For historians and archivists concerned with the history of the presidency, the Big O has gotten off to a great start. President Obama used his first day in office to issue an Executive Order (#13489) revoking the odious EO #13233 that George W. Bush had issued in November, 2001, revoking a sensible 1989 Reagan (EO #12667) definition of the rights of former presidents to restrict access to their public papers. Bush’s EO enabled not only former presidents but also their heirs to cite “executive privilege” to justify withholding of presidential papers from the public. This was typical of a number of Bush’s actions aimed at walling the presidency off from public inspection, and reflected his grandiose, ahistorical claims of executive power.
But in 2001, many of us suspected that something much more specific and closer to home lay at the roots of EO#13233. This was because under the Presidential Papers and Records Act of l978, passed in the wake of the Nixon debacle, presidential papers become potentially available to the public 12 years after the end of a president’s term. George Herbert Walker Bush’s term ended in January, 1993, so that his twelve year protect period would end in 2005 — and Ronald Reagan’s in 2001. Wouldn’t historians have loved to look into politically contested actions of the Reagan years? And those were years in which Bush 41 was deeply implicated in controversial actions, especially Iran-Contra. Bush 43’s order, that is, may have served to cover up his father’s alleged misdeeds, as well as Reagan’s.
The Obama order restores the state of affairs with presidential papers to where they were at the end of the Clinton presidency, but adds a few important technical bells and whistles designed to increase neutrality in the process of agreeing to restrictions on access to presidential papers. Neither the 1978 Act nor the Freedom of Information Act, nor their combination, provides completely open access to presidential papers — there are many plausible claims on which information can be withheld, national security concerns among them. But the Bush EO was issued in the context of his attempt to administer a national security state, at the same time as he flagrantly violated the rights of citizens to the privacy of their own communications. So under Bush there was good reason to be concerned that the substantially open information required for vigorous democratic government was seriously at risk. At least for the moment, Obama has put those fears to rest.
For historians and archivists there are still severe challenges to achieving something approaching open access to presidential papers, but, thanks to President Obama, we ought now to be able to begin serious research into the Reagan and Bush 41 presidencies. Further, as my buddy Stan Kutler has pointed out, we can meet at the Archives on January 20, 2021 to begin looking behind the fortress walls Bush 43 erected to protect his administration and himself. Perhaps we can even discover something about what Vice President Cheney was actually up to, but only time will tell what he has actually turned over to the Archives. Stay tuned.
