this is captivating! I am lost in the technology history so all of these events tend to flow around me... I will want to read more about this. Thanks, Ed Sharpe, Archivist for SMECC See the Museum's Web Site at _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org/) 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. Thanks, Ed Sharpe, Archivist for SMECC See the Museum's Web Site at _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org/) We are always looking for items to add to the museum's display and ref. library - please advise if you have anything we can use. Coury House / SMECC 5802 W. Palmaire Ave. Phone 623-435-1522 Glendale Az 85301 USA CONFIDENZIALE: Questo messaggio e gli eventuali allegati sono confidenziali e riservati. Se vi è stato recapitato per errore e non siete fra i destinatari elencati, siete pregati di darne immediatamente avviso al mittente. Le informazioni contenute non devono essere mostrate ad altri, né utilizzate, memorizzate o copiate in qualsiasi forma. CONFIDENTIAL: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may contain reserved information. If you are not one of the named recipients, please notify the sender immediately. Moreover, you should not disclose the contents to any other persons, nor should the information contained be used for any purpose or stored or copied in any form. A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org. For the terms of participation, please refer to http://www.archivists.org/listservs/arch_listserv_terms.asp. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>