Oral History and the History of American Foreign Relations

Abstract

United States foreign relations history and oral history were made for each other. At least one would think so, given the public and private funding of numerous oral history collections in the field. So why are they so little used in leading works of diplomatic history? While oral histories are consulted regularly and show up in many bibliographies of major works, they seldom make it to the footnote; arguments and conclusions are rarely based on oral history evidence, as an examination of two leading works on the history of the Cold War reveals. Of the copious citations in Melvyn P. Leffler's A Preponderance of Power, the most comprehensive work on the foreign policy of the Truman administration, there are only about ten citations to oral history in over 116 pages of endnotes. Michael J. Hogan's book The MarshallPlan is a masterpiece of in-depth, multiarchival research; it pioneered both corporatist interpretations of foreign policy and an international approach. A scan of the book's footnotes, however, shows no references to oral history; the bibliography lists only two interviews. This is particularly surprising because the Marshall Plan was one of the main focuses of the Harry S. Truman Library Oral History Project (completed in 1971), which contains 371 interviews and over 42,282 pages of interview transcriptions.1 Since both these works are justly considered paragons of archival research, their relative neglect of oral history sources bears some examination. This article will attempt to explain why some of the best diplomatic historians ignore or dismiss oral history sources and to suggest how new ways of reading those sources could increase their value to the field. Finally, the article will briefly survey some of the