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Perlstein Nitpicks (Newsweek Edition)

December 6, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks, Vietnam 

Nixonland author Rick Perlstein is doubly wrong in a Newsweek column:

For 364 days a year archivists toil anonymously, transcribing hundreds of hours of often banal, taped conversations. Then they pick out a few titillating excerpts to nab a headline in the next day’s newspapers.

How much time has the recently so widely celebrated scholar of the Nixon Presidency actually spent with Nixon White House records? There’s nary a National Archives transcript to be found. As archivist Maarja Krusten recently wrote in comments at “The New Nixon” and as most Nixon scholars know well, NARA decided a generation ago not to make transcripts, since it took 100 person hours to transcribe an hour of tape (300 hours before PCs were available). Instead, archivists supply finding aids in the form of outlines.

And is Perlstein so unfamiliar with NARA practice that he thinks government archivists actually “pick out…titillating excerpts” and feed them to the papers? Perlstein meets Nixonstein: That’s what 37 and his cronies were supposed to think. Hundreds of dedicated professionals are cringing at the accusation. Perlstein and “Newsweek” owe them an apology.

Elsewhere in his column, writing about Vietnam, Perlstein misuses the tapes as he did a secondary source in Nixonland when he tried (but failed) to show that President Nixon had foreknowledge of plans for a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. As the Miller Center’s careful transcripts have shown, while Henry Kissinger was consistently pessimistic about whether South Vietnam would survive the withdrawal of U.S. forces, President Nixon was all over the map, sometimes saying that South Vietnam couldn’t survive, other times saying it must for the sake of U.S. credibility.

In his article, Perlstein tries to have it both ways:

In moments of candor both men admitted that Saigon would inevitably fall to the communists within a couple of years. Yet they were determined to stave off the collapse for a “decent interval”—the real purpose, as Nixon well knew, of the Christmas bombings. The two men told another story to the American people, our allies in the Saigon government and perhaps even themselves. In the new tapes, Nixon justifies his decision to use the most fearsome bomber in the fleet by saying that one final, swift, savage blow might force communist negotiators to give up their claim to non-communist South Vietnam. The only person he’s trying to convince is himself.

So if on one tape, Nixon says he doesn’t think Saigon will survive, he means it. If on another, the President says he thinks the bombing will blunt Hanoi’s ambitions, he doesn’t mean it.

How does Perlstein know? He doesn’t. He’s just pushing the “decent interval” theory, which is an ideological construct, the rearguard action of the antiwar movement.

The real history of the Vietnam war, and therefore the Nixon Administration and Watergate, has yet to be written. That work will take open-minded writers who among other things will take into account evidence, undercovered by scholars such as Stephen J. Morris, that the December bombings had precisely the chilling effect on the communists that the President had hoped. It was the distraction of Watergate that may well have doomed Saigon, not the Nixon policy.



Comments

9 Responses to “Perlstein Nitpicks (Newsweek Edition)”

  1. Rick Perlstein on December 6th, 2008 9:27 pm

    I have to take full responsibility for the “transcribing” error, with great regret–an editor introduced that word in a truncating edit; I told them to change it to “reviewing,” and they sent me a final version to review, which kept the word “transcribing,” which I missed.

    On the “decent interval, ” I stand behind my interpretation 100 percent, based on the totality of the scholarship I’ve reviewed.

  2. Rick Perlstein on December 6th, 2008 9:37 pm

    “And is Perlstein so unfamiliar with NARA practice that he thinks government archivists actually ‘pick out…titillating excerpts’ and feed them to the papers? Perlstein meets Nixonstein: That’s what 37 and his cronies were supposed to think. Hundreds of dedicated professionals are cringing at the accusation. Perlstein and “Newsweek” owe them an apology.”

    I don’t understand this criticism. Was it unclear that I was referring to the five excerpts of less than a minute that NARA distributes to the press, and which make up the entirety of what 99 percent of the media report on?

    This gentleman has done yeoman’s work documenting the “decent interval” evidence:

    http://www.youtube.com/user/fatalpolitics

    I recommend everyone review his presentations and judge for themselves.

  3. John H. Taylor on December 6th, 2008 11:39 pm

    Rick: My apologies on the tape segments assertion. During all earlier chron releases, the government took care not to highlight segments that one archivist or another may have found interesting, on the assumption that it was up to scholars and researchers to determine what they were interested in. I guess they have changed their approach.

  4. Maarja Krusten on December 7th, 2008 6:35 am

    John, thanks for the nice reference to my painstaking explanation a few days ago on TNN about the transcription issue! The best way to refer to me is “former archivist” rather than “archivist” since I haven’t worked in the profession since January 1990, when I transferred to another federal agency to take a job as an historian. (I still work there as its historian.) I only mention this because archival principles remain the same as they did when I worked as an archivist (1976-1990), but some of the technology has changed. As I mentioned to Luke Nichter, for technical questions, such as present decisions regarding digitization of reference tapes, it’s best to turn directly to NARA. That’s why I’m always careful to i.d. myself as former archivist. Funny to note that December 6th is the anniversary of the day I became an employee of the National Archives in 1976.

    I found Rick Perlstein’s Newsweek piece disappointing, sorry to say. I daresay he meant well, but it’s not the first time I’ve read something about the release of Nixon’s records and regretted the missed opportunity by the author to explain the archival ethos. And how historians depend on it being applied properly. I’ve hoped for nearly two decades that federal archivists would find a champion in a scholar who relies on their painstaking work but I just don’t think it’s going to happen. Stanley Kutler came the closest but did some things differently than I would have done. Perhaps I’m expecting too much. History is not an “I” profession for me because of my prior work as an archivist. It gave me a heightened awareness of how all the pieces fit together.

    Rick Perlstein writes that “These occasional public unveilings are always sexy, but somewhat misleading. For 364 days a year archivists toil anonymously, transcribing hundreds of hours of often banal, taped conversations. Then they pick out a few titillating excerpts to nab a headline in the next day’s newspapers. (Richard Nixon would understand the impulse.)” I do not know why NARA gave out excerpts this time around. John Taylor is correct is saying that for past openings—going all the way back to the first playing of the Watergate Trial Tapes at the Archives in 1980—archivists did not pick and choose any tape segments to highlight. So while use of “they pick out” may be accurate *for this instance,* it does not fit with his opening which refers in the plural to “these openings.” The casual reader is left with the assumption that this has been NARA’s practice, when it has not.

    I would have ditched the references to banal and titillating and sexy. Archivists don’t apply such value judgments. To imply that they do is to fail to capture the archival ethos, which centers not on picking out juicy stuff, but on working very hard, sometimes under extremely difficult conditions, to ensure that restrictable information is protected and disclosable information can be opened. We felt an enormous weight of responsibility as the public servants whom outsider depend on to act properly, no matter what information we heard. I wish Rick would have been able to convey that.

    Instead, Rick moves on from “sexy” released tape excerpts to write, “Fun stuff. But the real work of historians begins only now, when researchers embark on the slow, patient task of assessing the new data and integrating it into current debates about everything.” Why not link the two professions together, emphasizing dependencies, instead of implying that it is historians to whom the public owes the most?

    Missing is any acknowledgement that for those historians to be able to do their work, government archivists must be able to work in a nonpartisan, objective manner. Although the U.S. Archivist is a subordinate officer within the executive branch, his mandate is unique within the executive branch. Former Acting Archivist Frank Burke once wrote that the National Archives serves “not to implement the programs of the administration in office but to protect the records, good and bad, of the administrations of the past.” What other federal agency or department has such a mission? Without NARA, historians would have to rely largely on public information, memoirs, personal papers collections and oral history interviews. Without historians, the contents of many of NARA’s records would remain unknown. Had I been writing for Newsweek, I would have used the opportunity to educate the public on this inter-dependency. Rick missed out on an chance to explain this balance.

    Government archivists know where their work fits in with the life cycle of records. Records managers in federal agencies and departments use retention schedules approved by NARA to ensure that some records are designated for permanent retention while others are destroyed as temporary in nature. So, for starters, that part has to be performed properly. Even White House records are supposed to fall under some form of records management, although it is the President, rather than the U.S. archivist, whose responsibility it is to ensure that what needs to be preserved is kept and what is personal and non-governmental is ditched. Of course, POTUS delegates that responsibility to people in the WH Office of Administration and his Counsel’s office.

    Nixon’s records came to NARA with little application of records management, although some of the paper records reflect handling by what then was the White House Central Files. The tapes simply captured everything Nixon discussed while the recorders were running. We archivists first had to determine what was governmental and retainable and what was personal and returnable to Nixon. So not only were we acting as archivists, our work also had aspects of records management.

    As for the Vietnam passages, no President is going to match in public what he says in private. Vietnam presented many difficult challenges and few good options for Nixon and his team. I dare say everyone who reads TNN has stumbled about, wavered in their optimism, and even been all over the place in what they have said in private about thorny issues. Perhaps there are TNN readers out there who have straight, unwavering throughlines on everything of consequence with which they’ve dealt at home or on the job. But somehow, I doubt it.

    That’s not to say that RN did not have some tragic character flaws which, as a President for whom I cast my first vote at 21, I wish he would not have had. I’m one of the people who put their trust in him of whom he later said he “let them down.” But in all fairness, historians can only go so far in unraveling his intentions. We have more words by which to judge him than are available for any other President. But we cannot go back and say we can read his mind and know with certainty Nixon’s unspoken motivations, any more than we can for other President.

  5. Maarja Krusten on December 7th, 2008 6:46 am

    Even I write with the assumption that some things are clear when they are not. Sorry! The Presidential Records Act depends on records management principles being applied but it was not passed until 1978. Nixon’s records fall under a different law, the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which was passed after he had resigned. I should have added a sentence between two paragraphs to make it clear that it Nixon’s day, White House records still were considered personal property. While application of some records management principles was useful–and is discernible in many of the paper records–the tapes were recorded and set aside with no effort to determine what was on them. That job fell to my generation of archivists at NARA.

  6. Maarja Krusten on December 7th, 2008 3:53 pm

    John, in the back of my mind, I remembered that there was a news clipping that reflected NARA’s contemporaneous thinking on the transcription issue. I was thinking of something addition to Dr. Joan Hoff’s references to me and to Fred Graboske in her Winter 1996 Presidential Studies Quarterly article. I tracked down the reference that I remembered. Tim and Sharon may not be familiar with it, unless they’ve had a chance to look at clipping files from the 1980s.

    Here is the extract, which quotes NARA’s Nixon Project director, Jim Hastings. No links available, unfortunately. The article appeared in a local Washington area publication after a group of students from the University of Maryland (Baltimore Campus) visited the National Archives’ Nixon Project in Alexandria, Virginia:

    “Archivists hope to open the remainder of the tapes to the public in a phased schedule, starting in 1989 with 80 hours of material the Watergate special prosecutors requested during their investigations. No researcher may ever be able to digest all the tapes. The Archivist’s Finding Aid, an index to people and subjects in the recordings, is itself 27,000 pages long. And there are no plans to transcribe the tapes, which according to project director James J. Hastings, would take 75 years. ‘Two years of eight-hour days would be required to listen to all of the tapes,’ Hastings warns researchers, ‘with no time for lunch allowed and no time permitted for turning the machine back to listen to particularly tricky bit of conversation over again.’”

    Source: Article, Ed Cohen, “Richard Nixon: UMBC Students Explore the Papers Behind the Persona,” _Maryland Today_ , 1988.

    Of course, the WSPF opening did not occur until 1991 and the phased opening of the disclosable portions of the balance of the tapes that Hastings had anticipated would occur between 1991-1995 did not occur the way we had planned. Still, having still been a NARA/NLNP employee in 1988, I can confirm that this what he is quoted as saying in the article indeed is what officials were telling researchers back then about the tapes and transcription back then. I remembered there was a quote of that type from my former boss somewhere and am glad I was able to track it down and post it here to help shed some light on the issue.

  7. John H. Taylor on December 7th, 2008 5:46 pm

    Thanks, MK.

  8. Maarja Krusten on December 7th, 2008 6:18 pm

    You’re welcome. Sorry that one sentence was messed up, I stopped in the middle of writing to look at something and messed up. I meant to write “Still, having been a NARA/NLNP employee in 1988, I can confirm that what he is quoted as saying in the article indeed is what officials were telling researchers back then about the tapes and transcription.” Former NARA/NLNP archivist Paul Schmidt’s Career Intern Development System paper, “The Opening of the Nixon White House Tapes,” May 8, 1985, also has some interesting insights but unfortunately, I haven’t had time to re-read the copy I xeroxed at the NARA library in 1992. (I just came in as a regular researcher, having left NARA in 1990.)

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