So Libby and Others Were Taking Notes?
Dr. Riley begins by noting:
While much of Washington has been focused over the past week on reports about Vice President Cheney's early discussions of Valerie Plame's identity, little notice has been given to something equally surprising about these revelations -- their source. Investigators looking into the case reportedly found evidence of these meetings in former vice presidential aide I. Lewis"Scooter" Libby's own notes of conversations he had with Cheney.White House alumni across political lines -- and others wise to Washington's current ways -- have undoubtedly had the same incredulous reaction on first hearing this news: You mean he actually wrote it down?
Ever since President Richard M. Nixon got tangled up in the transcripts of his own tape recordings, the White House has operated more and more as an oral culture. Anything that shows up in written records can become a target for a hostile investigator. Accordingly, White House staffers have learned over the last few decades that the less committed to paper or computer, the better.Those gaps in the written record have made my job -- recording oral histories -- more important than ever. But these imperfect recollections, however candid and enlightening, cannot capture the tone nor match the accuracy of contemporaneous notes.
Dr. Riley then 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 also developed during the Clinton administration:
The simplest was to avoid creating documents, such as meeting notes or diaries, in the first place. One political aide, according to oral history interviews with two of his colleagues, kept each day's essential observations on a single index card, which was ritually deposited in a shredder on the way out the door 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.
The consequences of this behavior for historians will, of course, be tragic. The kinds of written records we have relied on for a millennium to reconstruct the crucial events of the past will be either compromised or in many cases nonexistent, leading to what can rightly be called a vanishing history of the American presidency."
Dr. Riley notes of the present White House, some officials of which served in Washington during past presidencies, such as Ford's , Reagan's, and the elder Bush's, that"the current administration remains a mystery on this point. Its senior ranks are filled with seasoned Washington hands who have lived through much of the litigious history of the modern presidency -- and who thus know firsthand the perils of the written word. Indeed Cheney himself once informed Bob Woodward that he keeps no diary -- and pointed to his head when Woodward asked where the history of the Bush years could be found."
Dr. Riley ends up speculating about the present day paper trail, based on what he derives from the glimpse apparently provided by Fitzgerald's investigation. But he notes the existence of Bush's executive order on the Presidential Records Act and concludes,"Unfortunately, given the probable delays in accessing presidential records -- delays this White House extended with an executive order in 2001 -- it will be a very long time before we can know with certainty whether today's written record is more expansive, and thus ultimately more illuminating, than others."
He's right.