I apologize if this is unnecessary but in checking whether the URLs
work, I've been unable to get the copy and paste method of linking to
Dr. Eduard Mark's posting to work properly.  So I've copied it below in
full along with my original posting to H-Diplo.  Again, sorry if this
is redundant, perhaps this worked for some of you.  Maarja

From: Eduard Mark <[log in to unmask]>
List Editor: "H-Diplo [Ball]" <[log in to unmask]>
Editor's Subject: Russell Riley on White House records, history [Mark]
Author's Subject: Russell Riley on White House records, history [Mark]
Date Written: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:45:10 -0500
Date Posted: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:49:42 -0500

    I should like to offer a few comments inspired by Maarja Krusten's
post on the lamentable state of federal record-keeping.

     I doubt nothing of what Russell Riley writes in the _Washington
Post_
about the lapsed state of record-keeping in the White House. It accords
too well with what I have observed elsewhere. Neither do I doubt that
political expediency has played a role there and elsewhere in the
Executive Branch in permitting this state of affairs to endure for at
least two decades. All this conceded, it remains that both Riley's
article
and Krusten's post are somewhat misleading. To wit:

(1) There is, I must stress, no reason at all to believe, as Riley and
Krusten imply, that the state of record keeping is worse in the White
House than elsewhere in the Executive Branch. I dare say, in fact, that
it
is better. Record-keeping has everywhere collapsed in the government,
and
not only in the United States. (European officials historians with whom
I
have worked indicate that the problem exists on the Continent as well.)
The root cause is, as I have in the past observed in this forum, the
inability of the government to deal with electronic records. This is
not,
I stress, inherent in the nature of electronic records. Indeed, the
advent
of electronic records should have improved record-keeping. That it
failed
to do is entirely owning to a failure to institute appropriate archival
procedures when the transition to computers was made in the 1980s.
Malfeasance has more exploited this state of affairs than caused it.

(2) The loss to history is severe, but as citizens we should not lose
sight of the fact that two other consequences are more worse: the loss
of
accountability for official acts and a generalized decline in the
efficiency of government due to the loss or misplacement of documents.
The
day shall surely come, I predict, when some great and terrible event
will
bring all these consequences home to the country at large.

What then is to be done?

(1) Congress must empanel a national commission to devise appropriate
archival standards and methods of enforcement. These must include, inter
alia, stringent and specific standards, enforceable under law, for what
must be documented as well how the resulting records are to be
preserved.
There should be severe criminal penalties for infringements.

(2) Government must engage leading companies in the field of data
storage
to advise in the creation of an archival system appropriate for an age
of
electronic records. Too little of the requisite talent exists in the
government, where it is any case liable to be inhibited by caution and
hostility to change.

(3) The professional societies of the learned professions should form an
alliance to preserve public accountability, governmental efficiency, and
the historical records.To these ends the societies should petition
Congress to address the collapse of record-keeping while suing select
federal agencies to observe such archival regulations as they now have,
inadequate though they be.

(4) The FOIA should be abolished, to be replaced by a strict 30-year
role.
This will reduce the temptation to destroy records or else not keep them
in the first place. Declassifiers, now inundated by mostly frivolous
requests under the FOIA, could then resume progressive declassification
of
record groups, which has all but stopped.

I must note in conclusion that one of the most serious obstacles to a
redress of the national crisis of record-keeping resides in the yawning
indifference of historians to it. I have agitated this issue for some
years, finding that with only the rarest exceptions historians are so
narcissisticly engaged in their own research that they care not a whit
for
their professional descendants. The issue of declassification arouses
them, predictabibly, but the usual attitude toward the problem of
record-keeping is, "I've got mine. After all, the Eisenhower
Administration kept good records." Even organizations that style
themselves champions of declassification, and which, like so-many
bloodhounds, will pursue records under the FOIA to prove that he United
States was beastly to their favorite third-world dictators, have
remained
resolutely indifferent to the crisis of record-keeping. They have
theirs -
or will in time.

Eduard Mark
Department of the Air Force

In reply to

From: [log in to unmask]
List Editor: "H-Diplo [Ball]" <[log in to unmask]>
Editor's Subject: Russell Riley on White House records, history
[Krusten]
Author's Subject: Russell Riley on White House records, history
[Krusten]
Date Written: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 13:36:52 EST
Date Posted: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 21:43:54 -0500

From the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook for November 6, 2005, see the
commentary, "For History's Sake, Nothing Like a Paper Trail" by Russell
Riley, professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public
Affairs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2005110
402284.html

(registration required for access to the Washington Post).  Copy also
posted
on the Miller Center site (http://millercenter.virginia.edu/), see "In
the
News."

Dr. Riley describes a seeming pattern of diminished recordkeeping among
high level White House officials during recent decades.  Drawing on his
experiences, John Earl Haynes pointed to a similar trend on H-Diplo on
April 19, 2003 in a message posted to a thread I had started in April
17,
2003 on "History, recordkeeping, cultural assets."  In comments that
later
circulated in the records management community, Eduard Mark expressed
concern about some other causes of diminished recordkeeping in a posting
on April 27, 2001 (see
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=0104&

week=d&msg=%2b2spm0ZSnGRBhgGdgj2QNw&user=&pw= ).

Dr. Riley recounts problems that both political parties have had with
records over the last few decades, from Nixon through Clinton. He
writes,
"Former chiefs of staff James A. Baker III and John Sununu have both
said
publicly that by the time George H.W. Bush became president in 1989,
senior officials knew better than to keep meaningful written records of
key meetings. These claims have been confirmed by scores of White House
staffers, both Democrat and Republican, in confidential oral history
interviews conducted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center of
Public Affairs over the last five years."

Dr. Riley notes "coping methods" which developed during the Clinton
administration.  He mentions a White House aide who allegedly deposited
his work notes in the shredder each night.  "Others learned that, when
internal documents had to be constructed, they should be written only in
what is termed 'discoverable language,' meaning language that will do no
harm if unearthed in the discovery phase of a lawsuit or investigation."

Dr. Riley believes that "the consequences of this behavior for
historians
will, of course, be tragic."  I haven't see much discussion of these
issues on Listservs, message boards or at scholarly conferences.  If
anyone hears of any forthcoming conference presentations on the
challenges
of studying foreign policy or decisionmaking in the post-Watergate age,
please let us know.  I also continue to be interested in hearing
scholars'
strategic thinking -- what, if anything, can be done by historians to
counter the seemingly strong imperative for high level White House
officials to create fewer and fewer records.  I am especially interested
in hearing affirmative arguments for good recordkeeping: what should
we say to White House and executive branch officials.

Maarja Krusten
Federal historian and former National Archives' Nixon tapes archivist

For source verification (postings 11/15 and 11/17/05, H-Diplo's
November logs are available at
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=lx&list=H-Diplo&user=&pw=&m
onth=0511

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance