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




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