Presidential Secrecy: Keeping Archives Open

Abstract

The other authors in this forum as well as a great deal of the research in our field amply demonstrate the importance, if not the centrality, of archival research, and the concomitant need to ensure access to the documents housed in those archives. Presidential archives allow us to understand individual presidencies and the presidency as an institution in ways that are simply impossible without them. Archival research allowed Fred I. Greenstein to analyze Dwight Eisenhower's hidden hand leadership, rescuing the former president from his reputation as a genial but out-oftouch chief executive.1 Archival research allowed Larry Berman to make his case against Henry Kissinger s conduct of the war in Vietnam.2 Archival research allowed political scientists to deepen our understanding of the workings of the executive as an institution.3 And archival research allowed communication scholars to grasp the creation and promulgation of presidential speeches and images,4 as well as the rhetorical machinations of presidential conversations.5 In short, without the information available to us through presidential archives, our ability to study the presidency and its individual occupants would be seriously impoverished. For those of us who work in the area of presidential studies, there is reason to be very nervous about the continued viability of presidential archives as they are constituted within the presidential library system. The current chief executive, in issuing Executive Order 13233, has launched an all-out assault on the practice of preserving and opening presidential documents by reducing the power of the archivists over presidential papers and increasing the power of individual presidents and their heirs to determine what gets opened and, more importantly, what remains closed. In order to make this case, I will first provide an overview of the library system and its history, and then detail what I consider to be a most serious threat to it.