Peter is right, of course, that this topic is relevant to archivists
and appropriate for discussion on rather than off list.
When I asked for off list responses, I was mindful of Tom Eisenger's
comment yesterday when he said I appeared to be venting in my original
message. While my original intent was to alert people to what I think
is a bureaucratic misstep on NARA's part, Tom's message led me to
reflect on some larger issues. There is indeed a backstory here that
perhaps I should address.
I think we should be debating policy issues, such as when to allow
researchers to renew their cards. And why it is important for NARA to
communicate such a policy more effectively, rather than having people
blindsided when they walk in. As I said yesterday in my "taking it off
list" message, requiring people to renew something only when or after
it expires is counterintuitive. We don't do that with any other i.d.
cards we hold. I'm not even sure the policy has been applied
uniformly, as someone told me yesterday of being allowed recently to
renew his or her NARA picture i.d. researcher card any time within the
month that it expired. If that was true, why couldn't I renew on April
27 a card that expired April; 28? I do not think, however, that I was
singled out -- not all all.
Still I have to acknowledge that I, as an individual, have to be
careful how I raise these issues. Candidly, I trail an awful lot of
baggage. I try to be balanced in the way I present issues related to
NARA. Mostly I succeed. Sometimes I fail. Unfortunately, some of you
may have picked up on how steamed I was yesterday when I posted about
the refusal to renew my card. Naturally, that means there's a heavy
backstory, for me, the NARA rebuff had a metamessage as well as a
simple bureacratic message.
I had the bad luck to walk into a NARA building yesterday, the day
after Allen Weinstein and Bill Leonard released the results of the
reclassification audit. I happen to think Weinstein and Leonard did a
good job. The audit report was balanced and the presentation by both
men seemed to be very professional. They did not resort to
scapegoating but laid out the facts and promised improvements in the
process. I found the honesty and candor refreshing.
This is exactly what I wish NARA had done, when confronted with the
Nixon tapes controversy that led me to leave the Archives and to take
another job. I loved my job at NARA. I didn't want to leave it. If
NARA's managers had handled the revelation of external pressure from
Nixon in 1989 or 1992 as well as Weinstein and Leonard handled the
agency re-review issue, I still would be working as a NARA employee
today, 30 years after I took a job with the Office of Presidential
Libraries. I have enormous respect for people who recently worked at
the Nixon Project or who still do, people such as Karl Weissenbach,
David Mengel, Mark Fischer, John Powers. I would be honored to have
them still as colleagues. But I don't. So, being human, it was
bittersweet for me to walk into a NARA building yesterday, of all days.
Very bad timing.
Anyone who doesn't want to know why the timing was so bad can stop
reading here and tune the rest of this out. For anyone else, here's
the story. I wasn't going to get into any of this but perhaps I owe it
to you, given what Tom said, with some justification, about the
uncharacteristic "misstep" on my part in posting to the List about the
card problem.
After I testified in the Kutler litigation in 1992, two or three
members of the NARA Nixon Project told me that archivists there were
afraid to take telephone calls from me. One person told me that he and
perhaps other staff feared that "someone" was listening in on or
monitoring their phone calls. While I didn't believe that was the
case, I found it unfortunate that people who were working with the
historical records of "governmental abuses of power" should feel that
way.
I also found it unfortunate that archivists might have felt any
pressure about what to say when placed under oath in the Kutler
ligitation. All the more so because the lawsuit dealt with the
Watergate coverup tapes. I won't get into all of the problems. I can
say that one of my friends told me in 1992 that one NARA witness told
colleagues before testifying, "I'm not going to lie." That should
never have been an issue, especially in a lawsuit dealing with
Watergate. In my view, NARA's lawyers and managers should have handled
differently than they did a number of issues at the end of the 1980s
and early 1990s. (See my HNN article at
http://hnn.us/articles/10862.html for more than you'd ever want to know
about Nixon tape issues.) I can't help but wonder if they had acted
as Bill Leonard and Allen Weinstein did on Wednesday, the Kutler
litigation and the terrible turmoil within the Nixon Project staff
might have been avoided.
The historian who brought the Nixon tapes lawsuit, Stanley Kutler,
later wrote an article for the Legal Times. In it he noted of the
lawsuit, "Eventually, the Archives acknowledged it held hundreds of
hours of Watergate tapes, but only after I proved their existence. . .
.The Archives thus exposed its own cover-up.” What an unfortunate
statement to read in print about NARA by a Watergate scholar.
As things changed during the 1990s, the fear among Nixon Project staff
abated. As you all know, I was one of the few outsiders invited to
attend the farewell reception at the Nixon Project last year for Karl
Weissenbach, the then director of NARA's Nixon Presidential Materials
Staff. I received a warm welcome.
But I still find that, unlike other researchers, I have to gather up
an awful lot of courage and steel myself whenever I walk through the
doors of a NARA building. (Remember what I wrote on the List at
http://shrinkster.com/efc ). I had hoped that my trip to AI
yesterday would be pleasant, trouble free, routine and positive. It
was not. Although the reasons for that were purely bureaucratic, as
you can see now, my reaction was far more complex than it seemed on the
surface.
If anyone at NARA or elsewhere was offended by my posting yesterday,
which was focused on communications and an absurd card renewal policy,
not on the actions of members of NARA's staff, I do apologize. Perhaps
some of my other feelings crept into the posting. As I said, I'm
human, :-p What happened yesterday caught me at a real low point,
sorry.
Maarja
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Kurilecz <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:30:51 -0400
Subject: Re: Request for off list responses on research card policies
On 4/27/06, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> In an attempt to move the researcher card issue off list, here's a
> question for those of you who work outside the National Archives. If
> your institution issues researcher i.d. cards that are valid for a
> fixed period of time, how much of a window do you give people to
renew
> them?
why would you want to move the discussion offlist? I think the
discussion is very relevant to the archival community.
--
Peter Kurilecz CRM CA
Richmond, Va
A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the
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A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org.
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