December 2003 Newsletter

The End of History?
The Beginning of Global Perspective?
The Threat to Sources.

Luncheon Address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
2003 Conference
June 7, 2003
George Washington University, Washington D.C.

By Thomas S. Blanton

Thanks very much for coming out today to this luncheon speech that was listed in the program without a title. Sort of a surprise main course, if you will. Mystery meat. For the sizeable crowd here, I give all the credit to my colleagues at the National Security Archive, for it is their credit account, or credibility account, on which I constantly draw. Perhaps I also had help from the rain. There was not much else to do today.

Why was there no title for my address in the program? Well, remembering John Lewis Gaddis’ admonition in his wonderful Oxford lectures, published as The Landscape of History, to look to the sciences for help in history matters, I look to psychiatry, sort of a science, which tells us that procrastination basically represents an unarticulated conflict. It wasn’t until earlier this week, while talking with a fantastic group of graduate students who attended the George Washington University Cold War Group’s first Summer Institute on archival research, that I realized what my conflict was over this title. I can blame it, like so much else in our profession and our modern world, on Richard Nixon.

Picture the scene: April 27, 1971, after eight in the evening, and the White House operator is calling; President Nixon wants to speak with his national security adviser. Henry Kissinger picks up the phone, and unbeknownst to Nixon, so do Kissinger’s secretaries, who proceed to tape and type an almost verbatim transcript of the conversation, as they do for all of Henry’s calls.

Of course, unbeknownst to Kissinger, Nixon’s voice-activated tape machine is also rolling, as on all of Nixon’s conversations. It’s a mutual wiretap society, the perfect metaphor for that administration.

The two men are exhilarated on this day, because there’s been a breakthrough, a secret message from the People’s Republic of China. Premier Zhou En-lai has sent an invitation through a Pakistani channel for a Nixon emissary to come to China and arrange what would become Nixon’s historic trip to China. The Chinese message had even mentioned Kissinger as the possible emissary, but Nixon now proceeds to torment Kissinger with other names instead. The knife twists as Nixon mentions the U.S. representative at the Paris talks on Vietnam, Ambassador David K.E. Bruce, and then asks, “How about Nelson?”--meaning Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger’s long-time patron. At first Kissinger says no, but when Nixon keeps raising other possibilities, Kissinger comes back to Rockefeller because “I could keep him under control.” Nixon muses that Tom Dewey, former Republican presidential candidate, could do it, but of course, Dewey’s dead. Nixon even suggests Kissinger’s military assistant, then-Colonel Alexander Haig, because “he’s really tough.” You can just feel Kissinger’s pain at this moment. He’s probably thinking, “Tough? Tough? I’ll show you who’s tough. I’ll order some more secret bombing of Cambodia soon as I get off the phone!”

The most cutting comments are reserved for George H.W. Bush, then serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Nixon asks, “How about Bush?” and Kissinger replies, “Absolutely not, he is too soft and not sophisticated enough.” Later, Kissinger volunteers, “Bush would be too weak,” and Nixon says, “I thought so too but I was trying to think of somebody with a title.”

Well, I didn’t have a title until earlier this week. Now I do. “The End of History? The Beginning of Global Perspective? The Threat to Sources.” Let me explain.

For starters, it’s a real pleasure to be here today, as an adopted member of the diplomatic history profession. I say adopted because my own training, such as it was, was in economic history. And while there was a certain international and comparative dimension to it, comparing the economic growth and in particular the textile industries of England and New England and the American South and the Asian Tigers, I left history for journalism and only came back to history when in the mid-1980s documents from declassified files that journalists and scholars had requested had piled up so high in their basements that several of their spouses threatened to divorce them if they didn’t get the papers out of the house!

Thus was born the National Security Archive. I was in the right place at the right time, visiting a little three-room office in an upper corner of the Brookings Institution where the basement files had been dumped, and I had just gotten one of those dunning letters from the student loan agency. You know, those people chased me down in Guatemala and in Washington; I think if we just put them in charge of immigration and naturalization they’d have caught the 9/11 hijackers before they got on the plane. So I needed a job, and the archive gave me the grandiose title of director of planning and research, which only meant that I filed declassification requests all day. Through the application of the well-known Peter Principle, which decrees that one rises to one’s level of incompetence, I am now the executive director of the archive.

From the very beginning, the archive had a project collecting documents on the Nicaraguan contras. We treated them as if they were a federal agency (which in a sense they were). We also had a project collecting documents related to the taking of the American hostages in Iran, U.S. policy towards the Shah, and the Ayatollah. So in the fall of 1986, when President Reagan announced that a fellow named Oliver North had connected the two, the archive became the primary source for people studying arms deals, diversions, covert operations, and Iran-contra. The rest is history.

I should clear up one item, though. Our name. National Security Archive. It’s not really accurate. We’re not national. We’ve done what Michael Hogan suggested yesterday for the diplomatic history profession as a whole: we’ve gone global. We are working with the Cold War International History Project and with partners, scholars, journalists, and truth commissions in thirty-five countries, with more added every year. Ulan Bator, anyone?

Security? Financially speaking, we have very little. We live on foundation grants, mostly, and some royalties from our books and microfiche and the Digital National Security Archive subscription, marketed by ProQuest and Chadwyck-Healey, which publishes hundreds of thousands of pages that would still be secret today if not for our Freedom of Information requests. And we certainly don’t give much of a sense of security to the government officials whom we’re constantly barraging with our requests.

And Archive? We’re not a traditional archive, since almost all of our collections are declassified documents, which is to say, photocopies of the originals. In a couple of cases, our copies are the only versions that have survived--which leads me to the main topic of my talk today: the threat to sources.

But before I go there, I have to say I was fascinated to see the portrait of Benjamin Franklin in Paris on the cover of the SHAFR program. At first glance, I thought – how dated! Diplomacy from the 1700s? Sure, he was a father of our country, but couldn’t we come up with a more modern, contemporary, hip image? Isn’t this what so many of us complain about, that diplomatic history is backing itself into a corner, isolating itself from world trends, becoming a niche market, gazing inward rather than going global like everyone else?

But then I talked about the cover with my colleague and guru in matters historical and diplomatic, Bill Burr, and we applied a little belated post-modernist thinking and soon detected several layers of meaning. First, of course, is the obvious reference to the Bush-Chirac handshake at the recent summit, current French-American tensions over Iraq, the renaming of French fries as freedom fries, and so forth. Here’s Benjamin Franklin, arranging the French-American alliance against a despot who lives in London (!), with the added irony that the French are keeping their despot throughout (or are soon to be trading him in for a new one).

Then the cover anticipates globalization, with the French lady reaching up to touch – I can’t quite tell – is it his coonskin cap? She evokes a fascination with things American, cultural exports, coonskin as the predecessor of blue jeans, kites as the predecessor of rock’n’roll, from electricity to soft power, if you will. Joseph Nye was not the first American to understand soft power, as Edmund Morgan’s brilliant short biography of Franklin shows. Morgan describes Franklin’s adventures at the French court and his acquisition of a harem, or as John Adams and other American members of the delegation to France saw it, a harem’s acquisition of him.

Then, to take the modernist cultural references even further, there’s the obvious connection to the Bob Dylan lyric, “he’s in the alley, with his pointed shoes and bells, speaking to some French girl, who says she knows me well.”

Well, as you see, there can be too much of a good thing, and as historians we may well be further along towards Michael Hogan’s sage advice of yesterday about the future of diplomatic history in a global age than we thought.

But if you listen to the pundits, we recently arrived at the end of history. Where would that leave us? Unemployed, no doubt. The most recent manifestation of this kind of doomsaying for our profession appeared just this week in Slate, the Microsoft on-line magazine. The article was written by a prominent journalist from the Boston Globe, Fred Kaplan, who was one of the original donors of documents to the National Security Archive and who also has quite a scholarly pedigree, with a Ph.D. from MIT and a wonderful book called Wizards of Armageddon on the history of thinking about nuclear weapons.

Fred’s article is titled “The End of History.” It builds on several postings by our colleague from the Air Force history office, Eduard Mark, on H-DIPLO, warning that the government is no longer saving the kinds of operational documentation on which our profession relies. Dr. Mark’s examples are frightening indeed. He cites the PC-based records of the 1989 invasion of Panama, which would have been deleted but for his own intervention, and the multitude of PowerPoint files rotting on, if not already deleted from, PCs in thousands of military units, yet representing the only evidence, attenuated at that, of the primary form of military communications, that of briefings.

Fred Kaplan takes this very real problem and turns it into a misdiagnosis. The subtitle of Fred’s posting is “How e-mail is wrecking our national archive.” But Dr. Mark’s concern is not as much about e-mail as it is about the absence of any computerized or electronic substitute for the typing pool, which used to guarantee that documentation could be centralized and saved. In fact, I would argue that e-mail has actually resulted in the generation of far more documentation on policymaking than previous generations of historians could ever imagine having access to, and we have actually succeeded in saving the most important, highest-level material.

You may remember the saga of the White House e-mail lawsuit. We at the National Security Archive filed suit on the last full day of the Reagan administration, after a national security adviser named Colin Powell ordered the deletion of all the back-up tapes of White House e-mail from the Reagan years. We got an injunction and fought the case all the way through the first Bush term and well into Clinton’s term. Before we won, the National Archives contained only a handful of electronic records. More than 130,000 White House e-mail records survived on those back-up tapes from the Reagan years, as e-mail use started in 1982 and became common by 1988, and from the first Bush term. From the full eight years of Clinton’s presidency, White House e-mail amounts to more than 30 million records! And all of this is preserved at College Park by court order.

Another example: Just think about the electronic sources that allow us to document September 11. In the New York Times reconstruction of the final minutes inside the two towers, for example, the reporters relied on voicemail and e-mail records from more than 140 people inside the towers, most of whom did not survive, as well as more than fifteen hours of audio tapes made by various units of the police and fire departments.

This does not refute Ed Mark’s point in the least, because the disappearance of computer-based files at the operating level is a very real and very dangerous problem. But at policymaking levels, our problem as historians will likely be too many sources, not too few, and it is only their preservation as digital files that will allow us to overcome the numbers and actually work through them.

The other counter to Cassandras of history comes from the remarkable new opportunities in the realm of international history. Again, the problem is too many sources, not too few, and in too many languages. Does anyone here speak Hungarian? It’s part of the Urdu-Finnish family, and there are file cabinets full of it in Budapest, archives open to researchers regardless of any 30-year or 20-year rule, through the collapse of Communism there in 1989.

I would say we are nowhere near the end of history. Instead, we are only at the beginning of the possibility of global perspective. The excitement among our international partners is palpable. Multiple archives, multiple languages, multiple countries, multiple perspectives. And over and over, Eureka moments.

Think about the sheer intellectual, historical, and yes, even moral joy that comes from finding the Soviet copy of Mao Zedong’s cable to Stalin on October 2, 1950, that directly contradicts the official Chinese version published in Beijing. Instead of rushing into the Korean War, Mao hesitated, while Stalin was willing to fight to the last Chinese.

Experience the vertical learning curve that comes from being a fly on the wall, courtesy of the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership’s notes, as Khrushchev explains, only two days after he ordered the missiles withdrawn from Cuba, that he did so in large part because of “that crazy Fidel.” Nikita was then positioned as the world’s leading pacifist – even Bertrand Russell was writing him fan letters.

Listen to the arguments, the condescension, the prickliness in conversations between the Chinese and the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, pieced together by a multinational group of scholars who combined the Vietnamese and Chinese versions produced by the Communist Party in each nation as a way to explain to cadres how two fraternal socialist states could come to blows in 1979.

Shiver as you peruse the 1964 Soviet war plan for Europe (the parallel U.S. war plans remain top secret) that shows the Warsaw Pact and NATO had very similar assumptions: each believed the other would strike first, and each assumed that the conflict would quickly go nuclear, perhaps even on the first day. The difference between the two lay in their reaction to the first strike. The Warsaw Pact, with its rear guard turned into a smoking, radiating rubble, would move forward; as Le Monde said on its front page, “Lyon en huit jours.” NATO would fall back, getting lunch at La Bocuse on the way to the Paris bistros, with maybe a cookout at the Fulda Gap.

Lift your eyebrows when you read the comment from the Czechoslovak general in one of the internal Warsaw Pact meetings, after 1968 I believe, who questioned the whole notion of national sovereignty and his oath to defend his country when the war plan meant that his country would disappear into a bottomless crater.

Share what must be the ultimate fantasy for a historian: Jim Hershberg’s exhilaration as he delivers to Fidel Castro in person, face to face, at the conference for the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis last fall in Havana, the secret message from JFK, forwarded through the Brazilians (and found by Jim in the archives in Brasilia) but overtaken by events on October 27 and 28, 1962, and therefore never delivered at the time, warning Castro that his erstwhile allies, the Soviets, were bargaining away the missiles and selling him out and he’d be better off making a deal for himself with the Yanquis.

I’m already belaboring my point. There are plenty of sources, too many sources for a single historian to analyze. Oh for the good old days that E.H. Carr mentions in his What Is History, when a specialist, say, in vanished Sumerian civilizations could actually peruse every known cuneiform tablet or pottery shard – all that was left from hundreds of years and thousands of human lives. Our only hope is for parallel processing of all these new sources by means of a vast expansion of the kinds of networks created by the Cold War International History Project and my own organization, involving multiple scholars proficient in multiple languages. These networks would resemble the networks of thousands of personal computers that process interstellar signals for NASA in the form of background programs and provide a mass of computing power far greater than NASA could otherwise afford.

My argument today is that the real threat to sources is not the digital age, but the rising tide of secrecy, both in terms of what it directly withholds and in terms of what it covers up. Sources on diplomatic history are disappearing into the vaults of the securocrats.

The Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy began well before September 11, and it did not arise from the war on terrorism. Rather, the ideological origins of the secrecy fetish for this White House lie in the battles over presidential power that Presidents Nixon and Ford lost in the 1970s. President Bush and Vice President Cheney do sincerely believe that the American people have made the White House way too open, way too accountable, over the past thirty years since Vietnam and Watergate. One might say that this administration is trying to haul those pesky open government laws off to the secure, undisclosed location where they’ve been keeping the vice president.

Perhaps the single most illuminating conversation on this subject occurred in January 2002 on ABC News “This Week,” when ABC’s Cokie Roberts asked Vice President Cheney about his energy policy task force. Cheney had refused to give Congress, the General Accounting Office, or the public any documents from the task force or even the names of advisers. “These things generally end up with people turning over the papers,” said Roberts. “ The Republicans are dying to have you turn over the papers. Why not turn over the papers? . . . It looks like they’re hiding something.” Cheney began by saying that withholding the information was where “the lawyers decided” to draw the line, then he went on to give his core belief: “In 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job . . . . We’ve seen it in cases like this before, where it’s demanded that the president cough up and compromise on important principles . . . unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 or 35 years.”

What occurred some thirty-five years ago, of course, in 1966, was the passage by Congress of the first version of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, signed, grudgingly, by President Johnson. His signing statement emphasized the need for secrecy as much as openness. The law acquired teeth only with the 1974 amendments enacted in the wake of Watergate (almost thirty years ago on the Cheney time scale). (Many of the current battlegrounds for openness revolve around statutes like the Presidential Records Act that were offspring of the Watergate scandal.) Those 1974 amendments were a defining experience for the new White House deputy chief of staff, a thirty-four-year-old in his first really big job in Washington – Richard Cheney. He reported to a more experienced Washington hand, a former congressman named Donald Rumsfeld, chief of staff to President Ford; and their first big challenge was to keep President Ford’s veto of the 1974 amendments from being overridden by Congress. They failed, but their objection animates today’s retrenchment: the president, Rumsfeld, Cheney and their lawyers believed that any law that could force the president to release information he didn’t want to release was unconstitutional, particularly on national security grounds. President Bush is an absolutist, repeatedly asserting unilateral power to withhold information even from Congress. For example, in the October 23, 2002 signing statement for the fiscal year 2003 defense appropriations bill, Bush declared that “the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that the President’s authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security flows from the Constitution and does not depend upon a legislative grant of authority.”

That assertion, of course, does not tell the whole story. As the 1997 Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy concluded, “the Necessary and Proper Clause in Article I, section 8, of the Constitution, which grants the Congress the authority to ‘make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces,’ provides a strong basis for Congressional action in this area. As an area in which the President and the Congress ‘may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain,’ the security classification system may fall within the ‘zone of twilight’ to which Justice Robert H. Jackson referred in 1952 in his famous concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer (the ‘steel seizure’ case).”

A belief in the God-given right to secrecy is not the whole story either, of course. Control of information keeps people (like Congress, other bureaucrats, nosy reporters, or critical voters) from interfering with your agenda. The grave danger to openness today in the United States comes from the combination of secrecy theology at the highest levels and the bureaucratic imperative at all levels.

Besides the energy task force, the other prominent example of pre-September 11 secrecy targeted the Presidential Records Act. A routine release of 68,000 pages of Reagan-era records landed on the new White House counsel’s desk in January 2001, and instead of letting the release go forward (four million pages of Reagan White House documents had already been released), the White House stalled. Ultimately, in November 2001, the White House issued a new executive order that turned the Presidential Records Act on its head, giving former presidents and even their heirs the ability to stall release of their records indefinitely. Curiously, the first former vice president to be accorded this executive privilege was the incumbent president’s father. A lawsuit by historians and public interest groups to prevent the National Archives from implementing the order is pending in federal district court.

There are many other examples of the rising tide of secrecy – too many to describe here – but we do have at hand an extremely useful tool with which to assess the government’s new secrecy claims. During the decade of the 1990s, especially after President Clinton’s 1995 executive order reforming the national security secrecy system, the U.S. government declassified more than one billion (!) pages of historic secrets. In fact, President Clinton deserves credit for declassifying more documentation than all his predecessors put together. These documents comprise a remarkable parallel to the DNA databases that are now proving guilt or innocence in capital cases, with dozens of accused murderers released from Death Row and growing doubts about the whole system of capital punishment. The billion pages we now have of historic secrets raise similar doubts about the whole system of national security secrecy.

For example, the new evidence illuminates the most prominent single test of national security secrecy claims, the Pentagon Papers case of 1971. In that case the government did persuade three justices to rule against the plain language of the First Amendment (but lost 6-3). Now we have the secret briefs that the government filed with the Supreme Court. The scholar John Prados was able to test the 11 “drop-dead” secrets that were too sensitive even to discuss in open court and concluded that none were truly damaging.

We now know that the then-solicitor general of the United States, Erwin Griswold, who argued the “drop-dead” items, concluded in 1989 that no damage was done by his losing the case:

“I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat . . . . It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another. There may be some basis for short-term classification while plans are being made, or negotiations are going on, but apart from details of weapons systems, there is very rarely any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to transactions in the past, even the fairly recent past.”

We now have the crash report, declassified in the 1990s, that was the centerpiece of the Supreme Court case in 1953 that established the “state secrets” privilege. In that case, U.S. v. Reynolds, the Court accepted Air Force affidavits claiming that release of the crash report would reveal national security secrets and therefore the civil case brought by the widows and families should be dismissed. More than nine hundred subsequent federal cases cite this precedent, which has served the government as a kind of neutron bomb against whistleblowers: no case left standing. The actual text of the crash report, found by one of the victims’ children via the Internet, refers obliquely and without detail to secret electronic gear on board but focuses on the repeated acts of negligence on the part of the Air Force that allowed the airplane’s engines to catch on fire. The government lied, but there is no justice: this year the Supreme Court declined to review a new petition by the Reynolds families. That leaves it to us, to review – with utmost skepticism – all the government’s secrecy claims.

Even before the 1990s, we already had the secret evidence behind the single most egregious violation of American civil liberties in modern times – the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. In 1982, under the Freedom of Information Act, Professor Peter Irons of the University of California at San Diego obtained Justice Department documents on the key internment prosecution, Korematsu v. United States, decided for the government by the Supreme Court in 1944. Irons’ documents encouraged Fred Korematsu to sue to vacate his conviction on grounds of government misconduct; and in fact, in 1984 a federal district court did vacate his conviction, finding that “the government knowingly withheld information from the courts when they were considering the critical question of military necessity in this case.” Judge Marilyn Patel concluded with this warning about the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision:

“Korematsu remains on the pages of our legal and political history. As a legal precedent it is now recognized as having very limited application. As historical precedent it stands as a constant caution that in times of war or declared military necessity our institutions must be vigilant in protecting constitutional guarantees. It stands as a caution that in times of distress the shield of military necessity and national security must not be used to protect governmental actions from close scrutiny and accountability. It stands as a caution that in times of international hostility and antagonisms our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial, must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.”

For me, those words echo all too loudly today. Right now, in the halls of the National Archives out in College Park, goon squads of securocrats are roaming the hallways, pulling boxes from the shelves when a scholar asks for them. Instead of rolling on carts to the reading room, the boxes get a trip to the back room for a once-over under the bare lightbulb! Millions of pages already declassified are now going through a re-review on the off chance that somewhere in there might be information about – horrors! – the fact that we had nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles in Turkey in 1962.

Who’s behind this travesty of a mockery of a sham? Some of the usual suspects, like the CIA and the Department of Energy, no doubt in search of a full-employment program for classification officers. But the original initiative arose in Congress, among a handful of Republicans who really did believe that Bill Clinton declassified all those documents in order to give our nuclear secrets to the Chinese in return for big campaign donations in 1996. I’m serious, that really was their theory, and now the taxpayers are paying tens of millions of dollars for a re-review of millions of pages, and we as scholars are losing our essential evidence behind a cardboard curtain.

So where are the SHAFR squads? Where is our profession’s expert study of what the securocrats are doing? Where are our hot letters to the national archivist, John Carlin, or to the members of Congress like Senator Kyl of Arizona who legislated this idiocy?

Where is our litigation? Why can’t SHAFR join the current lawsuit to save the Presidential Records Act that in alphabetical order has the American Historical Association as the name plaintiff (the National Security Archive is in the middle of the list)?

Where is our professional assessment of the problem Ed Mark points to, of disappearing personal computer files on the operations of government, especially the military?

Where are our grant applications that would fund expert working groups to save our history?

Where are our campaigns to change the law? As Martin Luther King remarked, change the law and their hearts and minds will follow.

Perhaps our biggest success as a profession to counter the threat to sources from secrecy was our victory in 1991 enshrining in law the requirement that the Foreign Relations of the United States series be an accurate and comprehensive documentary account of U.S. foreign policy and include the CIA, much to its dismay. Left to its own devices, the CIA would have ensured that FRUS carried no mention of U.S. covert actions or intelligence operations, much less U.S. fingerprints on regime changes. Not only did we win that requirement, we also won a key enforcement mechanism in the form of the Historical Advisory Committee at the State Department. The HAC does not deserve its acronym, unless in the sense of Michelangelo hacking at Carrara marble, because the HAC has provided crucial leverage against the prevailing mindset in the securocracy that once a secret, always a secret. Every department needs such a committee, with a statute behind it, ordering such an independent outside guarantee of comprehensive accurate documentary history.

Imagine how such a statutory framework would change the recalcitrance of the CIA, which has persuaded its non-statutory advisory committee not even to publish its recommendations, as if such publicity could diminish the candor of these senior scholars. In fact, by going along with the CIA’s charade, the members of the CIA advisory committee have voluntarily given up the only actual power they have to leverage more openness at Langley, and that is the power of public exposure.

So there you have it. We have to rally ourselves to combat the real threat to sources, that of excessive government secrecy. But we have much to look forward to, since the digital age is vastly expanding the potentially available sources and even giving us some of the tools to search them, use them, and save them. And we have a new international history to embrace, with extraordinary excitement (especially in the Brazilian archives, like water for chocolate).

The internationalization of our discipline does present us with some problems, though, starting with our name. Will we become the Society for International and Global History? S-I-G-H? My wife says we definitely have to keep the word “society” – it’s high-toned, much better than “association” or “organization” or the other professional titles, and closer to the original American formulation, as exemplified by the Society of the Cincinnati. Personally, I’d like to see something with action in it, something that signifies clout, maybe something like the Society for International and Contemporary Matters, SICM (sickem)! Well, maybe not.

In the final analysis, I have to agree with our society’s distinguished president, Michael Hogan, who yesterday suggested the new name of Society for the Study of International Relations, or SSIR. Well, on that subject, I would like to raise a toast, quoting that estimable child of the Cold War, that voluble author of espionage thrillers, that inspiration for John F. Kennedy’s covert operations (not only in Cuba but also in the boudoir, according to Robert Dallek and many others). I’m referring, of course, to Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series, and particularly to his volume titled: To SSIR, With Love.

Thank you.

1. Dr. William Burr found this document, titled “TELCON, The President/Mr. Kissinger, 8:18 p.m., April 27, 1971,” in Exchanges Leading up to HAK Trip to China – December 1969 – July 1971 (1), Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Security Council Files, Box 1031, National Security Archives, Washington, DC. A copy is available online at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB66/ch-18.pdf
2. Scott Armstrong, Malcolm Byrne, and Tom Blanton. The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (New York, 1987); Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne, eds. The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New York, 1993).
3. See, for example, the virtual network of freedom of information advocates at www.freedominfo.org
4. See www.il.proquest.com/products/pd-product-DNSA.shtml
5. Edmund Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 2003), 246-49.
6. The song is “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” from the Blonde on Blonde album, © 1966 Dwarf Music.
7. Fred Kaplan, “The End of History,” Slate Magazine, June 4, 2003, http:// History slate.msn.com/id/2083920/
8. See, for example, Eduard Mark, “History, recordkeeping, cultural assets,” posted Tuesday, 22 April 2003, and “NARA and recordkeeping,” posted Friday, 27 April 2001, on H-Diplo at http://h-net.msu.edu/
9. Tom Blanton, ed. White House E-Mail: The Top-Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy (New York, 1995).
10. New York Times, 26 May 2002, A25.
11. For one recent example in English, see Csaba Bekes, Malcolm Byrne, Janos Rainer, eds. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (Budapest, 2002), of which Istvan Deak commented, “There is no publication, in any language, that would even approach the thoroughness, reliability, and novelty of this monumental work.”
12. Shen Zhihua, “The Discrepancy between the Russian and Chinese Versions of Mao's 2 October 1950 Message to Stalin on Chinese Entry into the Korean War: A Chinese Scholar's Reply,” Cold War International Project (CWIH), Bulletin 8-9, Cold War in the Third World and the Collapse of Detente Pact, Winter 1996/1997, 237-39. http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=library.document&topic_id=1409&id=20
13. “The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Political Perspective After 40 Years,” Conference Briefing Book, Primary
Source Documents, Volume 2, The Crisis of October, Document 45, “Czechoslovakia, Minutes,
Conversation between the Delegations of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union,” October 30, 1962.
14. Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tonnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung and James G. Hershberg, eds.
“77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-1977,” Cold War
International Project (CWIHP), Working Paper #22,
http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=library.document&id=951; Stein Tonnesson,
“Le Duan and the Break with China,” Cold War International Project (CWIHP) Bulletin 12-13, End of the
Cold War, Fall/Winter 2001, 273-278. Virtual Archive, http://wwics.si.edu/topics/pubs/ACF37.pdf
15. Jacques Isnard, Le Monde, "En 1964, l'armée rouge se vantait d'atteindre Lyon en huit jours"
2000-05-25, 1. Parallel History Project of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_1/texts/media_echo_texte.htm
16. See Vojtech Mastny, “Did NATO Win the Cold War?” Foreign Affairs 78, 176-189.
17. The exchange took place in the Palacio des Convenciones, Havana, on October 12, 2002. Interestingly, Ted Sorensen promptly interjected that the message must be a fake, since he wrote JFK’s messages and did not remember any such item. Professor Hershberg pointed out that according to the White House tapes of the discussion of the message (which had been drafted by the State Department), Sorensen was not present, and JFK had in fact approved.
18. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York, 1961), 11-13.
19. Vice President Dick Cheney interview with Cokie Roberts, ABC News This Week, 27 January 2002.
20. For LBJ’s signing statement, Ford’s veto statement, and copious legislative history, see Will Ferroggiaro, Sajit Gandhi, and Thomas Blanton, eds. “The U.S. Freedom of Information Act at 35,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 51, at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB51/ (posted July 1, 2001).
21. Together with key documents of the Bush administration’s secrecy policy and national security secrecy claims the signing statement is on-line at www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002/wh102302.html
22. Secrecy: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, S. Doc. 105-2, 103rd Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1997), p. 15 (available on the Web at <http://ww1.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/index.html>http://ww1.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/index.html).
23. For the text of the Executive Order, statements from Congressional testimony, White House statements, and the legal complaint filed by historians and public interest groups, see www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20011128/ and www.citizen.org/litigation/briefs/FOIAGovtSec/PresRecords/index.cfm
24. See Thomas S. Blanton, ed., The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Audiotapes (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 48), posted June 5, 2001, updated June 29, 2001, at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchive/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/index.html
25. Erwin N. Griswold, “Secrets Not Worth Keeping: The courts and classified information,” Washington Post, 15 February 1989, A25.
26. For a summary of the case and the new evidence, see In Re Patricia J. Herring et al., “Petition for a Writ of Error Coram Nobis to Remedy Fraud Upon This Court,” submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on February 26, 2003 (awaiting docketing), by the Philadelphia law firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath. For the importance of Reynolds, see Morton H. Halperin and Daniel Hoffman, Freedom vs. National Security: Secrecy and Surveillance (New York, 1977), 103-4; and Stephen Dycus et al., eds. National Security Law – Third Edition (New York, 2002) 975-79.
27. Dycus, National Security Law, 805-7.
28. For an excellent succinct account of the CIA’s censorship of FRUS, the resulting public scandal, the profession’s campaign, Congress’s response, and the HAC’s effectiveness, see Kate Doyle, “The End of Secrecy,” in Craig Eisendrath, ed. National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War (Philadelphia, 2000), 101-4.
29. For discussion of this issue and an open letter to the committee’s chair, Robert Jervis, see
http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/ciahrp4.html; for an August 2003 statement by the CIA Historical Review Panel, see http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/ciahrp8.html; for related issues, see Steven Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists, Project on American Secrecy, online at http://www.fas.org/sgp/