The Weekly Standard reported in its Jan. 22 edition on the controversy over housing the George W. Bush Presidential Library on the campus of the Southern Methodist University (SMU). The Standard called the academics who signed a letter of protest "an embarrassment to scholarship."

If you read the letter signed by some academics at SMU, first mentioned on HNN in December, you can see that they conflated a government administered Presidential Library and a privately funded institute administered by the Bush Foundation.

Faculty members described two separate visions for a Bush Presidential Library. "In the first vision, the Library will be a neutral space. . . . SMU decision makers seem uniformly to hold the first vision. . . We wonder, however, if this model of the Presidential Library will be able to come about. . . . In the second vision, the Library will be a partisan space. . . The Library will hire conservative scholars to pursue a partisan agenda in favor of the President's policies and programs."

But Presidential Libraries are staffed and administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). And the controlling authorities are federal laws and executive orders.

Until Watergate, a President's records were considered his personal property. NARA explains on its website the statutes that cover Presidential Records and discusses the establishment of a system of Presidential Libraries.

Although Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidential Library is on a campus, it differs from the proposed Bush Library. It is staffed by NARA but LBJ was able to select what records he wanted to deposit in it and to place restrictions on access.

Theodore White noted in Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (1975) that Nixon formed a library committee in 1969. Its members visited Presidential Libraries and reported that " 'starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt, every President had emptied his archives and left his files empty.' " LBJ told them that he wanted to get a shredder for his Library.

White wrote that LBJ's attitude caused problems for "the chief archivist at the Johnson Library, who confessed that he did not really enjoy the task of expurgating the historical record that had been left in his care. Historians, observed the [archivist] don't like to work with material that is salted."

Not all the files were emptied, of course. Over time, the donor-restricted Presidential Libraries of Presidents Hoover through Carter have released useful information. Although LBJ placed a fifty-year restriction on his White House tapes, the work of the federally mandated JFK assassination review board in the 1990s and Mrs. Johnson's subsequent decision to allow archivists access to them shook some of them loose.

Until 1974, the idea was that scholars would have to be patient. Professor Clement Vose noted in his article, "The Nixon Project" (PS, Summer 1983), that the practice at donor-restricted Presidential Libraries was to screen innocuous files first. Before Congress passed the Nixon records act in 1974, archivists usually set aside files covering contentious matters so as to allow "the passage of time to dim controversy" related to the highest officials, "including the President himself."

All of this changed with Watergate - at least on paper. The laws governing Nixon's records (the Presidential Recordings and Materials Act of 1974) and those of Presidents starting with Ronald Reagan (the Presidential Records Act of 1978) reversed the concepts of private ownership and of deferred disclosure.

The Nixon act asserted government ownership of Presidential records and called for the disclosure "at the earliest reasonable date" of "the full truth" about "governmental abuses of power." The PRA permits former Presidents to restrict certain information in White House records for a relatively short period -- 12 years -- after leaving office.

Presidential Library foundations fund the construction of Libraries but do not administer them. They can, however, reject the U.S. Archivist's choice of a director of a Presidential Library. The role of these private sector entities in relation to NARA is murky. Former Truman Library director Larry Hackman ("Toward Better Policies and Practices for Presidential Libraries," The Public Historian, Vol. 28, No. 3 [Summer 2006]) and Benjaim Hufbauer (" Archives of Spin,") have called for greater transparency in some areas relating to the nonprofit partners of the government run Libraries.

Having participated in NARA's struggle to release Nixon's records, I was not surprised that George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13233in 2001. The order placed potential limits on the Archives' ability to open records under the PRA. Hugh Davis Graham wrote that Bush gave Presidents and their descendants "full veto authority in perpetuity over public access to documents in their presidential papers. This was what President Nixon tried to achieve in his 1974 agreement with the head of the General Services Administration (which then included the National Archives), a deal that Congress overturned later that year."

For now, E.O. 13233 represents the last word over what scholars and other members of the public will see from a President's records.

The National Archives is a subordinate agency within the executive branch. Many of its actions are shielded from view. The public occasionally receives glimpses into archival matters. For example, in 2006, newspapers revealed a secret agreement at NARA that reportedly led to the restriction of some declassified records.

At the same time that the SMU controversy erupted, Rep. Tom Davis (R - VA) released a report on the removal of documents from the National Archives by former National Security advisor Sandy Berger in 2003. The report examined NARA's internal reviews and asserted that an official allegedly was "bullied" into leaving Berger alone in an office with highly classified documents.

The report described troubling disputes among the National Archives' Inspector General (IG), Paul Brachfield, and officials at the Department of Justice. Mr. Brachfield sought unsuccessfully to inform the 9/11 Commission that Berger had been left alone with original documents at NARA during visits prior to the one during which he admitted to removing records. The IG tangled with "powerful and influential" Justice officials but finally concluded it would be "career suicide" to cross them.

Benjamin Hufbauer's editorial shows what a scholar can do if he carefully studies issues related to a President's museum and archives. Because they failed to gather enough data, whatever their actual intent, the professors at SMU who wrote a letter in December provided ammunition to those who believe academics have a kneejerk reaction to anything involving President George W. Bush.

Related Links

James F. Hollifield: SMU should say yes to the Bush library

Benjamin Hufbauer: Archives of Spin