Bad News with FRUS

by Cliopatria

The Foreign Relations of the United States series, an invaluable source for the study of diplomatic history, is in the news--and not in a good way.

In what the FAS blog has termed a" crisis," William Roger Louis, chairman of the Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, has resigned his post, with a blistering attack regarding the performance of State Department Historian Marc Susser. Louis especially criticized the heavy turnover on Susser's staff. The FRUS, as has become standard for the past generation, is well behind schedule in publishing volumes.

Louis' concerns were echoed by SHAFR president (and my friend and undergraduate advisor) Tom Schwartz. The Louis and Schwartz memos raise grave concerns about the state of the FRUS program. That the State Department appears to have dismissed these concerns entirely is even more troubling.

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Maarja Krusten - 12/12/2008

I should have made it clear that Cox and Wallace are the editors of the book I mentioned. A number of authors contributed to it.

Maarja Krusten - 12/12/2008

Hard to say what is going on. I used to know some people who worked in the department's Office of the Historian but they are long gone. I don't know anyone who is working there right now. However, these things make me a little uneasy. Having been involved in internal disputes over Nixon's records myself, I know that airing out disputes in public can be a tricky way of resolving issues. In the situation with which I'm familiar from my days at NARA, the agency has had to abide by message discipline to a large extent while outsiders obviously have greater freedom of speech. So there has been an imbalance. Sometimes former insiders speak out and provide some insights after they leave their positions. Sometimes they stay silent.

Professors Richard J. Cox and David Wallace describe past controversies over FRUS and the Department of State's Office of the Historian in their book, _Archives and the Public Good_. To read their account, go to pages 230-233 on the Google books site (I actually found the pertinent portion by typing "State Department" and "Archives and the Public Good" on the Google main search page.) If you want a sense of the topics generally covered by the Cox/Wallace book, Professor Roy Rosenzweig's review is at
http://www.archivists.org/periodicals/aa_v66/review-rosenzweig-aa66_2.asp

You also may remember the article that reporter Tim Weiner published about the FRUS volumes in the New York Times on April 9, 1998. That was the one which began, "The official record of United States foreign policy stands in danger of becoming 'an official lie.' Unfortunately, as you probably already know, this is not the first time controversies have arisen with FRUS.