February 27, 2006
Secrecy Is a Historian’s Best Friend Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:30 AM EST I have not read At Canaan’s Edge, Taylor Branch’s new book about Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement, but I have read several reviews of it, including one by our own Joshua Zeitz. As often happens, each reviewer brings his own perspective to the material. A conservative critic bemoans the movement’s degeneration from egalitarianism and peacefulness into separatism and violence; a liberal critic laments that King’s death kept him from leading the country in a new and radical direction; and Josh, a pro historian, while generally praising the book, points out some lapses in Branch’s scholarship and aspects of the story that he might have pursued more thoroughly. One point that all the reviews mention is that much of Branch’s information comes from records of bugs and other illegal surveillance conducted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It must have been a little creepy for Branch to listen to the tapes and jot down important revelations while thinking the whole time what a gross violation of civil liberties they were. Yet, as I wrote in the early days of President Clinton’s perjury scandal, since Revolutionary times, Americans have never shied away from using evidence obtained in questionable ways. And while nobody would defend illegal surveillance on the grounds that it helps historians, neither would anything be gained by ignoring the wealth of information that is contained in the FBI’s files. The larger question here has to do with secrecy and the historical profession. A few years ago our magazine ran a column by Richard Reeves criticizing President George W. Bush’s decision not to declassify some documents from the Reagan administration. While there may have been many possible reasons to oppose the decision, the focus of Reeves’s article was summed up in its headline: “A recent presidential edict will make it harder for historians to practice their trade.” And if you’re writing a book about the Reagan administration, as Reeves was at the time (see his article about the experience), that assessment is certainly true. In the long term, however, greater secrecy leads to greater openness. Reeves’s column points out that much of what we know about the Nixon administration comes from minutely detailed records obsessively collected by Nixon’s aides, which were later made available to historians. Those records had been compiled with the expectation that they would remain under Nixon’s control, as had been the case with Presidents since George Washington. The same is true of Hoover’s FBI archives; he never suspected that they would one day be made public. Only in the mid-1970s, prompted by the Watergate scandal, did laws and court decisions begin to seriously restrict the power of government officials to keep documents under wraps. The result? No more Oval Office taping, of course (a practice that began in Eisenhower’s day and has yielded important information about the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War). Nor would any President today be crazy enough to let his aides assemble a Nixon-style collection of revealing documents. In fact, when our current President took office, he announced that he would send no e-mails for the duration of his term in office, since if he did, they would be subject to subpoena. Around the Vatican it’s said that officers of the Catholic Church are trained to “think in centuries.” Historians need not be so farsighted, but they should at least think in decades. The sooner documents and records can be released to the public, the more effort will be made to destroy them, keep them secret forever, or avoid their creation in the first place. But if the secrecy of documents is assured for a couple of generations, they will eventually become available to scholars in much greater volume. This creates an awkward interval, after an event is over but before all the pertinent records are available, in which historians must rely on partial documentation—though, to be fair, it’s also the interval in which the participants are still around to be interviewed. And to be sure, there are far weightier arguments for and against government secrecy, ones that have nothing to do with the writing of history. To the extent, however, that history enters the discussion, it should weigh in on the side of greater privacy and confidentiality for longer periods. From a historian’s standpoint, more secrecy today means more openness tomorrow.
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