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When Archivists Deal with Power Players

President George W. Bush reportedly is leaning toward Southern Methodist University (SMU) as the site of his Presidential Library, which will be administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).  A handful of people negotiate site selection for a Presidential Library.   A history professor at SMU has posted on his blog articles reflecting various perspectives.  But there are no opportunities during this process for faculty members and the President of the United States to discuss the different worlds in which they work.

Politicians often face mudslinging by opponents.  They can easily lose sight of the value of objective analysis. Screening out sycophancy among one's advisers also is a challenge in the halls of power. Not all who analyze history’s lessons are a White House's enemies, but a President (Democratic or Republican) may come to view them as such.

How prepared is any President to leave the shelter provided by loyal aides and to hand over control of historical information to objective, nonpartisan federal archivists?   My experiences show very different reactions by two Watergate principals..

Shortly before he resigned as White House chief of staff in April 1973, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman met with President Richard Nixon.   Nixon told Haldeman that even if he “beat the rap,” he might not be able to return to government.  “If that’s the case, I want . . . you to take over the [Nixon] foundation.”  Haldeman replied, “I hope to get funding for the ability to clear my name and spend the rest of my life destroying what some people . . . have done to my President.”

Instead of beating the Watergate “rap,” Bob Haldeman went to prison.  He came out a changed man.  When, as an archivist employed by the National Archives, I worked with Haldeman in 1987, I liked him for his intelligence, introspective qualities and courage. Bob told me that he read every book that was written about Watergate and the Nixon White House, marking portions that were accurate and also noting ones that were inaccurate. 

Bob was very interested in getting the records of the Nixon administration released. Instead of adopting a defensive posture, Haldeman gave a lot of thought to lessons learned from the events that had led to his downfall.  He patiently took questions from historians at the Hofstra University conference in 1987.  And he sat for hours with archivists, giving us a wonderful series of candid, reflective, insightful oral history interviews.

The National Archives holds the originals of Haldeman’s diaries. They were Haldeman’s property – he signed a deed of gift -- and do not fall under the Nixon records statute.  But as Joan Hoff explained in Presidential Studies Quarterly in 1996, NARA failed to release them as expected.  Haldeman arranged for his own copies to be published.

Photo supplied by Maarja Krusten

Haldeman wrote,  “The diaries are . . . an admixture of enormously important and incredibly insignificant matters with which the President, and I, dealt each day. The people involved are intelligent, hardworking and, at times, very human.

 . . . Included are actions I would now prefer had not been taken, conversations I would now like to forget or disavow, and opinions with which I now strongly disagree. In the interest of historical accuracy, the content remains unchanged from the day it was written.”

At the time I met Haldeman, NARA believed it soon would start opening Nixon’s tapes.  Researchers received information sheets from NARA’s officials, stating that “archival processing” of Nixon’s tapes “will be completed in 1987.”  Haldeman himself wrote in 1988 in a NARA publication (Prologue) that “The National Archives’ processing of the tapes is virtually complete, and the agency is nearly ready to go forward with a schedule of phased openings.”  Haldeman believed he could live with what the Nixon tapes showed.

Nixon reacted differently.  While in office, Nixon was demonized beyond belief by political opponents. He believed that “Historians will probably not deal with me too well because generally they are on the left.”   Nixon expected to control access to his records but the government took custody of them.  (Another law provides for government custody of records of later Presidents.)

When the Supreme Court upheld the Nixon records statute in 1977, the Washington Star reported that Nixon’s attorneys warned that “cases could continue ‘for the rest of his days or until his money is gone.’” A lawyer for Public Citizen later asserted that Nixon used litigation threats “as bargaining chips to convince the Archives to change its archival processing.”

John H. Taylor, executive director of Nixon’s foundation, reportedly “denounced the Nixon archivists as 'junior prosecutors' bent on making the late president look bad."  I was an archivist trained in history, but not a Nixon hater.  In 2004, I asked the National Archives to release from the Nixon White House files any documents about me.

My White House Central Files “name file” showed that I had applied for a job with the Nixon White House in September 1973—at the end of a summer’s worth of Senate hearings on Watergate.  Because I had not yet found a job when I finished college, my (late) twin sister Eva and I initially volunteered to help out in the office of Sen. Howard H. Baker (R – Tenn.), vice chairman of the Senate Watergate committee. 

The released file included notes from October 1973 stating I was a Republican.  A Nixon White House official then checked me out and noted, “Per Gary [Sisco] – Exec. Asst.  Sen. Baker – Maarja was 1 of twin[s] who worked for Baker – bright girl – final product good – good worker.”

I didn’t follow through on the job offer as I had just accepted another job elsewhere. But later, as an archivist employed by NARA from 1976 to 1990, I worked in so impartial a fashion, no one could tell I had voted for Nixon.

We faced withering fire.  In 1987, Nixon blocked our efforts to release some historical documents.  In an oral history with us, former White House official Charles Colson expressed bafflement over why Nixon blocked archivists from releasing some information from his files (publicly available NARA – Colson oral history, June 15, 1988, page 41).

A senior Archives’ manager said of his outgunned agency in 1986, “We won every battle [in court] but so far are losing the war.”  His successor officials only opened 63 of 3,700 hours of tapes during Nixon’s lifetime.  Congress in 1974 called for the release “at the earliest reasonable date” of “the full truth” about Watergate.  But some 200 hours of Nixon’s taped conversations about Watergate sat unreleased until after Nixon’s death in 1994. 

Yet there was a price to be paid for the information vacuum.  Nixon’s family had to suffer through the grotesque images presented by Oliver Stone in his 1995 film, Nixon.  

You’ve seen through my eyes how differently two of the Watergate principals reacted to the archivists who serve as gatekeepers to history.   I understand the pain Nixon must have felt at the prospect of having Watergate information revealed.   But I respected Haldeman because he never blamed archivists for words he himself wrote or uttered or actions he took while he was a power player.