Thirty-two of the nation’s leading historians have sent letters to congressional leaders calling on them to strengthen the Presidential Records Act (PRA). [Text & signers posted below. Click READ MORE.] The effort, led by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Coalition for History, notes that while the PRA requires the administration to preserve presidential records, “it fails to provide an effective means of enforcing compliance with that requirement.” (View the letters here and here.)

This effort has taken on increased urgency as the Bush administration prepares to leave office and may be ready to expunge the record on its tenure. Bush has already repeatedly manipulated and rewritten open government laws in order to cover up his wrongdoings:

– The White House is “missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office.”

– In 2001, President Bush issued an executive order “allowing former presidents to review executive documents before they can be released.” Last year, however, a U.S. District Judge invalidated the order, ruling that former presidents would be able to “indefinitely” keep their documents secret.

– Bush plans to solicit contributions from foreign donors for his $200 million presidential library, but plans on keeping their identities secret.

CAPAF Senior Fellow Mark Agrast told ThinkProgress that although the “prospects for legislative action during the remainder of the 110th Congress are not promising, we felt it was important to lay down a marker for the next Congress and the incoming administration before this Congress adjourns.”

CREW and several historian organizations are also filing a separate lawsuit today, “asking a federal judge to declare that Cheney’s records are covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and cannot be destroyed, taken or withheld without proper review.”

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Mark Agrast: Congress Must Act to Preserve Presidential Records for Future Generations

September 5, 2008

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House
U.S. House of Representatives
H-232 The Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

The Honorable John A. Boehner
Republican Leader
U.S. House of Representatives
H-204 The Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Speaker Pelosi and Republican Leader Boehner:

Last year, the National Archives located a July 7, 1863 letter written by President Abraham Lincoln concerning the Civil War, which was described by the Archives as a “significant find.” The discovery of this short note, written over 150 years ago, occasioned extraordinary interest and excitement.

Modern presidents have generated millions upon millions of documents that are critical to an understanding of our nation’s past. Yet unless Congress takes action to safeguard these materials, many of them may be lost to future generations.

In 1978, Congress reacted to the Watergate scandal by enacting the Presidential Records Act. The PRA requires the president to “take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records.”

Unfortunately, while the PRA requires the preservation of presidential records, it fails to provide an effective means of enforcing compliance with that requirement. The consequences of that failure have only recently become clear, with the revelation that millions of White House email messages generated between October 2003 and March 2005 are missing. Little to no effort has been made to recover the missing messages, and many, if not all, may now be permanently lost. That loss will leave an enormous gap in the documentary record of the period, compromising the ability of future historians to understand how and why the Bush administration made critical policy decisions, including the decision to go to war in Iraq.

As historians, we believe it is vital that the PRA be strengthened to ensure that such a devastating loss will never again take place. Effective enforcement measures, including appropriate penalties for noncompliance, are essential to establishing and maintaining sound record keeping practices. In addition, there must be greater oversight of compliance with the PRA, including such measures as annual reviews and inspections by the Archivist. Had such inspections been the norm, the fact that millions of records were missing would have been discovered much earlier and all or most of them might have been recovered.

New technologies have made possible the capture and retention of an enormous volume of executive branch communications. A reinvigorated Presidential Records Act is needed to ensure that this information is preserved and made available for historical study—so that future generations can one day greet the discovery of an email from President Bush with the same excitement that attended the Lincoln letter.

Sincerely,

Allida M. Black
George Washington University

David W. Blight
Yale University

Alan Brinkley
Columbia University

Douglas G. Brinkley
Rice University

Robert A. Caro
New York, NY

Clayborne Carson
Stanford University

Lizabeth Cohen
Harvard University

Robert Dallek
Washington, DC

Joseph J. Ellis
Mount Holyoke College

Eric Foner
Columbia University

Lee W. Formwalt
Executive Director
Organization of American Historians

Gary Gerstle
Vanderbilt University

David A. Hollinger
University of California at Berkeley

Arnita A. Jones
Executive Director
American Historical Association

Stanley N. Katz
Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

Michael Kazin
Georgetown University

David M. Kennedy
Stanford University

Linda K. Kerber
University of Iowa

Stanley I. Kutler
University of Wisconsin

David Levering Lewis
New York University

David McCullough
West Tisbury, Massachusetts

James M. McPherson
Princeton University

William Lee Miller
University of Virginia

Anna Kasten Nelson
American University

Jack N. Rakove
Stanford University

Bruce J. Schulman
Boston University

Martin J. Sherwin
George Mason University

Gabrielle Spiegel
Johns Hopkins University
President, American Historical Association

Lee White
Executive Director
National Coalition for History

Sean Wilentz
Princeton University

Roger Wilkins
George Mason University

Garry Wills
Northwestern University