If I've fallen down on the job as a blogger in recent months, it's because I'm in the throes of trying to finish a book on the history of presidential speechwriters. Between trips to almost all of the presidential libraries, more than 100 hours of interviews and countless hours poring over speechwriter memoirs (from Raymond Moley to David Frum) and other source material, blogging has been squeezed out.*
But I was inspired by an op-ed in today's NY Times University of Louisville history proffessor Benjamin Hufbauer, who writes about the reforms needed in the presidential library system. He makes a half-dozen good recommendations, but from my admittedly narrow perspective the best is:
First, according to the Office of Presidential Libraries, it will take up to 100 years for the papers and records at the recent presidential libraries to be processed, primarily because of an explosion in the number of records created by the executive branch. The Roosevelt Library has 17 million pages of documents, while the Clinton Library has more than 76 million, but the number of archivists has not kept pace.
A wait of 100 years is unacceptable. To be able to learn from our history, scholars, journalists and the public need access to a majority of records in presidential libraries within 20 years after a president leaves office. To meet this challenge, the newer libraries must add a substantial number of archivists, as well as new processing protocols and systems.
One of the few presidential libraries I did not visit in my travels was the Clinton library in Little Rock. The papers were sealed until a year ago and while my FOIA requests were numbers 80 through 91 in the queue as of February, I'm not holding my breath on getting the 300,000+ pages the library turned up before the second edition.
As a practical matter, my real hope is that my FOIA request gets the records open so that the next historian who comes along with an interest in the subject will be able to see them. But Hufbauer is right -- Congress needs to step up and fix this problem.
* Sports blogging being more reflexive and less reflective than this high-brow stuff, I have been contributing regularly to my sports blog.