Washington — The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian suffers from abysmal morale and may require reorganization, according to a brief report by a special committee appointed late last year by Condoleezza Rice, who was then secretary of state.

“Remarkably, in all our interviews and the statements we received, only a single person suggested that there was no crisis, no problem beyond what is normal in an office,” the report says. The committee was led by Warren F. Kimball, a professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University at Newark.

The report was written in mid-January, but it was not made public until today, when it was posted at Secrecy News, a blog published by the Federation of American Scientists.

To nonhistorians, the State Department office might sound like a quiet backwater. But the office is responsible for the production of Foreign Relations of the United States, a 148-year-old compilation of diplomatic papers that is a vital source of oxygen for diplomatic historians and scholars of international relations.

Many historians have taken intense interest in recent reports about the office’s alleged disarray. —David Glenn