"They're fearful of what they don't know and of things that might come out in the future," said Anna Nelson, a history professor at American University in Washington and a longtime spokesperson on behalf of historians' access to federal records who has done research in five presidential libraries. "In the short run, they're thinking about Bush Sr. and people in the current Bush administration, but they're not thinking ahead to the long-term problems."

One of those problems is that history itself would be incomplete. For example, the kinds of presidential source material used to write biographies like "John Adams" by David McCullough and "Theodore Rex" by Edmund Morris might not be available to biographers of more recent presidents if E.O. 13233 were to remain in effect.

"History can't be written responsibly without the entire record," said Stanley Kutler, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and one of the two historians whose names are on the lawsuit. In the 1970s he led litigation with Public Citizen to get access to Nixon's Oval Office tapes, the transcripts of which he later published in "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes." "To be a fair or good historian, you need the entire context."

The effect of incomplete history, said Anna Nelson, has a widespread influence. "What researchers and historians do trickles down to the media, to movies, to how news is viewed and analyzed," she said. "We lose our sense of an entire decade. We need more of a sense of history, not less. Many of the policy matters made back then we're still living with now. A healthy democracy requires open government." On a more practical note, she pointed out that people training to make policy and other governmental decisions in the future get many of their ideas from history sources, and therefore an incomplete record hampers how effective they would be in the future.

Although Bush initially claimed that E.O. 13233 was issued to protect national security, in fact the 68,000 papers withheld do not involve national security but entail another of the PRA exemptions: the correspondence between a president and his advisors. The Bush administration claimed that by forcing the early release of such information, it would inhibit free speech between a president and his advisors.

Anna Nelson pointed out that presidential advisors have already known for a long time that their correspondence with a president will be public and that it has not impeded the flow of ideas. "Not only that," she said, "people making policy, they're too busy and don't have time to consider what they've been writing down. That it would have a chilling effect on correspondence is clearly fallacious."

She also noted that the argument about giving the former presidents more power to protect their constitutional rights and assure executive privilege and that sensitive secrets don't get out is weak. "The National Archives always protected records and is very conscientious about third-party issues and embarrassments," she said. "They held onto the Nixon tapes all those years and never had a leak."

Bruce Craig, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, doesn't suspect that there is any "smoking gun" among the Reagan papers. But he fears that the order might have a detrimental effect on historians writing about future presidents. "Oftentimes, the confidential advice given at the highest level is the stuff of history," he said. "What would we know about the Bay of Pigs without that information? What type of history could you write about Bush's reaction to 9/11 without access to those papers?"

Whether the issue is decided by the lawsuit or reined in by Congress' bill, barring a summary judgment on the lawsuit, it will take months until the success or failure of these measures is seen. Until then, millions of presidential papers remain under the effect of E.O. 13233. "I just don't get it," said Hensen. "What [presidential administrations] do is at the behest of the public. This executive order reflects a more imperialistic or corporate mentality, rather than public service."

"The Nixon experience brought into focus this ordeal with presidential records," Kutler said. "The Bush order is like handing Richard Nixon a victory after 30 years, as if to say, 'You were right.' But you need access to all the information to write history well. Ultimately our history is going to be the better for it.'"

Recent Stories