Will Success Spoil the Presidential Libraries?

Abstract

THERE WAS a moment, say a third of century ago, when world was a great deal more simple. There were no nuclear weapons and no Vietnam War. There was not even a Pentagon, much less any Pentagon Papers. And of course federal government had no presidential libraries to occasion any concern among historians, as has recently been case. This is not to suggest that historians of a generation ago were concerned only with remote past. They worried about jobs, for 1938 was a depression year. They were exercised by delay in publishing Foreign Relations of United States, which had attained staggering lag of sixteen years. There was even some concern for archives, for American Historical Association in those days still had, happily and fittingly, a standing committee on source materials archives and historical manuscripts. When AHA held its annual meeting in 1938, its members, 1,017 strong, found time for such contemporary topics as passing of Austria and New Deal liberalism. Moreover, as anonymous rapporteur of that meeting wrote, the spacious lobbys and lounges of Chicago's and world's largest hotel gave free scope to gregarious and convivial impulses and flow of professional gossip.1 It is not possible to reconstruct gossip of that shining moment, but it may be safely assumed that along with Munich, recent congressional elections, and conviviality, Stevens Hotel Bar flowed with at least some conversation about decision of man in