[Mb-civic] For History's Sake, Nothing Like a Paper Trail - Russell L. Riley - Washington Post Sunday Outlook

[William Swiggard]

For History's Sake, Nothing Like a Paper Trail

By Russell L. Riley
Sunday, November 6, 2005; Page B04

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.

Both parties have had their own tragic experiences in 
self-incrimination. On the Republican side, Nixon's Oval Office tapes 
gave his critics all the ammunition they needed to run him out of 
Washington. President Ronald Reagan's national security team imploded 
when its inept attempts to delete sensitive e-mail files failed to 
account for a central White House back-up system, thereby exposing to 
the world a remarkable web of deception it had spun surrounding the 
Iran-contra affair.

On a smaller scale, but no less consequential as an object lesson in the 
price of keeping written records, was the experience of the Democrats' 
Josh Steiner, then 28-year-old chief of staff to Treasury Secretary 
Lloyd Bentsen. In 1994, Steiner was called before a congressional 
committee investigating questionable contacts between Treasury and the 
Clinton White House, and found himself in the unenviable position of 
having his personal diary, detailing his office's activities (as well as 
his term of endearment for his girlfriend), exposed to the world and 
having to deny that its embarrassing contents accurately represented 
reality.

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.

The hostile investigative climate during the Clinton presidency made 
those serving in that White House especially cautious. Blanket subpoenas 
from congressional investigators and an army of independent counsels 
became so commonplace that most Clinton officials developed coping 
mechanisms to protect themselves. 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.

Or so we have thought.

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.

Yet this is also an administration that has operated in an environment 
fundamentally different from its predecessors. The independent counsel 
statute expired in June 1999, before the Bush administration took 
office. And Congress has been docile and thus not inclined to perform 
the kind of dogged oversight that generates subpoenaphobia.

(continued)...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2005110402284.html
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