Presidents Days ahead. In the meantime, remember that Nixon went to China, and they’re still singing about it.”

Perhaps because I try to hold on to a sense of fair play, I actually think some of them will.

The bigger problem is, who will read such books.  Fewer and fewer people read and more and more of them turn to self-validating echo chambers for news and information. And then there is the huge problem of neediness and ego stroking and  self esteem (“I’m a good person because of how I vote, yay, me, boo, you!”) that seemingly more stoic members of past generations, people perhaps with better coping skills, didn’t show as much.  What impact will thoughtful consideration of Nixon by historians have?  Some impact, certainly, on what I consider to be the present day “Silent Majority” of Americans.  But little or none to those who need to cling to myths.

Watching the rise of birtherism and the heated rhetoric used against Obama has made me decide that no matter how I vote (I have voted for both Democrats and Republicans at the federal, state and local level since becoming an Independent around 1989), I will never again consider myself a Republican. I’m in the same position some Democratic leaning Independents may have been in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as they watched the SDS and other radicals demonize Nixon. I refuse to be a part of moral corrosion when it comes to assessing presidents of both parties.

If a liberal scholar writes a balanced book about Nixon, what are the chances that right-wing talkmeisters will give him credit, given the comical way that Ronald Reagan has been built up into a mythical figure by the present day GOP? To hear them praise Reagan is to think that he never raised taxes, which he did. Of course, Reagan governed in an age where politicians still treated the American people as if they were grown up and tough enough and unselfish enough to listen to debate about revenue imbalances in terms of options that ranged from cutting spending to raising taxes. Yes, really! There was a time when voters weren’t treated as big babies. That this no longer is the case is the responsibility of both the speakers and listeners, but I think more so of listeners. Too many have bought into a “make me feel good” culture. I voted for Reagan.  I’m the first to say that he hurt America with his demagoguing of federal civil servants and public sector employees and through fiscal policies that increased the deficit.

Of course it’s hard for a president’s present and former associates to watch him be lampooned or vilified or demonized on public policy issues or personal characteristics, such as alleged drinking. I see no distinction between Republicans and Democrats on that score. I greatly admire Barack Obama’s courage and cool in the face of attacks from the right that are as bad as what Nixon faced from the left in his day. The more Rush Limbaugh makes fun of Barack and Michelle Obama, the more I admire the cool and classiness and courage of the Obamas. Just as I admire the classy and decent way George and Laura Bush have conducted themselves after leaving office.

John Taylor hopes that future Presidents Days will be better for Nixon than past ones have been. There’s a lot of unnecessary baggage mixed into that equation due to the Kutler lawsuit. Although it will take time for scholars to make their way through all the released tapes by the time NARA releases the last segments of “Chron 5,” I do think some will write the books that John thinks Nixon deserves. Just as the best of them will write objectively and fairly about Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

Demagogues play a part in history but they don’t write credible narratives. For that you need people trained in historical methodologies who have not lost their moral compasses or given way to situational ethics.

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“The tapes must never come out”

Posted on February 22, 2011 | 5 comments

In a fascinating Presidents Day essay about Richard Nixon, John Taylor, who once served as Nixon’s chief of staff and later as director of the Nixon Foundation, writes of the White House tapes my colleagues at the National Archives and I prepared for disclosure during the 1980s:

“His taping system was the worst idea in the history of the modern presidency. He either had no idea how his private discourse would play publicly or no conception of ever losing control of the tapes. For someone who was so careful about his public persona, it was the ultimate nightmare. In the early 1990s, I got a call in Yorba Linda from Carlos Narvaez, who worked for Nixon in the National Archives. “The tapes must never come out,” he told me. “His reputation will never recover.” After Nixon died in 1994, I prayed our friend Carlos was wrong as I negotiated a deal under which the tapes were opened beginning in 1996 and were supposed to be fully opened by 2000.”

Never come out. Yet there was a law passed in December 1974 which placed them in government custody and required that the National Archives release them, first the portions dealing with “abuses of governmental power” and later the segments dealing with matters of “general historical significance.” (Under the implementing regulations for the 1974 Nixon records statute, the latter did not include purely political or purely personal material, of course.)

I knew Narvaez, of course. A nice young man with a pleasant personality who worked for Nixon (I believe his law firm paid his salary but it could have been the foundation). Sadly, Carlos died tragically, far too young. I liked him. We NARA archivists knew he was reviewing on behalf of Nixon the tapes we had marked for disclosure. But I had no idea until this morning that he reported back in the early 1990s that “the tapes must never come out.”

Actually, I can’t say I had “no idea.” The reaction to the tapes lawsuit filed by Professor Stanley Kutler in 1992 within the segments of the federal government where power resided – and the resulting de facto legal abandonment I experienced – gave some clues. I could tell by the defense strategy used in the case (Kutler’s lawyers referred to Nixon as a Defendant-Intevenor) that Nixon seemed determined to limit disclosures during his lifetime. With the help of then White House lawyer John Roberts, the Reagan Justice Department already had tried in the mid-1980s to get the U.S. Archivist to defer to Nixon’s requests not to release certain information from his records. Only a court’s intervention prevented the requirement of archival submission.

In 1992, the George H. W. Bush Department of Justice provided little or no pushback in its pleadings to Nixon’s arguments about the tapes and the federal employees who had worked with them. (Did they know, I now wonder, that Nixon’s side had concluded the tapes should “never come out?”) As late as 1998, only Peter Jeffrey, the president of the union at NARA, was brave enough to pen a letter, countering what Taylor had said in his earlier “Nixon man” guise about NARA’s archivists. (Taylor had called us “Hardy Boys” and said “the archivists have done their worst.” He also referred to us as “Junior Prosecutors,” an approach to discourse from which he now has turned away.)

Taylor has moved on to a more courageous and admirable path since then.  This  is so rare in public discourse, I no longer take seriously political chest pounding about values by either political party.  (This is compounded by the whiff of control freak nannyism, just in different areas, by some on the right as well as the left.)   But then, I am a confirmed Independent.

Is Taylor’s candor likely to result in any conservative pundits, historians, or records professionals writing about the challenges my archival cohort faced and noting, “wow, tough situation. What happened to you guys really was a bummer. Glad it wasn’t me.” I don’t know. I’m not betting on it.

In trying to understand why people talk past each other on so many public policy issues and why arguing “do the right thing” only reaches a limited audience, I’ve turned to the work in Moral Foundations Theory of Jonathan Haidt. He looks at five values: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Respect and Purity. Most people display some of all the values in some situations but they weight some of them differently. Haidt says that liberals value care for others and protecting them from harm and fairness more highly than do conservatives. Conservatives reportedly value loyalty and respect for authority more highly than do liberals. Fairness is the lowest ranked value for conservatives; purity for liberals.

Having myself been stereotyped as a liberal out to harm Nixon, when I actually considered myself a conservative Republican during my NARA career, I remind myself not to paint others with too broad a brush or buy into neat theories. As I pointed out in my Presidents Day post, however, it pays to be aware of stereotypes and how others perceive you. The smart thing to do is to take advantage of opportunities to prove you are not what others assert in their most cartoonish depictions that you are. The party that values social justice and fairness and justice and emphasizes rights needs to work harder to prove it can be trusted in areas related to national security and defense. The party that emphasizes security and downplays rights and calls for less regulation needs to work harder to prove it can be trusted in areas related to fairness and justice.

Bloggers and pundits and activists often undermine this, as do some of the principals, at times. Most historians probably will conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake, given the lack of WMD and the huge fiscal strain it put on the U.S. (No War Bonds, just Cheney’s assertions that deficits don’t matter, no shared financial sacrifice, “just shop on, dudes, max out the credit cards,” and people did, in the private and public sector.) But some of the Code Pink protestors and the people who sniped about General Betray-Us did the Democratic party no favors.

Activists on both sides can be pretty clueless, as reading some of news stories about what is happening in some states now reminds me. Break up the unions and who are workers supposed to rely on to ensure their members are treated fairly in issues involving workplace safety, training, and political pressure—the same fist pounding angry guys that painted them as caricatures? (Yeah, I am thinking about Peter Jeffrey’s courage in speaking out for my cohort.) Last time I looked, anger wasn’t a good thing on which to base public policy. If you’re going to work to limit the power of unions to bargain on non-financial issues or paint yourself as a fiscal reformer, you have to build up street cred on fairness and integrity issues first, that’s a no-brainer. Most importantly, you have to understand that you are in a position of trust.   That means you have to show moral courage by speaking out against extremists or injustice on your own side.  For too many, that is too hard to do, or even worse, not even valued.

Neither party is good about moving beyond largely meaningless political theater and displaying moral courage on most public policy issues. The same is true with archival issues. I shrugged off Corner blogger Stanley Kurtz’s cries about what happened during his research because he never has spoken out against the threatening calls the archival staff at the University of Illinois (Chicago) reportedly had to endure. Earlier, legal issues came up about access to the records of the Clinton health care effort. Liberal academics largely sat that one out in the 1990s.  

Group solidarity and loyalty may be valued more highly by the right according to Haidt, but you see examples of missed opportunities to show integrity and moral courage on archival issues among adherents of both parties. In fact, when it comes to backbone and integrity, regardless of voting record, I can start my count with John Taylor in his Father John guise, but I’m not going to run out of fingers on my two hands as I continue.

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An Old Fashioned Value, Playing It Cool

Posted on February 20, 2011 | 2 comments

Play it cool, real cool. “Go man go  but not like a yo yo school boy. Just play it cool.” West Side Story. “Cool,” the musical number in the garage after the rumble in which the leaders of the two rival street gangs died. One of my favorite musicals. I saw the movie version that was released in 1961 while I still was in elementary school. I was born in New York City and lived for the first three years of my life in the same neighborhood pictured on the cover of the Broadway original cast album for the show. (You might be able to make out the W. 56 on the trash can pictured on the cover.)  The photo below, taken with a flash on an overcast day, shows me with my late sister on W. 56th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues in 1972 1974.  No, it’s not a color photo of us “photoshopped” into a black and white picture of the street.  The buildings are that dark and dingy.  And we were standing steps from where we used to live in the 1950s, when West Side Story opened on Broadway.  I am on the left, my twin sister on the right.

Play it cool. Keep your cool. Don’t let ‘em see you sweat. I picked up on a vibe of valuing cool over heat as a child.  (That mantra served me well as a federal employee when I was questioned for two days by Nixon’s attorneys in the Nixon tapes litigation in 1992.  I later heard that one of the people present during my sworn testimony, where I essentially testified without legal support, had said that I was “a killer witness.”)  My schoolmates and I talked a lot about West Side Story when I was in my last year of elementary school. We ran around the schoolyard, snapping our fingers and chanting, “play it cool.” 

Fifty years later, when I click around the internet, I see a lot of in-group bonding. Does this make it harder to discuss archival and record keeping issues than in the past? Perhaps.  Some bloggers seem to bond through complaining. The man who wrote that “Email Sucks. Time to move on” said in a reply to a comment about email posted at his blog, “The relative small % of useful info that comes from outside the firewall for which we pay such a huge price.”

“Pay such a huge price?”

Another blogger wrote last week of achieving a “zero email organization.” He started off his blog post with the assertion that “There’s not a person who’s not aware of the current limits of email and the fact it has become a factor that limits employees performance. But very few really try deal with this issue once and for all.“  

“There’s not a person?”  If that is so, why did the post leave me saying, “really?”

I became curious.  What was it with all the seeming angst and handwringing about email, I wondered? To me, it’s just a communications tool, one that suits some people but not others.

As I looked around the blogosphere, I realized that the email dramaz are centered in organizations seeking tools for internal collaboration within their specialized workplaces. They don’t appear to be affected by the Federal Records Act or the Freedom of Information Act. The “chilling effect” never is mentioned. That political opponents or advocacy groups or mischief makers might attempt to get access to their deliberations is not a problem that comes up in these blogs.  The writers seem to have good intentions. They seem to be aiming for solutions that suit their workplace cultures and environments.  But when they complain about email, they’re not talking to federal employees whose external customers use a wide range of communications tools.

What isn’t apparent in the tweets about blog posts with the dramatic anti-email titles is that this apparently is a niche thing. While we in federal government are used to seeing almost nothing but internally or externally generated work related email in our inboxes, some of the complainers in the blogosphere appear to get little email that applies to their jobs. No wonder the feds that I know take a serene approach to a communications tool that seems to drive others to attempts to stamp it out.  Judging by the efforts of the National Archives and Records Administration, feds may work on improving internal collaboration, and consider what technology works best for that, but most of us want the U.S. public to approach us through whatever means they wish.  That includes everyone from the elderly letter writer or the prisoner in a jail cell (yes, prisoners have the right to ask executive agencies for information disclosure) to the most technologically savvy computer whiz.

But if fed users of email mostly are still playing it cool, real cool, on issues such as email, we’re doing so in an environment that is increasingly heated. That this is so is reversible, if there is sufficient good will. I’ve seen that in my own life.

When John Taylor and I talked about collective bargaining last week, I explained that while I never have belonged to a union, I have seen union members at NARA play a useful facilitative role in some non-financial workplace issues. No, I haven’t seen agency officials approached by a Fred Malek type doing some Jew counting, although Nixon’s records show that can occur in Washington.  But I’ve seen other types of pressure applied by power players to executive agencies. And I’ve seen union members work to cool things down or to speak up for employees.

Union representatives may play a facilitative or mediating role in the workplace. Sometimes, union officials step up and speak on issues that management seems unwilling to tackle.  When Taylor published an article, “Cutting the Nixon Tapes,” in The American Spectator in 1998, my sister (who unlike me still worked at NARA) showed me a strongly worded defense of the National Archives’ Nixon Presidential Materials Project written in response to Taylor’s article by a NARA union representative.  The right-leaning The American Spectator never published the letter the union official submitted but at least he spoke up for us and our successors at the National Archives. No similar letter from management circulated at NARA in 1998. As I’ve noted before, our cohort sometimes seemed “too hot to defend” – but not to union officials.

John Taylor has changed since he wrote “Cutting the Nixon Tapes.” Now he writes thoughtful blog posts such as “They Were Enemies, And They Were Friends.” When I thanked him on Saturday for providing a place at his Episconixonian blog that is a safe haven for discussing difficult issues related to the presidency and goverance, he described how his Facebook page reflected the same vibe as his blog. He mentioned a recent debate between a conservative Orange County, California friend and a center-left New York City friend who disagreed but kept it civil. Then he added, in what seemed to me a combination of the wisdom of an Episcopal vicar and a former chief of staff to a past U.S. president,

“It also reminds me of the times I’ve resorted to the sophism of personal disparagement. The best conversations occur (on-line and in person) when people are confident of their POV without being too emotionally invested. My bias is that being rooted in the peace of a mature spirituality helps. If you know you’re safe, you can risk being wrong in a discussion and even being open to what you might learn from an opponent.

So why do we descend into incivility? Ego, pride, arrogance, woundedness, a lack of empathy (reaching epidemic levels, as you suggest) — but mostly fear.”

While John has evolved from a spokesman for a former President of the United States to a provider of a safe haven for reasoned debate, many on the Internet seem to be headed in the other direction. As I noted in my “Safe Havens” post, this makes it harder to sell the value of Open Government and increased transparency.

To understand the challenges federal records professionals face, you have to zoom out and look at the big picture.  As John Taylor notes, people engaging in political discourse seem to have increasing problems with empathy for each other.  Most of us have seen anonymous commentators flame and demonize each other on comment boards associated with newspapers and political sites.

In 2008, Joel Achenbach, an online columnist for The Washington Post, pointed to how discourse plays out in areas where people speak under their own names. He wrote that

“The demands of punditry disallow intellectual modesty. Certainly we see that in the world of TV and radio, where we’ve created a political culture dominated by a certain kind of loud, angry, chest-beating male. The culture of bluster is driven by ratings — and, online, by page views. The moderated opinion, nuanced and open-minded, is a field mouse in a land patrolled by raptors.

Punditry increasingly is the province of partisans, table-pounders, the permanently outraged, the congenitally ungenerous.”

In this Sunday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd discussed reactions on the Internet to the reported sexual assualt of CBS’ courageous reporter Lara Logan and to Sen. Scott Brown’s brave revelations about abuse he encountered as a child. [Addendum February 21, 2011, 1:15 am.  Since my link to Dowd’s NYT column no longer works, I’ll add a couple more quotes from her column.  Dowd quoted a right leaning blogger who smacked Logan verbally in a comment devoid of sympathy.  The NYT columnist also observed of stories of the attack on Logan that “Some Yahoo comments were disgusting. ‘She got what she deserved,’ one said.”  Dowd added of comments about Brown that a poster at one site said, “‘OK, Scott, you get your free pity pills.”]  

Dowd observed  that “Online anonymity has created what the computer scientist Jaron Lanier calls a ‘culture of sadism.’”  She wrote that

“Nicholas Carr, author of ‘The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,’ says technology amplifies everything, good instincts and base. While technology is amoral, he said, our brains may be rewired in disturbing ways.

‘Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions,’ he said. ‘If we’re constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn’t have occurred before.’”

That may well be true, but I think in some cases, how people interact also tells us something about their core selves and real values.  Maybe we need an Internet update to the phrase In Vino Veritas.

Sometimes, you have to cross your fingers and trust your instincts.  Although I had been attacked verbally by Nixon’s side, most notably in the potentially career-ending epithet of “incompetent” archivists once flung at my cohort in 1992 by the former President’s attorney, I didn’t approach John Taylor’s first blog, “The New Nixon,” with angry words. Here’s one of our first exchanges, back in June 2008 under a post he wrote about James Rosen. Here was I, one of the once maligned federal Nixon tapes archivists, daring to show up at a blog associated with the Nixon Foundation.  (Truth be told, I was a little scared when I posted there the first time.  But I took a deep breath — something just told me it was the right thing to do.)  I explained who I was and how I viewed Nixon’s presidency. I had been an expert in “governmental abuses of power,” the segment of tapes the law required NARA to reveal first, as it did for no other president. John Taylor didn’t chase me off.  He not only kept his cool, he responded respectfully. And we’ve been engaged in great dialogue ever since, to the point where I find his later blog, The Episconixonian, a safe haven.

The rest of the Internet?  There are some good places.  I’m a big fan of Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish due to the very interesting and wide ranging posts.  But when I click around to other sites, sometimes it feels to me as if things were better when my schoolmates and I danced around the playground during recess in imitation of West Side Story. When I turn to political discourse on the Internet, there are a lot of sites where I feel as if we live in an age of “yo yo schoolboys” (and schoolgirls), to quote the lyrics for “Cool.” There aren’t that many people willing to say, “keep cool,” as Ice does in the musical when Action yells, “I wanna get even.”  And what Dowd describes in her column today is downright dismaying.  We may no longer value “cool,” but anger, payback or snark aren’t the only way to roll.

Is it scary to open presidential records? Sure. There are so many people out there ready to pounce on released records and to cherry pick them or use them cynically or for partisan payback. Some will pick out the worst. Others the most sensational. Some will puzzle over issues that are hard to explain to anyone who never has worked with power players or struggled with difficult executive decisions, as all presidents do. But I’m a glass half full person by nature.  I’ve always thought that if more information was released from presidential records, people would come to understand governance better and to move away from demonizing officials, including those of the party for which they do not vote.

President Barack Obama said in Tucson, Arizona in January, “We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us. And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.”

How we treat one another. There is much we cannot affect or alter in the world. And some forces are so evil, we cannot affect them.  But how we treat one another is most certainly entirely up to us.

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It Takes All Kinds

Posted on February 16, 2011 | 3 comments

Yesterday on Twitter I saw a records professional whom I greatly respect link  to a post titled “Email Sucks.  Let’s move on.”  When I read the linked post, I was surprised to see that the author was John Mancini, the president of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM). 

It would be a mistake to judge someone of whom I know nothing and of whom I have never heard by a single post.  This one came across to me as an in-group “high-five me, guys” post, not intended for someone such as I.  I’m on the periphery of records creation and retention solutions.  As an historian, I’m an end user.  As a former archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), I worked with non-paper based records during the 1970s and 1989s, the Nixon White House tapes.  Not only did we listen to the tapes to decide what portions could be released to the public, we did “sound enhancement” on them.  The right-hand photo in the banner for this blog shows me with the notch filters and parametric equalizers we used.   I was assigned to train staff on how to do archival disclosure review.  I also trained archivists on using the equipment and assessing where sound could be modified to suppress background noise on work copies of Nixon’s tapes and where it could not.

Given my past and present jobs, I’m interested in records related solutions for the federal government.  There may be workplaces where workers’ internal office preferences and aptitudes align closely with a relatively monolithic or conformist customer base.  There also may be workplaces where professionals can be dismissive of “the unlike.” But the government isn’t one of them.  There’s an awful lot of diversity among a nation of more than 300 million.  So much so that some even still send in letters to government officials or pick up the phone when they want to interact with us.

As an historian, I have a stake in how the government handles its electronic and paper records.  That’s why I tried out a records managers’ forum for a while.  AIIM describes itself as “the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information.”  Mancini’s post centered on what works for him in his workplace.  Perhaps there are other posts on the AIIM site that are more inclusive and helpful for someone such as I.  Maybe I’ll browse around some day.  Maybe not.  In my view, there really aren’t any one-size fits all solutions to communications and record keeping issues.  We Americans are very individualistic.

After I read Mancini’s post, I thought back to an essay on The Washington Post’s site in December 2006 about the demise of classical music station WGMS. I felt sorry for my 80-something mother when I heard WGMS was shutting down.  (Fortunately for us classical music lovers, WETA, the Washington, DC area public broadcasting radio station, switched in the next month from a news and talk format to classical.)

My Mom relies on an old radio for music and checks in on it for the weather forecast and news roundups, as well as for the  symphonies, concertos and opera broadcasts she loves.  Mom is less comfortable with technology than I.  She hasn’t enjoyed the transition from analog to digital broadcast tv.  Where she once could turn a dial on her old 1980s era tv, she now has to juggle two remotes and remember that one has to be set on 03 and not use the wrong one to change channels on the adapter box. 

Is that funny?  Of course not.  She was born in a different era than I.  I respect my Mom for coming through the horrors of living under totalitarian occupation in Europe during World War II with her resilient personality and sweet natured temperament intact.  And it’s not just that she’s a nice person and a wise, highly educated and very well-read observer of world events. My Mom can do all sorts of things that I’m not capable of doing because I’ve never learned the skills, like crocheting and knitting.  Just like some of our dads were handy around the house with tools some of us rarely pick up or would not know how to use effectively.   Inside or outside the office, life is not a zero sum game.  Having aptitudes or preferences in one area doesn’t trump someone else’s.  People are different, that’s all.  And we’re all going to be old one day—if we’re lucky enough to live long enough.

My Mom appreciates the fact that there’s something like email, which enables us to stay in touch quickly and easily with relatives abroad who once were sequestered behind the Iron Curtain.   (My family never could get permission to visit before the Soviet regime that occupied my Mom’s homeland fell in the early 1990s.  Of course, my Dad worked for the U.S. government for Voice of America.)  But Mom’s not on Facebook and Twitter and I don’t look down on her for it.  We don’t live in a one size fits all society.  Young and old, we decide what works for us and feel able to say to each other, you go your way, I’ll go mine.  People reach for different solutions to their needs.  In their diversity, they represent a portion of the customer base of many organizations, including ones I assume that AIIM is looking to help.

Some of the posters who wrote about the demise of WGMS under the “Coda for the Classics” post were empathetic.  They showed awareness of the fact that they weren’t the center of the universe.  They sympathized with those who said they would miss the FM radio station.  Others offered kind hearted solutions worded with a clear intent to help.  But some looked at the issue through what works for them, as if they are setting a standard for all.  One sneered:

“Here’s a clue for any of you radio “executives”: the smart/rich people have all left you guys. The people who are left are the ones who are either too old or too poor to afford an alternative.  So that’s what you’ll have to sell to your advertisers: Too Old and Too Dumb.” 

Sounds like a lot of political jousting on message boards.  But as I’ve observed in other postings, we don’t have to let the political snarkers call the shots or set the tone.

Are old people disposable, irrelevant, targets of scorn in our society?  Of course not.  The posters who shrugged at the loss of a longtime FM music station simply lacked empathy or perspective. You see the same quality in many political forums.  But writing from an in-group insular perspective is not the only way to roll.  Sometimes it pays to study what history professor Timothy Burke calls “the unlike.”  Dr. Burke observed of the challenges of the presidency in January 2009 at Easily Distracted that 

“The hardest challenge, in many ways, falls in the space in between the titular, symbolic Presidency and its interior deliberative work, in the way that the President and his officers operate within the public sphere, in how they formulate and present and defend policy in front of and in dialogue with the public. This is hard because it requires a very fine distinction between the voices that authentically speak from a habitus or perspective that’s at odds with the worldview of the President and his advisors and much more calculated and cynical bids at ‘framing’ that come from a well-oiled machine that approaches public dialogue as a pure instrument, as a zero-sum exercise which either advances or defeats narrow self-interests.

The distinction between the two is most easily glimpsed if you cultivate a taste for the unlike, force yourself to speak in unfamiliar and uncomfortable tongues, travel across ways of seeing and talking as one might travel across geographies. This commitment is not a safe, happy kind of venture of unity-in-difference, not a boat ride through “It’s a Small World”. Listening to the unlike, speaking the unfamiliar, can be draining, painful, frustrating. And at the end of any journey, you’re perfectly entitled to conclude that you like your established ways of talking best, that there’s something wrong with a stranger’s world and voice. But I think the person with the taste for the unlike can hear better the difference between a public voice that comes from somewhere real and a cynical attempt at framing that comes from some rag-and-bone shop think tank.”

Listening to “the unlike” is a skill many of us have to develop out in the working world.  Because it’s not “just about me.”  A professor at Old Dominion University named Joan Mann wrote insightfully about inter-disciplinary communications in 2002 in a paper titled “IT Education’s Failure to Deliver Successful Information. Systems: Now is the Time to Address the IT-User Gap.”   She noted,

“One issue related to communication/collaboration that may need to be addressed is the gap between the way technical majors are acculturated versus the way they need to behave when dealing with end users. 

Acculturation is the process by which a human being learns the cultural traits of its societal group. It is not unusual to see two technical people meeting for the first time participating in a swift competition over jargon to see who is more technically competent (for a description of this dynamic in university Computer Science programs, see the work-in-progress (Margolis and Miller, n.d.). They label this pecking order: the ‘I know more about computers than you do’ hierarchy).

This behavior sends several messages:
–Your status comes from being able to ‘out-jargon’ those you meet
 –You need to be obsessive about learning new jargon so that you won’t lose face
— Never admit to not knowing something
–It is more important to appear knowledgeable than to be competent
–It is important to quickly size up a situation and come to a decision

On the other hand, this behavior is the exact opposite of what it takes to make an end-user comfortable.

Moreover, knowing that the end-user typically starts out with less technical knowledge, leads the analyst to assume they [the end-users] have lower status when, they are actually experts in their own discipline and often have more seniority. Plus, it leads to a tendency to quickly assume, he/she, as the technician, knows what the user wants. In reality, the user not only has useful knowledge about business processes and political considerations, they may also be able to contribute very useful expertise in the creation of an effective and usable system in general (ex: public relations personnel may have good ideas on presenting information effectively (Scalet, 2000/2001).”

Dr. Mann observed, “Consistently reinforcing the need to know the industry of the firm you work for and how its processes relate to its competitiveness will address the ownership gap on the IT side. To reduce the relationship and communication gap, it is necessary to stress the need to create relationships with end-users even when not in a project with them and the importance of finding a mentor with experience in relationship building.”

The solution?  Mann suggested development of a culture which relied on self-awareness and on people who can toggle between various cultures within an organization and when necessary, to serve as translators among them.  She included in a box in her paper suggestions which serve as a good model in many areas of potential conflict, even, in my view, the political:

“We believed that, in order both to fight against the stereotype, and genuinely to be able to work effectively in the political arena, IT managers would need:

–The willingness and openness to acknowledge [the IT] stereotype and its impact on them as individuals
–A sense of humor to recognise their own shortcomings, especially where these reinforce the stereotype
–The ability to be comfortable in situations of ambiguity and uncertainty
–A preparedness to accept levels of responsibility for business success well outside their areas of direct accountability
–Skills in all forms of communication, beyond the communication of dry facts
–A team-oriented approach to problem resolution
–The subtle arts of leadership — in all directions
–A full range of conflict-handling styles to deal with different situations in appropriate ways
–A sensitivity to the uniqueness of individuals and their different strengths, particularly when brought together in collaborative activities
–A culture of sincere customer focus within their IT functions
–A set of mutually compatible visions — for themselves as individuals; for their families and friends; for their IT functions; and for their organisations. “

This is especially important for agencies such as the National Archives and Records Administration, which has a diverse population of users.  NARA has to be prepared to deal with people who reach out to it using everything from Twitter and other social media to web 1.0 mechanisms such as email to old fashioned paper based correspondence and telephone calls.  As a poster in an archivists’ forum pointed out, researchers aren’t nuisances, they’re potential advocates for an archival organization.  Sure, individual employees may have preferences for what they like to use to communicate.  Why not?  But you’ll never see a NARA blogger putting up a post that reads, “Email Sucks.  Let’s Move On.”

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Safe Havens

Posted on February 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

A blogger recently observed of government records that “if the documents are NOT classified they should be available on the web. After all the public did pay for their creation and has access if they ask.” Surprisingly, despite someone posting links to it to both, the assertions in the blog were not examined in a records managers’ forum or in an archivists’ forum, except by me. Rarely do records professionals, much less historians or open government advocates, address the tricky issue of the potential chilling effect on the creation of records.

People who would be dismayed if their private emails about the way a records forum works were shared with the group as a whole rarely seem to stop and think how disclosure laws might affect government officials whose records are sought by historians, journalists, activists, advocates, and political opponents. I do, because I have acted as a creator of permanently valuable federal records; a decision maker in the process of releasing records created by senior officials in the White House; and a researcher working with federal records.

At the federal level, the Freedom of Information Act exempts a number of categories of information from public disclosure. Agencies and departments increasingly are posting information and data on their websites, much of it post-decisional in nature. Depending on the issues, some agencies post on their websites exposure drafts and solicitations for public comment on various matters. Social media allow for near real-time interactions with the public which were not possible 10 or 15 years ago. At the National Archives and Records Administration, as the agency’s links on the AOTUS blog show, writers post on a number of issues.  Their blog essays provide insights into some agency operations and also, to some extent, into functional work units’ cultures.

What outsiders never will see is the posting of deliberative information about ongoing and emerging issues. That’s natural. Corporations don’t post the details of product development meetings, discussions of customer feedback, or debates about how to react to competitors’ actions. Government officials are not going to post their pre-decisional deliberations, either. Indeed, even the knowledge that time will pass before records become available is not always enough to encourage the creation of some sorts of records.

Until recently, most agencies and departments had agency hold times of 20 or 30 years, enabling them to control access to their permanently valuable records for several decades before turning them over to the National Archives. (It’s unclear what the rise in electronic record keeping will do to this psychologically protective buffer of two or three decades before legal transfer to NARA.) If one’s words were going to be cherry picked or used against one, an official at least could take comfort in the fact that he or should most likely would be gone before disclosure occurred.  Successor officials at the agency or department could distance themselves from the comments, if need be, pointing to the fact that the person no longer worked there.

During the 1970s, Richard Nixon’s lawyers argued that the mere review of his records by government archivists would “chill expression because he [Mr. Nixon] will be ‘saddled’ with prior positions communicated in private, leaving him unable to take inconsistent positions in the future.” That this might be so was not the fault of the federal archivists who worked on disclosure review but stemmed from Nixon’s decision to secretly record his meetings and some of his telephone calls while in the White House. As it happened, Nixon was not saddled with prior positions expressed in private on the White House tapes. The National Archives released a mere 63 hours of an estimated 3,700 while he was alive. That NARA actually finished screening all the tapes by 1987-1988 but released so little (and never was able to explain why it changed course) points to the difficulty of moving from private to public control of presidential records.

Nixon’s lawyers objected to public access screening by the Archives because their client’s “most private thoughts and communications, both written and spoken, will be exposed to and reviewed by a host of persons whom he does not know and did not select, and in whom he has no reason to place his confidence. This group will decide what is personal . . . and what is historical, to be opened for public review.”

The courts found that “Congress had ample reason to mandate screening by government archivists rather than control by Mr. Nixon, who lacks their expertise and disinterestedness.” This was as it should be. However much someone promises candor in a book, if he or she controls access to the source materials, there always will be questions of what was included and what left out. Moreover, even with the best intentions, it’s difficult for a writer to step back and to consider the bad or the ugly in his cohort’s efforts, as well as the good.

James Rogan, a California judge who served as one of the managers in the U.S. House of Representatives for the impeachment effort against President Clinton, is about to publish a book (with the unfortunate title of Catching Our Flag) based on notes he took during the effort. I say unfortunate because on September 11, 2001, I dug up the flag pin I had worn while Nixon, for whom I voted in 1972, was President.  For several years after 9/11, I wore a flag pin of some type, as my author photo from February 2004 shows. But by September 11, 2004, I no longer wore a flag pin on my lapel.  I had decided to rebel against the notion that one party’s members were patriotic (Republicans) and the others (Democratic) were not. Perhaps it was the Independent voter in me or the fact that I was the child of refugees from Communism. But I pinned my flag pin on the inside lining of my suit jacket, close to my heart, where no one could see it. It was my way of protesting the political hijacking by the right of a flag I believed most of us honored, regardless of how we voted.

Had Rogan donated his notes to a university special collections unit or a local historical society, professional archivists could have screened them for disclosure and researchers drawn on them to write about events from perspectives difficult for a participant to cover.  Still, that someone might hold on to his notes is a very human and natural reaction. As I’ve noted previously about the transition from private to public control of presidential records, it takes a special, courageous person to say, “here’s what we did, here are the records, examine them and come to whatever conclusions you wish.”

Gerald Ford appeared able to deal with disclosures from his records as a stand up guy. Other presidents have struggled with the challenge. That’s understandable in many ways. Context matters. Ford served a relatively short time and did not become engaged in as many contentious issues as Nixon did. If to some extent Nixon was a casualty of the Vietnam war, as Jonathan Aitken once observed, then the Clinton impeachment, too, will have to be considered in the context of his times. Both men brought some of their troubles on themselves, but it would be a mistake in studying the impeachment efforts to overlook the vehemence, anger, hostility, and even sometimes lack of basic decency or fairness that some anti-war activists displayed against Nixon and some social conservatives against Clinton.

This raises the question of a safe haven in record keeping. It is the knowledge that your words will not be cherry picked and used against you unfairly that most affects how candid people are. Look at how we deal with the people we choose as friends, whom we date and reject or build relationships with, marry or with whom we otherwise build long term relationships. With some people around us, we wear masks. We establish a shallow, superficial relationship with them and save our “real selves” for those we actually trust. With the latter, we can be ourselves. We can reveal concerns and self doubt and look at issues honestly. It is the knowledge that the person with whom we share confidences will treat them honorably and with integrity, rather than politically or vindictively, that guarantees maximum candor. So too with executive branch officials.

Establishing a safe haven for the creation and the release of the records of government officials is increasingly difficult. It’s unclear to me why the environment has become so toxic. I suspect it has something to do with how people were raised and how they developed their values, with the need to enhance one’s sense of self-esteem being a bigger factor than it once was. Fairness, balance, respect for facts, and other Golden Rule type values have been shed by many of those who drive discourse these days. Whether poor parenting or a culture that doesn’t value fairness, stoicism, and accountability as much as it once did is the reason, things clearly have deteriorated.

Some observers, such as John Avlon (former speechwriter to Rudy Giuliani), argue that too many Wingnuts on both sides have seized the microphones.  I’ve noted in some of my previous posts on “Advocacy” and “No Need to Be Missing in Action or a Prisoner of War” the effect the tenor of general discourse may have on discussions of records related issues.  But as David Frum once observed, “The fact that other people fail in other ways is not an excuse for you failing in your way.” Writers at sites such as Civil Politics argue that “‘Civility as we pursue it is the ability to disagree with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.’ It is possible to disagree on a policy, but believe that others who disagree are not evil, anti-American, stupid, or heartless.” But as long as the mud slingers and shouters and the angry who sound as if they want to punish those who disagree with them dominate the public conversations about politics and policy, transparency and Open Government are going to be difficult to achieve. Sometimes, writers even are going to take some conversations off grid rather than creating records of their deliberations.  It’s human nature to want to protect oneself, and one’s reputation and one’s policy goals, regardless of political party.

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On a personal note, remembering good times

Posted on February 4, 2011 | 6 comments

Two twins who both became employees of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).  So a trip down memory lane, with everything from “Jackie” pill box hats to A-line jumper (pinafore) dresses to New Wave blue hose!  Yeah, I know, most archival bloggers and historians don’t mix personal posts in with the professional.  But since my late sister worked at NARA, as I did, I want to pay tribute to her.  I already shared some photos of her at NARA at Christmas.  She was my best friend!  And a friend and supporter of many others.  A NARA official said of her at her memorial service that she took pleasure in other peoples’ accomplishments as if they were her own.  That’s the best kind of colleague, friend or mentor to have as an archivist. 

1950s

At 9 months old. I think I'm on the right but I'm not sure.

With Dad in New York City. I have no idea which is me.

1960s

Even as young teens we already were bookish. Don't know which is me here.

Wearing our fake fur "Jackie" pill box hats and fake fur coats. No idea which is me.

 1970s

I was a National Archives' employee already, my sister would join me at the Archives within a few years.

1980s

Oh so totally '80s New Wave, blue patterned hose and all! You sure can't judge people by how they dress. I moved from GOP to Independent two years after this picture was taken. Sis remained a Republican until her death. She's on the right here, I'm on the left. Both of us were NARA employees at this point. This is around the time that my archival cohort completed review of the Nixon White House tapes.

2000s

The former archivist and the archivist at Archives II, College Park, Maryland. My sister died about a year and a half later.

2011

Missing my sis but grateful for many years of good memories of her and for my many loved ones and cherished friends.

[Post revised February 9, 2011 for simplification.  The original post provided more specific information on some of the photos.]

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Researchers Bob Woodward, Stanley Kurtz

Posted on February 2, 2011 | 1 comment

Former Nixon Foundation director John Taylor linked at his blog to my comments about Stanley Kurtz and shared a story about Bob Woodward.  John’s interesting post led me to go back and read a news article that resulted from Bob Woodward’s visit to the Nixon Presidential Materials Project in 1988. It provides evidence of how a reporter such as Woodward handled archival issues as opposed to a pundit such as Kurtz.

When Kurtz wrote in 2008 at National Review’s The Corner about his request to see Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) records, he speculated about their content and about what might be happening with the records. Kurtz asked, “Is this a politically motivated cover-up? Although at this stage it is impossible to know, it is hard to avoid the suspicion. I also have some concerns for the security of the documents, although I have no specific evidence that their security is endangered.”

According to the Society of American Archivists’ Code of Ethics, such actions would be unethical.  However, Kurtz wrote, “The public needs clear assurances that none of the CAC records have been, or will be, damaged or removed.”

When Kurtz’s efforts to see the CAC records were reported in an archivists’ forum in 2008, I urged caution. Indeed, I tried to wave people off from discussing the issue. This was a mistake on my part and I apologized for it this week. I noted on the listserv,

“As an historian, I definitely would not want archivists ‘falling all over’ not to alienate me. Or to diss me, of course. I’d want them to treat me like an ordinary researcher.

If I still were an archivist, I wouldn’t ‘fall all over’ not to ‘alienate’ Kurtz. Or any blogger from the right or the left. I’m just not wired that way. This is as good a time as any for me to say that I was wrong to caution subscribers to A&A to steer clear of the Kurtz story in 2008. I did that because it stemmed from a blog post at The Corner. As soon as I read it, I anticipated correctly that it would get picked up by other conservative blogs and by talk radio. I’ll always carry some scars from allegations made about my archival cohort by the Nixon side and I simply didn’t want archivists who didn’t work with the records in question to get caught in what I thought would be a crossfire from the right.

That was a miscalculation on my part. I now feel my approach was wrong, as the UIC archivists, some of whom subscribed to the list, came under attack, but were left feeling isolated. Some of that was my fault, directly so, I’m afraid, and I apologize for that. In retrospect, I actually should have started my Nixonara blog back then, spelling out the Nixon [experience] and the lack of support from the right for us, instead of waiting until [NARA Nixon Presidential Library director] Tim Naftali came under attack.”

An archivist who works at UIC reported in 2008 that “Ken Rollings was the CAC liaison who called us (not the other way around) regarding the deed of gift complications. We never made initial contact, and all our actions were in response to the unresolved deed requirements explained above.” 

She added, “Unfortunately, after the liaison from the CAC who helped arrange the donation called us regarding his concern that the requirements of final negotiations of the deed of gift had never been met and that a final deed hadn’t been signed, and evidence that that was indeed the case (he wanted to assure that clients’, donors’ and grant applicants’ privacy was protected by the removal of social security numbers, bank account numbers, children’s grades) action had to be taken.”

Via the archivists’ forum, I advised UIC and other archival institutions in 2008 to get out in front of stories in the future. I wrote:

“It’s not clear to me  the extent to which academics consider how much the political world  depends on framing.  This is an area where even governmental institutions, such as the National Archives, sometimes end up playing  catch-up.  At other times, however, the Archives has done well, even [when]  it had to act reactively rather than proactively.  This was the case with the so-called reclassification flap.  Indeed, the reclassification flap is a good example of how to answer an emerging issue with candor and
quick action. (It seems to me that Bill Leonard–unfortunately no
longer with NARA–played a part in that as well as U.S. Archivist Allen
Weinstein.)   With the CAC issue, it seems to me that UIC has been slow
to use all available outreach mechanisms.”

I noted that

“Stanley Kurtz wrote on August 23, ‘I don’t know if UIC simply determined that it had legal authority to open the materials, without further agreement from the donor, or whether UIC is making this material available only after having restricted some material, at the donor’s request. Obviously, I will be on the lookout when I view the records for evidence of tampering, or of, say, names in critical places being blacked out.’  Tampering with records is anathema to members of the archival profession. The Archivists’ Code of Ethics states that ‘Archivists may not alter, manipulate, or destroy data or records to conceal facts or distort evidence.’  To suggest that archivists might ‘tamper’ with records is a serious charge.

Had I been UIC, I would have addressed this more forcefully and directly. Assuming the institution did everything as it should have, I would have strongly rebutted the assertion of tampering, pointed to what such an assertion means in the archival world, and mentioned the Code of Ethics. An institution in this position needs to frame the issues and take all opportunities to educate the public and provide strong assurances to outsiders that address all questions raised.

Had I been UIC, I would have provided additional detail about what specifically was the issue regarding the legal status of the records. Mr. Rosati’s comment states that the query from a former board member came in on August 11. It would have been helpful if he would have placed this in time in relation to queries by Dr. Kurtz. . . . I also would have included additional information on what were the applicable restrictions, when the collection was processed, and so forth.”

I added that

“this is an interesting case study involving an intersection of the political and the academic worlds. I do understand why Mr. Rosati wrote in response to the op ed that ‘We do not need to be–and were not–‘bullied into doing the right thing’.” But that perception might have been avoided altogether. A library or archives cannot control how outsiders portray it. The wisest course is to craft and follow policies based on best practices and legal requirements, which all employees feel comfortable following. And it isn’t just what an institution does internally. Dealing with researchers who are interested in politically charged topics requires the formulation of good communications strategies and extra attention to detail. Perceptions as well as actions mean a great deal.”

Bob Woodward is a journalist. Different rules apply to reporting than to commentary, such as one finds at The Corner. John Taylor said he wasn’t aware of Bob Woodward ever visiting the private or the public Nixon library.  I can confirm that Woodward did visit us at NARA. I actually was in the research room during one of his visits to the National Archives’ Nixon Presidential Materials Project in 1988. I wrote about his research for the History News Service in 2007. I also commented in another historians’ forum about Woodward’s research, explaining that the reporter wrote:

“‘On July 5, 1971, the notes say, “Malek really check out Jewish cabals.” The July 9, 1971, notes say “Malek — Jews in BLS etc.”  On July 24, 1971, “How many Jews — Malek.”  On July 25, 1971, “Malek get the [number] of Jews in BLS,” and on July 30, 1971:  “Where are the figs on BLS ethnics.” According to archivists working on the Nixon papers, these are typical of notations Haldeman made in recording instructions from Nixon.'”

I then noted,

“However, Woodward and Pincus did not know – nor did anyone outside NARA – that government archivists attempted in 1987 to open an earlier segment of Haldeman’s meeting notes. Haldeman did not object to the release. The segment of notes (July 3, 1971) would have set the scene for the later, more cursory notes that Woodward and Pincus saw at NARA’s annex in Alexandria (yes, I still worked there then) and quoted in their article. But it was withheld from them and from all other researchers, not because NARA decided to restrict it, but because Nixon blocked us from releasing it.

There is no way Woodward or Pincus would have known about this. Archivists do not discuss with outsiders that which is withheld, whether the withholding derives from a former President’s objection or from an independent restriction applied by an archivist. All Woodward and Pincus would have seen when they visited us at the NARA annex in Alexandria was a withdrawal sheet showing that an item for July 3, 1971 had been withheld as “C,” meaning contested. That meant it was withheld at Nixon’s request.”

You can see the withdrawal sheet Woodward would have seen in the image below.

Since it later was released, I quoted the July 3, 1971 note in my History News Service article (link above).  [Addendum 02/02/11, 7:55 p.m.  Here is the pertinent portion of the Haldeman meeting note that was unavailable to Woodward in 1988 but was released byNARA after Nixon’s death:

“everyone in BLS is Jewish look at all sensitive areas ck. Jewish involvement . . . esp. uncover Jewish cells — & put a non-Jew in chg of each.”]

The article Woodward and Walter Pincus wrote in 1988 is very straightforward. Woodward could not tell that archivists had attempted to release a portion of Haldeman’s notes pertinent to his research but withdrew it when Nixon filed a claim against release.  [The withdrawal sheet shown above doesn’t mention Malek or BLS.] However, he did see other evidence of disagreements between NARA and Nixon. He covered this a reporter would, stating what he knew but not speculating as to content or whether the removal was proper or not:

“Records in the Nixon archives show that 134 documents have been withdrawn from Malek’s White House files by Nixon’s lawyers who asserted their release could involve invasion of privacy or violation of other rights.

Dozens of other documents filed in the Nixon archives authored by Malek or directed to him also have been withdrawn by Nixon’s lawyers. One knowledgeable source said that Nixon’s representatives carefully went through the files of former Nixon aides who have played or are playing roles in the Bush campaign.”

I don’t know who the “knowledgeable source” would have been. I was one of several archivists who at times were in the research room with Woodward but never spoke to him except to accept “call slips” for requested material and to deliver to him the archives boxes he asked to see.  However, that Nixon’s lawyers withdrew material from the files of officials later associated with George H. W. Bush was evident in the public withdrawal notices NARA then used.

Woodward noted,

“On Sept. 8, 1971, Malek wrote Haldeman a memo ‘re Bureau of Labor Statistics,’ but the document has been withdrawn from public access because its disclosure ‘would violate an individual’s rights,’ according to a notation in the National Archives files. Objection to public release of the document was made by lawyers for Nixon.”

This is the type of dispassionate reporting of archival issues to which I am accustomed. That’s one reason why the tone of Stanley Kurtz’s posts at The Corner took me by surprise.  I had to remind myself that while Woodward was writing as a journalist, ten years later Kurtz was writing a blog essay at the National Review site rather than a news article.

I do not know whether the September 8, 1971 memorandum from Malek was among the ones NARA later released or not. That it is not listed in the Watergate exhibit materials is not dispositive as the exhibit materials may not reflect every single item NARA has on a topic. Typing “September 8, 1971” into the Nixon Presidential Library’s search box produced multiple unrelated hits, so I’ll have to examine the site more closely this evening. 

[Addendum 02/02/11, 7:58 pm:  NARA did release the September 8, 1971.  I found a copy on Slate’s site:  http://img.slate.com/media/21/19710908_Malek_To_Haldeman.pdf  The Malek memo was used in an article by Timothy Noah published at Slate in 2007.  Noah’s article also includes an extract from the pertinent July 3, 1971 Nixon tape.

The later declassification marking under E.O. 12958 seemingly was done out of an abudance of caution.  Edie Prise already had stamped the “confidential” as being an administrative marking, not a national security classification marking, in 1982.  That is why Nixon’s representatives were able to view it (they did not hold security cleaerances) and to request that NARA withhold it prior to the 1987 opening of the White House Special Files.]

Interestingly, Malek comes across better to me in what he told Woodward in 1988 than in Ben Stein’s “Leave Fred Malek alone” column in 2010 (shades of “Leave Britney Alone”) or in the oral history interview he later gave on the BLS matter. (I’ve described Malek’s stance in the latter as “no harm, no foul.”) Yet Malek had more at stake, as he was being considered in 1988 for chairman of the Republican National Committee. (Well, it was the 1980s.  That was a very different age from the present–and come to think of it, one in which I still considered myself a Republican.  I left the party behind to move firmly into the Independent column soon thereafter.) Woodward wrote in 1988 that

“In a reference to the Jewish employees, Malek wrote that ‘13 of the 35 fit the other demographic criterion that was discussed.’ A handwritten notation, whose author could not be determined, was added to the bottom of his memo saying that ‘Most of these are at the top.’

Malek on Friday acknowledged that this ‘demographic criterion’ was whether an employee was Jewish. Asked if he thought it appropriate for the government to determine the religious affiliation of employes, Malek replied, ‘No.’

‘If the president of the United States asks you to get [political party] registration information, that’s routine,’ Malek said. ‘Anything else might be questionable . . . . When you are in the White House you get lots of directives that you don’t agree with.’

He said the party affiliations were done by checking voter registration rolls in the various jurisdictions. Asked how he or his staff determined whether a BLS employee was Jewish, Malek said, ‘I don’t know how you do it . . . guessing, the names.’

Malek said that Nixon’s notions of a ‘Jewish cabal’ were ‘ridiculous’ and ‘nonsense.’”

Accountability. What a concept. What seemed normal in 1988 sounds quite quaint these days days.  Well, I may no longer be a conservative but there are areas where I’m old fashioned.  To me manning up still is the best way to roll.

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