I have read, with concern, the report on the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Historical Documentation (Perspectives, May/June 1986). Summarized briefly, the committee thanks President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz for striving to publish United States diplomatic correspondence after thirty years, complains that this goal has not yet been met, and urges that a twenty-five year limit be set.
I hope that this writer will not sound irremediably reactionary if he states that we are moving in the wrong direction. Such recommendations are inappropriate for serious historians, political scientists, and authorities on international law. If it is our goal as historians to discover the true policy of our government, we must assure our diplomats that they may report the truth, as they see it, without fear of embarrassment within their lifetimes.
Anyone who has worked with US diplomatic documents prior to the Civil War, has been struck by the full and frank revelation of the most intimate thoughts of our diplomats in their reports to Washington. Before 1861, our ministers abroad penned extraordinarily revealing descriptions of the foibles and follies of the entire society in which they moved. We learn of a United States Minister who died while visiting a maison de joie, of another who was usually too drunk to attend to business, of a celebrated foreign cabinet officer who could be most easily reached through the friendly intercession of a popular actress. In other words, the pre-1861 correspondence lays bare the nuts and bolts of history and permits a research scholar to pursue psychohistory.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, however, Secretary of State Seward began the annual publication of the previous year’s diplomatic correspondence. Thus was born the series known as Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). Mr. Seward’s goals were propagandistic. Fighting a war for the life of the Union, the Secretary of State made use not only of FRUS, but unprecedented leaks to the press.
In Mr. Seward’s bands, the publication of FRUS was highly selective, care fully shielding our friends from the consequences of their indiscretions. United States diplomats protected themselves from the risk of immediate disclosure of their more embarrassingly candid comment by putting the really exciting commentary in private letters to Mr. Seward, written on personal stationary. During Seward’s tenure of office, most of that unofficial correspondence ended up filed with the official correspondence written on State Department stationery.
With the passage of the decades of the nineteenth century, the research scholar notes a gradual diminution of the amount of material on personal stationery, and a marked growth in cold and unrevealing commentary in official reports. The researcher then asks what means were used to communicate the truth to the State Department, as the official correspondence became less and less revealing. The answer is that with a wary eye on FRUS and the newspapers, diplomats resorted increasingly to privileged private correspondence with their superiors. Those letters, on personal stationery, were no longer filed with the official correspondence, as in the days of Mr. Seward. Instead, as the personnel of the State Department grew in number, revealing letters became increasingly dispersed into private collections scattered all over the country. When congress imposed a thirty-year limit on diplomatic archival secrecy, this process accelerated.
The final phase of the self-defeating battle of historians to force public servants to open their papers to public examination, has begun in the last generation. A series of dramatic lawsuits have been opened against public officials, or the executors of their estates, to force the opening of collections of papers that could be described as private property. In at least three well-publicized cases familiar to all my readers, the courts have declared various records to be public rather than private property.
These are pyrrhic victories. A few historians with gluttonous appetites have eaten the seed corn of research. We may be sure that even at this moment, the paper shredders and incinerators are destroying, forever, records that would have once been preserved if allowed a decent interval to age.
Historians must decide, now, whether they are content to be journalists interested in exciting and sensational headlines, or whether they are prepared to seek the truth after the death of the principal actors in historical dramas. It would seem that the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Historical Documentation move us toward the role of journalists.
Arnold Blumberg is professor of history at Towson State University in Maryland. He is the author of The Diplomacy of the Mexican Empire, 1863-1867, of which a revised edition is expected this year. He has also written other books and numerous articles.
